According to LinkedIn’s 2019 Workforce Learning Report, 94 percent of employees say that they would stay at a company longer if it simply invested in helping them learn. Corporate training programs can go a long way towards meeting those expectations and keeping employees engaged.
Following a yearly trend, increased budgets and executive support are paving the way for talent developers to play an even more strategic role in the business. In 2019, talent developers say they’re focused on proactive efforts like understanding skills gaps and marketing L&D programs to learners.
Indeed, employees are increasingly aware of the L&D department within their organizations, and learning professionals are even more empowered to make a difference.
But with all of this buzz, how do you even know which training programs necessarily need to be built?
To facilitate, better organize, and ensure more favorable outcomes for your organization’s learning efforts, we suggest the following strategies for keeping employees engaged.
Crowdsource training ideas
As we’ve written before, L&D should have a strong awareness of the types of courses most needed. To facilitate the process, learning leaders can crowdsource training requests, perhaps via internal, digital questionnaires, to gain a better understanding of needs across the organization.
Additionally, L&D leaders can conduct external surveys to determine that the skills needed internally map to those of similar roles within the industry at large.
Employees should feel empowered to communicate their needs and feel that their voices are heard and can lead to the creation and delivery of courses they need.
According to LinkedIn’s 2019 Workforce Learning Report, this interest in learning and development is particularly strong among younger workers. Roughly one-quarter of Gen Z and Millennials say learning is the number one thing that makes them happy at work, and over a quarter (27 percent) of Gen Z and Millennials say the number one reason they’d leave their job is that they did not have the opportunity to learn and grow.
Study the numbers
Analytics are key to measuring quantitively what’s working and what’s not. Your platform should incorporate data on course adoption, adherence, completion, and success, which should be tied to employee performance — delivering maximum insight into the effectiveness of your courses.
Not all courses will be a success — and that’s OK. It’s better to stockpile resources in order to make future attempts with potentially stronger outcomes.
Establish feedback loops
In addition to the quantitative feedback delivered from analytics, you should also constantly seek qualitative feedback from your learners, your learners’ managers, SMEs, HR, IT, senior management—anyone who has had some level of involvement in your programs. Besides quizzes and assessments, your learning platform should also be able to accept continuous feedback on the strength or relevance of your courses.
This is crucial so that your team can quickly address any gaps in quality, and be sure that they are building the right courses for keeping employees engaged with the learning program.
Crowdsourcing training ideas could certainly lead to a firehose of ideas. While all will not eventually become full-fledged courses, your team can build a lot more than you have in the past by using a Learning Design Systems (LDS).
Besides the ability to convert technical content to training material, allowing anyone to design and build effective courses rapidly and at scale, an LDS incorporates automation elements that can streamline your front-end development process — incorporating the crowdsourced training requests mentioned previously, to performing a needs analysis, then incorporating design, content assembly, storyboarding, prototyping, testing, version control, and maintenance.
