Learning something once is enough of a challenge—so how are your employees doing when it comes to retaining that information in the long term? Training leaders have a simple goal: teach workers to do their job more effectively. They try to give them the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in their day-to-day activities, but more often than not, it’s this translation from theory to practice that trips people up. Companies expect employees to get back to work after training and figure out for themselves how to incorporate their learning into their work. No matter how great your eLearning course is—no matter how engaging the content—participants in your course might leave the program feeling, or being, unprepared to actually apply what you have taught them. That application is called “learning transfer,” and when it’s lacking, the company has effectively wasted its time and money training its employees. Without some sort of strategy for reinforcing skills after the end of the training, 90% of the course’s content could fall right out of the learners’ ears. Read more about how to tackle this “challenge of training transfer” here.  Luckily,  training leaders can make the content of their eLearning courses really stick if they follow some simple tricks. Here are some ideas to help your employees apply what they’ve learned:

Let’s be honest: your employees use smartphones and tablets every day, everywhere — including in your workplace.

As the workplace moves faster,  Learning & Development leaders must keep up to ensure employees can adapt. High-impact learning is the answer to this. It is not only fast-paced, but it also involves strategies to increase retention rates, so your students aren’t just learning quickly, they’re able to retain and apply that knowledge. A large part of a high-impact eLearning program’s success is that it involves people in leadership and management positions which help encourage and enforce learning. Results can be recorded and continual, leading to real changes in job performance.

Micro Learning is a hot trend in eLearning design. We all know this. To get up to speed on the theory behind microlearning check out the resources at the end of the blog post. In the rest of this post, we are focusing specifically on calls to action. That is, how do you actually apply the principles of Micro-Learning to your eLearning design? Our hope is that by the end of this post you will be prepared to start thinking micro and create effective learning experiences. 

When was the last time you took a long hard look at your company’s training strategy?  If employees forget things you taught them back in onboarding or, worse yet, they’re leaving in droves to seek other opportunities — chances are your outdated training program needs to change, and fast. So, how does your training strategy stack up? Is it stuck in time? Or are you keeping up with the ever-changing needs of today’s modern employees? Let’s find out.

They often forget dates and end up missing social engagements or the kid’s soccer matches. The smartphone rings and they lose the thread of their thoughts. An email notification pops up, and they stop typing a report to send to their boss. This is your average employee (and probably you feel identified too). This is how people work—answering phones in between drafting reports, updating Facebook statuses while writing codes, and attending sundry meetings in between their daily tasks. Now would you be surprised if you knew that people usually forget 90 percent of what they learn within one week after the training event? (More stats here.) 

Standarized and "one-size-fits-all” eLearning courses are no longer relevant in today's context. Personalization has become the norm.  Modern learners are used to Netflix, Spotify, Alexa... and they expect their eLearning courses to work the same way. Designing personalized courses is all about offering the right content, to the right audience, at the right time. For this to happen, designers need to pay attention to a series of elements:  Content formats (e.g. audio, video, textual, graphical, etc.) The sequence of the content and the different possible learning pathways Where content will be delivered How students will be evaluated. and many other factors  In this post, we will share some proven ways for creating more personalized experiences.

The end of the year is a time for envisioning a better YOU and setting intentions for the road ahead. It is a time for making resolutions so that you can be your best version, both personally and professionally. As an instructional designer and/or eLearning professional, this is your chance to look closely at how you work and set resolutions that will help you become more effective in your field.