Today, Thursday 17 May is National Learning at Work day, with events promoting learning at work happening across the UK.
To support the day, we’ve created these Top Ten Tips for Learning to help and encourage business to make learning fun and relevant in order to motivate and engage employees:
1. Make learning social – Make learning fun and interactive through a community, whether you have a classroom, e-learning or blended learning approach. Use social networking to connect remote learners and share knowledge, experience and results.
2. Know your learners – One size does not fit all. Understand your learning community, how they want to learn and what motivates them, because people learn best when they are comfortable with the learning environment. Build up a menu of learning models that include learning for IT-phobic as well as IT-literate staff.
3. Keep it simple, keep it easy – User engagement should be your primary focus at the start of your learning in the workplace journey. Developing a learning interface that is clear, simple, easy to use and ‘wows’ your learners is the key to engaged learners.
4. Think about the channel – Design your learning content to reflect the learning environment. What works in the classroom may not translate into an engaging e-learning programme. For example, if you’re building a mobile learning module, keeping it short, sharp and punchy will make it effective.
5. Learn like a child by making it fun with gamification – Research shows that children learn quickly because game-based learning strategies are powerful motivations for education. It helps make learning compelling and engaging – adults are competitive too. Earning points, simulation, role playing and opportunities to win prizes aren’t just strategies for the kids!
6. Celebrate success – Motivate and engage further learners by promoting key achievements within the learning community that encourage others to follow suit or complete an e-learning assignment.
7. Use mobile learning for quick wins – Short learning courses designed for smartphones and tablets, such as quizzes and games, can be developed specifically to push out to the learning community to reinforce your core learning programme.
8. Create an experience, not just a course – Make your learning an entire experience and not a one-off course. Create an online and offline learning experience that is stimulating, easy to navigate and visually compelling.
9. Keep it relevant – Adult learners appreciate immediate relevancy, so create learning that can be applied right away day-to-day work life. Learning taken and not applied quickly by the learner is wasted learning.
10. Keep it personal – Remember that adults have a breadth of experience, so ensure learning includes extra resources for personal exploration. Videos, podcasts, resources and references provide an opportunity to construct knowledge in a way that is personal for each learner.
And finally, don’t do learning for the sake of learning – make sure that you align it with your employees’ goals and personal development plans.
Andrew Rodaway is director of communications at talent management applications supplier, Lumesse.
We welcome any and all contributions from the community, so please feel free to share your views and opinions with us, your colleagues and peers via our blogs section.
2 Responses
Thanks…
…for your kind comments. Since Lumesse entered the Learning space about a year ago we’ve beem impressed by how much is going on. I get the feeling is has been sleepy for a few years but re-energised by the economic downturn and by the capabilities of new technologies like iPads to deliver new ways to train people. Lumesse is historically a talent management vendor and by linking up learning to TM we think there’s a big opportunity for companies that see the potential to deliver a much more valuable and effective training process to staff. There’s a lot of debate in the HR space about staff engagement and retention and one of the things that always come up when staff are surveyed is development (or lack of it…) Companies that work their talent management systems to find out what training staff really need and then deliver it in engaging ways (i.e. not boring classroom stuff, but social, mobile, blended e-learning), are going to have a massive advantage in retention and productivity over the next few years.
a.
National Learning Week
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for this article – some really big events happening today.
Definitely take your point on ‘Know your learners’. I think it’s important to be bespoke in everything you do and your right, one size doesn’t fit all people do learn best when they are comfortable with their learning environment. We take a similar approach with our Learning management system here at access, I think it’s important to be unique across all areas.
Many Thanks
Dave