6 Key Considerations for Better Learning Experiences.

Investing in your employees is key to driving better business results. Improving your employer learning experiences can help speed this process up, here’s how. 

According to Employee Benefit News, it costs 33% of a worker’s annual salary to replace them if they leave. And when 71% of executives say engaged employees are critical to business success, it’s clear to see the benefit.

So, how do you engage your employees?

One key way to do this is to invest in their personal development. Create goals around their success to ensure they stay and perform to their best ability. 

Still not convinced? LinkedIn’s workplace survey found that 94% of employees said that if their company invested in helping them learn, they would stay longer.

Creating a learning experience is easy. Creating a good learning experience, not so much.

Keep reading to learn:

• What is a learning experience?
• What is an example of a learning experience?
• Why the employee learning experience matters?
• How to improve your employee learning experience

So, let’s get stuck in!

📈 Pro Tip

Think Learning is a leading LMS that supports HR teams develop their L&D functions. From appraisals to compliance, and mentoring to training hubs, we offer a whole host of tools to help you engage and develop your teams.

Learn more about our key learning features.

What is an employee learning experience?

An employee learning experience is simply a HR process that allows enables to upskill and develop key competencies.

Known as Learning and Development (L&D), this function is key in sectors that require compliance, but has since trickled down to other skills that support career development and job performance.

You might already be familiar with the phrase learning management system. If you’re not, you’re about to learn more about it.

An LMS is essentially a central hub that you can use to manage, share and report on learning content and employee progression.

Adopting a good LMS is key to creating a good learning experience, but more on that later.

What is an example of a learning experience?

Learning experiences can range from reading a book, attending a seminar to watching a video. There are a whole range of ways to encourage high learning retention.

What works best for you, and your employees, is up to you.

Let’s face it, employee training can be boring.

But, with the right tools in place it doesn’t have to be.

Why the employee learning experience matters?

A study by Deloitte found that engaged employees outperform their counterparts by 147%. That alone is reason enough to see why the employee learning experience matters. In fact, it’s absolutely crucial to achieve a high-functioning and productive workplace.

But that’s not all.

A good learning experience also impacts:

• Revenue
• Camaraderie
• Business agility
• Talent
• Accessibility

Let’s look at these in a bit more detail:

Revenue

It’s fairly self-explanatory but the more skills and knowledge your teams have, the better your business will perform.

By providing access to learning opportunities, your people always have the chance to develop themselves which has a positive impact on their job performance.

Camaraderie

Highly engaged employees have higher job satisfaction. And training opportunities present opportunities for your people to mix and engage with other colleagues they might not speak to regularly. 

Business agility

Navigating change in any business is hard work. But, by ensuring your people are up to date when it comes to training and compliance, it means you can feel better prepared for those inevitable changes.

Talent

Top talent looks for development opportunities when critically assessing a potential new role. By enhancing your employee learning experience, you’ll see less turnover from your best people and create a fantastic culture that encourages more top talent to join.

Accessibility

Access to learning is often limited just for senior managers. Opening it up carries a lot of power to break down doors that were previously closed, especially for underrepresented groups.

No matter what your business objective, you need to ensure that your learning experience is accessible for whatever employee is looking for it.

How to improve your employee learning experience

There’s growing discussion and interest in delivering improved learning experiences. With this, we’ve seen instructional designers take on UX tasks to become a ‘Learning Experience Designer’.

This shift is important. It means that organisations are no longer forcing content on their learners. Instead of hiding behind mandatory training, L&D teams are now creating experiences that learners actually want to take.

But creating an engaging, enjoyable and insightful learning experience requires a lot of thought and planning.

So here are six key considerations you should make to design better learning experiences:

1. Think about pre-learning engagement
2. Choose the right technology
3. Personalise the experience
4. Respect your learners’ time
5. Utilise social learning
6. Relate it to real-life experiences

Let’s talk about each in more detail.

1. Think about pre-learning engagement

L&D teams spend a lot of time designing learning, from ensuring the appropriate learning theories are applied, to visual identity and branding.

But often the pre-learning experience is completely disregarded.

To ensure a slick, modern learning experience, you must consider the journey your learners will take from awareness to action.

By considering the journey from this very first step and designing it carefully, your learners will have a thorough understanding of what’s on offer and why they should engage with the content at all.

2. Choose the right technology

Technology often gets in the way of progression when it comes to L&D. If you’re struggling to use your LMS, chances are, your learners are too.

Difficult-to-use technology threatens any learning taking place at all.

Adopting an easy-to-use learning platform that can integrate with the rest of your tech ecosystem will help you:

• Ease the route to learning for time-strapped learners
• Free up admin time for your L&D team
• Improve learning outcomes.

Flipping the classroom for a new style of learning is key to ensure you’re moved away from a one-size-fits-all LMS approach.

3. Personalise the entire experience

Personalisation is more than just adding a learner’s name into a course.

Look at Netflix for inspiration.

Their entire interface is completely tailored to you and your viewing habits. It’s this kind of personalisation that is going to transform your learning experience.

🚀 Pro Tip

We created the LMS version of Netflix. Learn more about our rating and recommendation engine to see how it could help you target learning opportunities to your people.

Some key questions you need to ask yourself about your learning strategy are:

• How am I suggesting content to my learners?
• Am I highlighting the benefit of my courses?
• Is the future impact of this course clear?

By answering these key questions, you’ll be on the way to a much better, and tailored, learning experience.

4. Respect your learners’ time

One of the biggest challenges L&D teams face is trying to get learners to make time for personal development. And if you want to encourage your people to become lifelong learners you must show you empathise with their pain points and any constraints they face. So, make sure that:

• Learning is easy to find.
• It’s simple and seamless to log in to the learning platform when necessary.
• The length of the learning intervention is representative of the value they’ll get from taking it.

Respecting your learners’ time in this way will enable them to build trust with you as an L&D brand.

This mutual respect and trust will result in learners being willing to engage with L&D time and time again, ultimately fuelling lifelong learning and creating more skilled employees for your organisation.

5. Utilise social learning

Learning in social and collaborative environments is proven to boost learning effectiveness.

But when it comes to online or distance learning, the social aspect is often overlooked.

This shouldn’t be the case.

In our day-to-day lives, we spend a lot of time socialising and educating ourselves informally.

And it’s time we look to these online platforms – such as YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook – for inspiration and curated content for our learners.

🔎Pro Tip

Have you tried a tool like Totara Engage? It’s a nifty little social sharing tool that enables collaborative and engaging learning online.

Learn more about Engage

6. Relate it to real-life scenarios

If your learner can’t understand how the learning experience will benefit them, you’re going to struggle to change their behaviours.

A sure-fire way to combat this is to refer to a real-life benefit.

Even if it feels obvious, it’s worth stating so they know exactly what they stand to gain.

Your headings, imagery and course descriptions should all be pointing back to the real-life application of the learning at hand.

Assess your current employee learning experience

Not sure your learning experience is hitting the mark?

You’re not alone.

We speak to HR and L&D professionals every day about key problems like this one.

The key to it all?

Finding the right tool that can help you both understand your key challenges, and actively support you to clear them.

Wondering if Think could be a good solution to your L&D problems? Book a demo with our team to learn more about our learning and engagement solutions.

Or, check out what Circle Health Group had to say about us.