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.

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 in companies 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:

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. 

We are living through disruptive times, where the pace of social, technological, economic, political, environmental, and demographic changes shows no sign of slowing in 2022. This creates an urgent need for organizations and individuals to keep up to date with the latest trends if they don't want to become rapidly obsolete. In terms of business continuity and resilience, for L&D teams this means one thing: They must make a pause, analyze the current situation with an open mind and start adopting the latest trends in their industry without fear or worry. The actions leaders make today will define which doors are open to them tomorrow. To take corporate learning experiences to the next level this new year, L&D leaders must start asking themselves some key questions:

We are seeing the emergence of a global skills revolution - where reskilling employees is a new business priority to help them rapidly adapt to the fast-changing economy. The vast majority of companies globally (87%) are conscious that they have a significant skills gap or will have one within a few years, according to McKinsey & Company. And more than just being aware of this challenge, companies consider it a priority (nearly all respondents to the McKinsey survey ranked closing potential skills gaps as a priority for their organizations, with about a third saying it is in the top three priorities) and want to take action to close it. The latest LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report also confirms this: 64% of training and development professionals say retraining today's workforce to fill skills gaps is a priority. So, if in 2022 one of your goals is to create more upskilling and reskilling opportunities for your employees, that means it is time to identify the existing skills gap. But what exactly is “skill gap,” you ask? As the name implies, it is:  “a significant gap between an organization’s skill needs and the current capabilities of its workforce.”  It’s the moment at which a company realizes it can no longer advance, keep up with previously set goals or be competitive against other companies unless those skills are learned or improved. It is driven by a combination of factors that create the new world of work including the exponential growth of automation, artificial intelligence technologies, along candidates lacking the necessary skills to interact with these advancements and innovations. The World Economic Forum said it clearly this year: COVID-19 situation worldwide has made the skills gap bigger and the need to close it more urgent. This calls for new strategies at every level to best prepare workers for the post-pandemic economy. Identifying these gaps is critical to building effective and focused training programs. Often, companies launch programs without enough understanding of where the skill gaps exist in their workforce. This just produces poor results. It doesn’t make sense to improve your customer service training when what your employees really need is leadership initiatives, right? There is a multitude of benefits to skill gap analysis and identification, including: Analyzes the organization as a whole. Analyzes existing skills and lets you know if employees can learn these new skills through training or if you may need to hire different workers. Gives you an idea of what training is required first and where you need to spend the most money and time. Keep your company updated and aligned with the new demands of labor markets that are continuously disrupted by technology, demographic change, and the evolving work environment. Motivated employees. Employees are anxious about the growing skills gap, and 46 percent of those surveyed by McKinsey believe their current skills will become irrelevant by 2024. By constantly reskilling and upskilling them, you are feeding their need for growth and improvement.

Let’s face it; the word “training” rarely inspires much joy in an office. People commonly associate training with school, and few people really want to go back there or take time out of their job to do it. But, the fact remains, that training is still pretty much the best way to make workers better at their current job and possibly even to move them up to a higher position. You might think “shouldn’t telling employees to take a course be enough of a reason for them to do it?” Making training mandatory will up attendance, but it is motivation that actually allows learning to happen. Motivation is what turns an interest in a subject and a desire to get ahead into actual action.  Consider how many times you have said you want to do something like write a novel or learn a new language but have you done those things? If you have those goals but haven’t accomplished them, then you have experienced the frustration that comes with having the desire but not motivation. Your employees also need this push of inner strength that motivation brings in order to actually seek out and absorb the information available. But how do you motivate learners to participate in training? Read on to get an insight into getting your employees to take action towards development.

As learning leaders, if we want to improve engagement, create memorable learning experiences and improve ROI from our training initiatives, we need to get even more creative in capturing our audience’s attention and keeping them coming back for more. Instead of simply coming up with a course and telling people to take it, we serve ourselves and our audience better by finding ways to inject a learning spirit into the company. 

As someone who cares about the prosperity of your business, you want your employees to be able to apply the knowledge acquired from the training programs to resolve real problems at the workplace. You have invested time, money, and effort to train your employees; you want to make sure that they DO and not just recite theories, quote statistics, and recount case studies. You want your employees to be able to figure out what is wrong with a machine and fix it, than just know the troubleshooting tips. Unfortunately, transferring learning is easier said than done. According to research, packing your courses with punchy content does not always deliver the knockout effect you desire.  Learning transfer is challenging because human beings are complex individuals and every person is different from the other. It is difficult to predict how each of them will respond to a course. One game that appeals to the intelligence of one learner might be too challenging for another one. Again, someone may comprehend an idea very well during the training but may not be able to apply his knowledge to solve a real-world problem. The most powerful reason why learning transfer is ineffective is that 90 percent of training is designed without a well-defined strategy that facilitates it. There are various other factors that determine how efficient the transfer of learning will be. Read this paper to find out. When you have an idea of the variables you have to work with, you can design more effective eLearning programs. As a training manager and a course designer, you have to provide a COMPREHENSIVE learning experience. You have to keep in mind that learning does not start and stop with the training session. You have to take care of all the stages of learning transfer: before, during, and after training.