Among the key factors that are core to the success of any business endeavour is the growth and development of their employees. There is no debate that learning is a major building block for the growth and development of employees. A Learning Design System can help to accelerate that growth.
Whether they are new hires slated for on-boarding or long-time workers that seek to climb the rungs of the success ladder, they require not just instruction; but a highly effective, systematic way of learning that really drives and aligns their knowledge, skills, and goals.
Thus, it is important that materials intended for learning and training undergo a thorough and careful analysis during the instructional design process in order to be completely effective. This is where an excellent learning design system steps in.
How A Great Learning Design System Can Improve Your Business
- Identify Factors That Motivate People to Learn
- Pinpoint Reasons For Non-Compliance
- Gather and Collate Knowledge and Experience
- Develop Highly Effective Learning and Instructional Materials
- Speed Up The Learning Process
- Save Money On Employee Training and Development
- Transform Employees Into Indispensable Assets
1. Identify Factors That Motivate People to Learn
Desire and learning should go together. Sophocles, one of the greatest Greek tragedians from Greece’s golden age, said it first when he advised people to “always desire to learn something useful.”
Centuries later, none other than the greatest artist from the Renaissance period, Leonardo da Vinci himself, echoed the same message. He lamented that learning without the fire of desire is an exercise in failure. Different wording, but the same context.
The process of instructional design involves knowing what stokes the learners to learn. Their desire is their motivation. A learning design system helps you discover your employees’ triggers that activate the desire for learning and how you can align their motivations to your goals.
2. Pinpoint Reasons For Non-Compliance
Equally essential to knowing what motivates your employees to learn are the reasons why they don’t want to learn. Say you have an existing instructional guide for new hires and you discover that after a month, most of your new employees still have lapses in their functions. Wouldn’t you want to know why?
Understanding the reasons for non-compliance helps you conceptualize and develop learning that your workers will abide by in no time. You are basically preventing instances of non-compliance in the workplace, which is a good thing.
3. Gather and Collate Knowledge and Experience From Various Sources
Most learning courses and instructional materials, as well as conventional teaching practices, are centered on the one who is giving the instruction. Trainer-centric learning solely depends on the knowledge of the instructor. With a learning design system, you can gather and collate the knowledge and experiences of subject matter experts, company officials, long-time workers, and other stakeholders.
Forbes stated in its 2019 list of effective learning and development strategies that both management and HR departments must work in tandem to effectively determine the practices, knowledge, and processes utilized by people across the organization to further improve their performance and competencies.
As you go through the instructional design process, you are able to identify methodologies and materials that are totally aligned with the goals of your company as well as the individual aims and motivations of your stakeholders with an LMS. It’s like taking all the good components and combining them together to build better, more optimized learning materials and courses.
4. Develop Highly Effective Learning and Instructional Materials
Design is not the same as development. Instructional design, however, is essential to the development of effective and engaging learning materials. When you are able to identify motivations that trigger learning in your workers and have a deep understanding of how to deliver learning in the most effective way, then making the actual materials for learning is not going to be a problem.
More than just providing them the steps on how to perform their tasks in the workplace, courses and other learning content that are built using the instructional design process are able to help them internalize the information. When your employees are engaged in their learning, retention of knowledge is better and the acquisition of skills is faster.
Also worth considering is the delivery of instruction. In this very modern world, employees are keen on learning and improving their competencies via mobile and digital platforms. The 2018 Workplace Learning Trends, published by LinkedIn, noted that these platforms are not as time-intensive as conventional learning delivery methods.
5. Speed Up The Learning Process Through Personalization
Faster learning means you are able to field more effective and highly productive employees. Tasks are performed efficiently and every work-related process is optimized. They spend less time training and dedicate more hours to their functions. Productivity and efficiency are increased significantly.
Personalization is one of the continuously growing SaaS trends. Using a personalized approach to employee training and development has proven to be quite productive, especially in a diversified workplace where the usual “one-size-fits-all” approach is clearly counterproductive. As an employer, you must go deep into your employees’ competencies and skill set and develop a learning program that is suited to their capabilities and pace.
6. Save Money On Employee Training and Development
Investing in a learning design system may take out a significant portion of your budget. However, the rewards can be very satisfying.
For one, you can assess the effectiveness of your current learning materials and discover flaws in your methodologies. After discovering these defects, you can then create concepts for new learning content and instruction materials that are founded on sound instructional design.
The creation and implementation of the new, effective and optimized learning may take some time. But if weighed against the perceived benefits of better knowledge retention, faster skill acquisition, and shorter time to learning, then you know partnering with the right learning management system vendor can provide huge value to your organization, especially from a financial standpoint.
7. Transform Employees To Indispensable Assets
When you field a team packed with motivated and empowered people, your business greatly benefits. But it is not only your company that reaps the rewards. Your workers enjoy the fruits of their training. Effective and engaging learning methodologies and instruction transform them, not just into better workers, but individuals with increased confident who are driven to succeed.
Learning Is Different From Accessing Information
Anybody can get their hands on information. A few words in a search engine bar will provide you with information on just about anything. But between accessing information that is beneficial to your job and understanding information in a way that you actually develop in the process are two different things.
Instructional design, simply put, makes learning engaging. Information is structured in a more streamlined way so that learning becomes easy. In the workplace, courses and activities that are built according to instructional design best practices enable you and your workers to pay attention so that you can quickly incorporate all the knowledge and skills at a much faster pace.
Sure, you can browse through a few articles and learn a few things without expert guidance or instruction. However, that takes a lot of time. And time, especially in this modern world, is a valuable commodity you don’t want to waste.
