The problem with corporate learning and development
If any of these sound familiar, you might have a problem with learning and development.
💻 A bunch of resources and course licenses gathering dust because nobody uses them.
🤷 People who aren’t engaged in L&D because, to them, it’s those mandatory yearly courses.
📈 A lack of data pointing towards L&D’s role and impact in the business.
And it’s more common than you think! Despite spending around $360 billion in 2020, 60% of employees wouldn’t recommend their company’s L&D offering.
Why is this happening? Six reasons for current L&D struggles
1. Because learning is built around outputs and not outcomes
A training course would be the perfect example. We care about the attendance or hours spent on it, but that doesn’t necessarily make us better at our job.
In fact, there’s a fair argument that it has little influence on our performance at all.
2. It happens infrequently rather than when it can drive performance
Learning that’s built around completion and not solving a problem is typically detached from where that information can be applied.
A leadership course four months before we lead our first performance review as a new manager is unlikely to help us lead those sessions effectively. At least not in the same way that practice scenarios in the weeks before and microlearning resources we can access on the day will.
3. Development is treated like a tick-box exercise
When there’s L&D budget to be spent, we seem to have ended up leaning on two traditional and traditionally flawed approaches.
Buying licenses to content or course libraries because the cost per employee represents good value.
Picking training courses for people to attend each year.
Once those two things are done, the obligation to offer development opportunities is sorted.
But what if people can’t find useful courses in that library or end up on a course which fails to influence their performance at work. In those cases, it is truly a case of a box ticked and little more.
4. Legacy L&D expectations are holding us back
Breaking free from these box-ticking chains isn’t easy when 82% of L&D teams feel legacy expectations of L&D are holding them back.
The old perceptions of L&D as a cost centre, not a value centre, and a team that isn’t directly driving us toward our goals can be hard to shake, but this guide will help!
5. Legacy tech is a problem too!
Work tech in general is frustrating (just ask the 91% who flagged it with FreshWorks), but legacy tech can be even more annoying! Especially if it was bought to solve the problems we’ve long overcome or forgotten.
But in many companies, L&D is built around and attached to a tool that simply doesn’t help people learn in the ways they naturally do today.
It was brought in by someone else, however long ago, for reasons that may no longer be obvious. And this contributes to why 57% feel restrained by legacy tech.
And if you take all of the above into account, it’s no surprise! Un-personalised, unlikely to make me better at my job, unsuitable for the way we work today and unaligned with the company purpose – why would people be engaged?
The good news is that we can rebuild L&D for the learner of today and engage them along the way.
How should learning and development look and work today?
The way it looks when we learn outside of work, that’s how! Look at what happens when you encounter a challenge in your everyday life.
🛑 The problem arises.
🔎 You turn to the tools and places you think will have the answers – typically Google, YouTube, or maybe a knowledgeable friend.
💡 You find the information that seems to solve the problem.
😁 And then apply that in your moment of need, when it can make a difference.
No course, no time blocking, no struggle to find the resource or long wait for a reply.
Essentially, our view on working and learning has changed, and it’s a bit of a myth that it’s purely pandemic related. In fact, the evidence has been there for a while now…
People want to learn when it matters
The image below comes from a 2018 LinkedIn Learning Report and shows that we’ve wanted to learn at our point of need for at least five years.
We call these moments that matter, those situations where accessing learning resources and information can have a direct influence on our performance.
👉 We’re on a customer call and access a resource on managing that situation.
👉 It’s our first performance review as a new manager, and we’re able to use a company-specific framework.
👉 Prospects are asking us about custom pricing, and an internal process or guide is there at our fingertips.
We should be creating resources with that moment in mind! When and where will it be applied, and which problem is the person facing in that situation?
(If identifying the right problem to solve is your biggest challenge, jump ahead now).
Hybrid working has, of course, influenced how we learn
73% of employees now work in either a hybrid or fully remote setting, with nearly half (43%) working remotely full-time.
We’ve been given the freedom and autonomy that we’ve craved for years when it comes to our working arrangements.
And this has opened two cans of worms:
We want the same ownership and flexibility over how we learn.
We want consistency in the learning experience, regardless of where we work.
But as long as we aren’t capturing insights from our experts and bringing them into one place, alongside our scattered resources…
Or we don’t build learning around when, where or how it’ll be applied…
We won’t tackle either problem.
The era of on-demand has shaped expectations
Think about the services and software you use every day.
The likes of Deliveroo, Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube.
They deliver what we want, when we want it, in a frictionless way.
On average, we watch 3.2 hours of Netflix content every day. Eight million of us in the UK use Deliveroo. Spotify’s pumping podcasts and music into our ears for 25 hours a month. And YouTube captivates us for an hour each day.
So when we encounter clunky learning software with poor user experience, it jars.
We want the same slickness we get day-to-day but end up with these tools that just don’t feel fit for purpose.
Learning is no longer a top-down exercise but something we all own
The sage on stage and course instructor have taken more of a backseat. Partly because they had to during the pandemic, and partly because we spend more time learning from those around us.
The death of the LMS and rise of the LXP have opened up L&D from something very few controlled to something the many can influence.
And that’s no more true than the case of knowledge sharing. It’s becoming more and more common for organisations to tap into their internal experts, people who’ve built relevant knowledge in the context of the company.
Their insights are far more useful and easier to apply than the generic advice we might encounter on a course (not to say they don’t have their value too).
Our channels of collaboration have opened up
Part of this has been the rise of digital collaboration and communication tools, allowing us to work and learn together in different ways.
Slack lets us create channels filled with relevant people and crowdsource ideas.
Google Docs empower us to collaborate in real time, wherever we are.
LXPs like HowNow allow you to bookend synchronous meetings with resources that can be accessed asynchronously – allowing people to come to them more informed or apply what they learn after.
Everyone knows what blended learning is these days, right? You take the offline and the online and you mix it all up. Not quite! We all thought we knew what a blender was, until those big bulky beasts were replaced by little kitchen ninjas.
And something similar has happened with blended learning. It’s gone beyond its humble beginnings of supporting what you do in a classroom with what you do online, becoming something much grander. It’s time to go on our own blended learning journey…
Traditional blended learning: combining offline and online
None of this is a slight on the traditional idea of blended learning, which still has an important part to play – after all, you just can’t replicate some of the benefits that come with face-to-face training. The original premise was to support classroom-style interactions with accompanying resources that could be accessed online.
Why? If you’re a learner, it’ll help you gain a more comprehensive understanding of the topic at hand. What’s learnt in person can be reinforced or built upon with online resources, whereas just learning it in the classroom puts you at risk of the forgetting curve and lost knowledge. On the other hand, if all learning is solo and self-led, you lose the power of Q&A, brainstorming and socially bouncing ideas off each other.
Creating a more traditional blended learning journey
It’s much easier if you’ve got a platform that helps you manage everything in one place, a way to manage the face-to-face event and connect the right people and resources to it. In HowNow, you can create custom learning pathways that link online and offline experiences, where your learners already live.
Here’s a great example. Say you’ve completely redesigned your brand identity and you’re hosting a face-to-face session to talk everyone through it. You’re already saving yourself time and hassle because you can create an event in HowNow and assign everyone in your Marketing group to it.
Next up, resources. If there’s anything that your attendees should know before the event for a better session and all the resources they’ll need after to deliver on what you cover face-to-face, create a course that combines the two. Set a deadline for viewing the pre-event content, add the event to the pathway and follow that up with all the resources they might need. You could also attach the most important resources to the event, like so:
One temptation or pitfall to avoid would be simply uploading any slides or videos directly as they were in your face-to-face session. Otherwise, you’re breaking all the rules of microlearning. Say you’ve covered everything from the tone of voice to the brand values and styling guidelines in that session, uploading that as it is puts the onus on your employee to sift through it all for what they need.
If you create a single resource for each specific topic, anyone in your team can just search for that and find a quick and easy resource to remind them of which words they definitely shouldn’t use and the hex codes for your brand colours.
Synchronous and asynchronous learning: so everything’s online?
We’re writing this in early 2021, when the idea of face-to-face learning doesn’t feel like a particularly realistic prospect. That’s where the idea of an entirely online blended learning approach comes into play. Synchronous learning would be any online course or content that happens in real-time, like a live webinar or discussion, while asynchronous is the on-demand content that supports it.
The principles are similar to the offline and online dynamic. Real-time classes and webinars all offer opportunities for engagement, direct feedback and building a rapport, whereas the on-demand resources give people autonomy to reinforce and learn more about the topics at hand.
One thing that people typically overlook in this approach is the group of people or cohort of learners. If we’re all learning the same thing and have the online platform to collaborate, why aren’t we learning socially or harnessing the power of peer-to-peer development?
The 70/20/10 rule states that 70% of what we learn comes from knowledge and 20% from our peers. And this model of blended learning is perfect for that! Create a group for the relevant learners, group them into one course and give them the power to collaborate.
Let’s use the re-branding example again. Say we all attend an online brainstorming session around our new brand slogan and messaging, and the next step is for us all to present our best suggestions. If we’re all in the same group on HowNow, we can upload our content as a Nugget, share it with the rest of the group and enable the discussion feature in order to get feedback from each other.
Organising everyone on the same course and in the same group has plenty of other benefits too. If that brainstorming session leads to a list of key criteria or a loose brief, attach that or leave it as a comment on the event. Enable the discussion feature and use it as a way to capture any ideas or feedback directly after the event.
Using different content types for a better blended journey
If you’re using a learning management system (LMS) for your blended learning, you’re limiting yourself! If learning is a buffet, an LMS is like filling your plate with the same item over and over again.
Your typical LMS limits you to SCORM files, videos and documents that you upload yourself. Using an intelligent learning platform lets you fill your plate with a mouthwatering feast of content, from plenty of different sources.
If you’re giving people more autonomy over how they learn, it makes sense to create more freedom around content types too. And if you think about how people learn in their daily lives, they jump between podcasts, YouTube videos, blogs, books, magazines – the list goes on.
That’s why we curate and bring together all these types of content from your favourite sources, it caters to a wider palette and lets people replicate their typical habits as they learn. Why, because our lives are already a blended learning experience! We might listen to a podcast on a walk, watch a video as we commute somewhere or read a quick article on the porcelain throne. It’s about having a platform that gives you all of those options, plus the option to filter between them!
The thing we haven’t covered yet is that this all makes it easier for people to learn in the moments where they are most motivated and the information is most crucial. With all the different elements of online and self-led learning experiences, it’s easier to find the knowledge you need outside of classrooms and webinars.
At HowNow, we believe that people can’t truly learn in their workflow, unless they can find that knowledge everywhere they’re already working! Whether that’s their inbox, Slack or Teams, as they search in Google, the apps they used to speak with customers – wherever.
We’ve got a little bit of all those blended ideas in our on-demand product demo! So if you want to see how this all works asynchronously, you’ve just got to click this link or the image below. And of course, we’ll be happy to discuss any points or questions with you after!
Check out our other learning and development resources
How do you measure the success of L&D? Start by solving the right problems!
It’s a case of establishing the problems you’re trying to solve and which metrics you’re trying to move before you build out anything learning related.
Too often, L&D teams create initiatives and resources and then try to find problems they can apply them to…
Start with the problem you’re solving or company goal you’re trying to reach
“We see initiatives where people say, ‘We’ve got an L&D program, let’s work out the problem we’re solving’ as opposed to, fundamentally we’ve got a clear challenge…”
And when we get the problem and solution the wrong way round, everything else falls apart. A wrong or poorly-defined problem influences how we build L&D programs, which are then less effective than hoped, and that creates negative feedback loops for learners.
We’ll then struggle to get buy-in or budget while employees have wasted their time with resources or initiatives that had no impact.
A problem-first mindset means you’ll essentially bake impact into L&D. For example, let’s say the business currently onboards people to productivity over a six-month period but have identified that reducing it to four would be a massive benefit.
We not only have a tangible metric to measure, we can use our problem-solving skills to understand what the current hurdles and blockers are in this process. We can then build relevant learning content to tackle those, and measure whether L&D has influenced that shortening of the time to productivity.
Ask why until you find the root cause
People aren’t always great at establishing the real root cause of their problems. They often mistake symptoms for the problem and come to the L&D team to ask for a course or materials targeting that issue.
A sales leader might come to us and say, we’re not closing enough of our pipeline.
But we might have internal data that shows we close a really high percentage, we just don’t have enough leads in the funnel to begin with.
This is where we have to ask why, why, why until we truly understand the issue.
If we accepted the request outright, we’d created resources that solve the wrong issue – around deal closing. Where we’d be more effective with resources on social selling, outreach, and building pipeline instead.
Crowdsource the problems you’re trying to solve
If you roll out learning initiatives and tools without speaking to the end user – your learner – that might come back to bite you in the bottom.
What stops them from learning right now? What are their biggest challenges? What do they see as their team’s hurdle in reaching goals?
We’ll build a wider, well-rounded picture of our problems if we go on that listening tour – as Sarah Stevenson calls it:
“I started with what I call a listening tour, going to all the senior executives, starting with the top layer of the organisation and then going to the bottom layer. Really talking to people everywhere to see what they needed…
“And then listening systems, so pulse surveys or exit surveys, which are extremely important… and 90-day onboarding surveys too.”
What’s L&D’s current perception in the business?
Every company has a learning brand, whether that’s intentional or not! A perception of what learning means within the context of the organisation.
And if you’re not aware of it, chances are it’s not a very good one.
We mentioned data already, but even the best data in the world doesn’t tell us how we’re viewed by others and why they have that view.
So we have to get out from behind our desk and run a discovery process for what we’re offering as if it’s a product.
What problems can we solve? What do people not like about our product right now? Who’s already engaged or an advocate?
Prioritise these over ‘L&D goals’, otherwise you might end up with vanity metrics!
🪑 Does someone attending a course count as a return on your investment?
💯 What about when you hit 100% completion for a course?
📝 Or if an internal survey showed people rated your L&D offering as a four but it’s now moved to an eight – would that tell us we’re doing a good job?
Now we’ve established the importance of solving the right problems, the answer is an emphatic no. None of these metrics tell us if we’ve had an impact on performance! Or whether we’re helping solve a business problem.
That’s not to say these aren’t useful things to know, but they don’t exactly help us demonstrate the impact we often need to show others.
Five rules for building a winning L&D approach
Once we know the problems we’re trying to solve and metrics to move, we can start asking the questions that’ll help build a winning approach.
Who are our audience?
When and where are they encountering these challenges?
And what do they need to overcome them?
It might seem like we’re oversimplifying things, but if you can answer these questions well, you’ll be able to drive impact.
Think of it as the base layer of the pyramid, the biggest, most important block – everything that sits on top wins if we’ve done this effectively.
And essentially, there are a few golden rules that’ll help stack the odds in your favour.
1. Know your audience and build strong relationships
As Doug Ellin puts it:
“This is actually one of the sneaky bits about L&D that make it such a beautiful role! It’s like your job is to have a chat and a good time with people. So it’s enabling yourself to talk with people on a level and really understand that they’re your colleagues.”
But you’ll be amazed at how often people overlook the power of a good gossip! And that’s how platforms and plans get rolled out without the end user ever seeing it.
How are you going to get engagement or buy-in if you decide what’s best and then try to make that square peg fit in the round hole that’s the problem our people need help solving.
If we want to help people overcome challenges and the business reach its goals, which ultimately define our success, we have to know our stakeholders and internal customers well.
2. Creating content? Don’t do it alone!
The chances of you being able to create all the content that upskills, engages, and empowers people to solve problems alone are slim.
It would also be a massive waste of time for two reasons: You can curate content for some and tap into external experts for others.
As Rebecca Lee-Webb, Head of Operations, intent.ly explained, this not only allowed her to build out their intelligent.ly learning space sooner, it was then populated by relevant content.
“The first stage of me trying to do the content by myself probably took about 6 weeks. We then launched it out to managers and had more content in 10 days than we did in those 6 weeks.”
It’s like a flowchart. If something’s business specific, do you have an internal expert who could create great content that helps others overcome challenges they’ve also dealt with?
If it’s not business specific, does some existing content already contain what you need? You can always add relevant context around that to help people apply it.
If the answer to either of the above is no, that’s when you can consider creating something from scratch yourself or by leaning on internal expertise.
3. Delivering learning in context, when it can drive performance
It’s no use identifying the challenges people are facing and not building learning around the context of where they face them.
As our CEO Nelson Sivalingam explains here, people are most motivated at their moment of need. And that motivation makes us more likely to engage with and apply learning resources!
We also call them Moments That Matter because they’re situations where L&D can drive performance – but only if the resource we’re creating can be applied in that moment of need.
There are six factors for Moments That Matter. Consider these, and you’ll create more content that drives performance.
Environment: Audio content wouldn’t work for people in noisy environments, for example.
Technology: Which tools do people have access to in moments of need?
Time: If someone works on a shop floor, it might need to be minutes long and available on a mobile device.
Activity: What else is that person doing in the moment that matters?
Organisation: What’s the culture like? Do people have the psychological safety to learn without fear?
External environment: What’s happening in your industry that influences the content you create?
Too much learning happens outside the workflow and outside the tools we use to do our job, and as Filip Lam put it:
“You shouldn’t be forcing people to come to your channel, training should exist in the channels people already operate in.”
4. Think big, but start small
Let’s say you decide on an approach but it’s something you’ve never tried before and there are still question marks about its viability or chances of success.
If you roll it out across the company and it flops, that’s not only a whole load of wasted resources…
It’s also a whole load of people who’ve had a negative learning experience and are less likely to engage in the future.
It’s as simple as that. A large-scale failure affects your credibility and perception, which reduces your ability to drive impact.
Test an idea on a small scale, perhaps on one part of a project or in a small group.
Did it work?
If yes, assess why and roll it out on a bigger scale.
If no, assess why and pivot to test something else out.
Then repeat the process.
5. Make sure it’s agile and adaptable
The world is changing far too fast for us to stick with strategies just because we invested a lot of time in them!
So, it’s imperative that we’re flexible and agile in the ways we create and deliver content.
Essentially, you need to ditch your ego! People are learning with or without you, so you can either facilitate it or obsess over things like the perfect strategy or format.
Imagine a new competitor steamrolls its way into our space, and the sales team are getting countless questions that compare us – so much so that leads are dropping out at the top of the funnel.
We need to create a consistent, useful way our salespeople can answer that pretty damn quickly.
Writing it in the notes on your phone and screenshotting it today is more useful than spending three weeks creating battlecards. Yes, you can still create the battlecards once you’ve provided the useful information, but it’s about educating people on how to respond while they can have maximum impact.
Who knew that skills were perishable? It’s one of those uncomfortable truths we overlook, but the competencies and knowledge we build have a shelf life. And with work changing fast and technology moving even more rapidly, we find ourselves in a constant need to upskill, learn new things and innovate.
Research shows that perishable skills (those related to tech or processes) have a half-life of about two and a half years, while the more durable skills (like frameworks) last twice as long.
And all of this has become a perfect storm for learning and development! Amid all this change, it’s the lifeboat that helps you build skills continually, encourage people to develop and drive you towards business goals. At HowNow, we always say that the fastest learner wins. But without a roadmap to get you there, you might end up lost or lagging behind – that’s why a learning and development strategy is so important.
What is an L&D strategy?
A way to capture how learning and development is going to help the business reach its goals and have a meaningful impact on performance. Typically through empowering and enabling people to build new skills and get better at their job. It’s always a way to formalise your learning culture…
Breaking down what this really means for L&D teams
Learning and development strategies are the documents or plans to build the skills, knowledge and competencies needed to keep your business and people going, growing and achieving goals. Typically, that means considering where you are right now, where you want to be, and the skills or knowledge gaps between the two.
When you picture strategy, you’re probably thinking of a uniform and consistent approach for everyone. Your strategy sets ground rules, outlines an overall approach and the tools you need to get there, but there needs to be room for personalisation – for you to build custom pathways for each individual in your team.
What an L&D strategy isn’t is simply sending people off for a training course or forcing them to use budget for an event that might help. And the metrics you’d measure for that tell us why! Old-school organisations only care if someone’s attended or completed that course, but they’ve got no interest in or method for measuring how much knowledge they’ve transferred into their role.
A learning and development strategy should be measurable and achievable, you should have clear goals and an understanding of how learning has made people better at their job.
Stakeholders in your learning and development strategy
L&D departments need to be smooth talkers, they’ve got plenty of people to win over! C-suite, leaders and those pulling the purse strings hold the power when it comes to giving sign off and releasing the budget to put your development strategy into action.
It’s probably why a lot of L&D leaders are changing their roles and relationships with those decision-makers. They’ve rebranded themselves from order takers to performance consultants, having conversations that help them understand the core problems the business and departments are facing. Understanding and aligning with business goals allows your learning and development strategy to impact performance and help the company reach its goals.
In the past, the sales director might have asked for seven reps to head off on a training day, and L&D might have just said yes. But the better approach is to understand why that director thinks training is the solution, the issue or results that led him to the point and truly diagnose the problem before offering a remedy.
Then you’ve got the learners, who need winning over in terms of why this should matter to them. Fortunately, many employees are motivated by progression and recognition, and pitching L&D in that sense could help get them on side. Especially if your strategy research involves speaking with them and understanding their motivations or concerns before delivering anything concrete.
9 things to consider when you’re building a winning learning and development strategy
How to align with the business strategy, goals and mission
What is the business aiming to achieve, over which time period, and how can you support it? We already spoke about L&D budget, and proving your learning and development strategy is having a positive impact on the bottom line is a great way to demonstrate a return on investment.
Typically, departments within the business will have metrics and key performance indicators they’re aiming to achieve. If you’re able to have those consulting conversations to understand their why and incorporate their metrics into your thinking, you’re better placed to move the needle. For example, if the marketing team is frequently behind on website updates and it’s due to ongoing tweaks to the layout, perhaps building UX design skills could help you close that time.
It’s not just about where the company wants to be in the future, what’s at the core of its success now? If it’s a particular product, service or department, your L&D strategy should consider how it can support that crucial function to continue functioning.
And it’s when you’re demonstrating that learning is a key part of how those goals are achieved that you’re aligning yourself with wider business success.
The wider business environment and culture
Is the company culture one where learning can thrive? For example, is curiosity a core value, or is collaboration something that’s baked into the way people work? You’re far more likely to get people on board if you go with the flow of their existing learning behaviours rather than swimming against the tide of change.
That means considering where people go in search of new information, where they communicate with their colleagues and how they do it. The more you can harness that momentum or incorporate the tools people already use, the more you can empower them to learn in the flow of work. Which is a fancy way of saying that they can find information they need when they need it most.
You also need to accept that learning is happening with or without you! Whether it’s Slack messages, podcast recommendations, sharing key takeaways from a recent podcast, there will already be some kind of culture in place. As you build your learning and development strategy, your job is establish how, where and to what extent. Then, you can leverage the existing behaviours to drive engagement with your L&D initiatives.
Your performance and skills gaps
A learning needs analysis is your best friend at this point. It’s a step-by-step process that helps you understand the skills needed to progress, assess where you are right now and establish the gaps between the two.
Your L&D strategy is the bridge between the two, building pathways that help people shuttle from one side of the skill valley to the side where the grass is greener.
But how do you measure skill levels in your team? It’s not enough to decide for yourself or ask someone to complete a self-assessment – that’s why a 360-degree review is so useful in painting an accurate picture. In HowNow, we help you build a skills profile for each person, through a combination of peer and self-review alongside manager insights. We also allow you to benchmark against more than 500,000 live job roles to understand in-demand traits and talents.
Assess all your existing L&D activity, content and strategy
It’s time for a learning and development audit. Before you even think about building out your L&D strategy, you should assess EVERYTHING you’re already doing. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
What works and doesn’t work about our current development strategy?
What do people like and dislike about it and the tools we use to deliver it?
How often are people logging in and using our learning technology?
Which content are people engaging with and finding useful?
How much of it is relevant to the current skill gaps we’ve identified?
What metrics do we have on the current learning performance, and what can they teach us?
Are you curating, creating or crowdsourcing content?
Content audit complete, now what? A lot of L&D departments simply don’t have time to create all the content they need, and that often means bottlenecks for learners – who might find that moment of need’s gone by the time content is available. A learning and development strategy feels like a long-term exercise, but it’s important that you’re being agile and reactive to move swiftly when content needs creating.
For example, the Customer Success team need the latest product support guidance now, not in five months time. And that presents two equally helpful solutions: curating existing content from third-party sources and encouraging internal experts to create resources.
Third-party resources are ideal for the things that aren’t necessarily specific to your company but are a great fit for your industry or someone’s role in the team. Whereas a subject matter expert in the company has a wealth of extremely relevant experience that you can harness in creating learning content.
As you build out your resources, job aids and knowledge bank, you’ll understand where each content lever sits and can use that to guide your learning and development strategy in places.
BUT, you have to avoid becoming a bottleneck in other ways! We simply can’t approve every piece of curated and internal content and keep up with the pace of change. So, we have to consider the guidelines we’re going to put in place as part of our overall learning and development strategy. Otherwise, we end up creating a content landfill – where we’ve curated and created too much content, without verifying its relevance and that it’s still up-to-date.
Integrating with other technology and platforms
Information is most useful in the moments and places where work is taking place. Learning shouldn’t be pulling people out of the workflow, and that’s why you’ll need to consider which tools it’s crucial people can find content in.
For example, if you’re using a customer service tool like Intercom, it’s more helpful if reps can access all of your guidance and content within that platform. It’ll help them find and apply knowledge in crucial moments while improving response time and customer experience.
At HowNow, our mission is to integrate with all the tools you use every day, enabling you to search for and surface knowledge in the flow of work, everywhere you already work.
Creating a mission/vision/value proposition
You want people to connect with your goals, to understand the value of investing in your learning vision and turn them into learning and development strategy advocates, but how are you going to do it?
For many, they choose to build a learning brand – something tangible that portrays values, creates a connection with people and improves the presence of learning within the business. For others, it’s enough to simply create a mission and vision statement, communicating the shared goals, aligning with people’s values and presenting a culture that people are likely to buy into.
Designing personalised learning pathways
One size fits nobody when it comes to learning and development! The tools you’re using, the overarching strategy and approaches will be structured, but there needs to be flexibility to customise pathways for every person in the team.
It comes back to our skills gap idea and applying it on a personal level, where is that one person aiming to be, and how can learning get them there? You also need to consider the types of content that person benefits from, which colleagues can help them through social learning and their overall career goals.
The role of self-directed learning
When we talk about flexibility, we mean it! Learning’s not a nine to five activity, it’s something that people should have the freedom to do on their terms. And the way you can do that is by considering the role of on-demand content and self-directed access in your learning and development strategy.
One of the biggest barriers to most people is finding information, especially when it’s scattered across loads of different platforms and systems. HowNow could be your collective brain, one place to bring together all of your knowledge and make it easy to find, all at the end of one search.
From 2 hours per day to 25% of the working week spent searching for information, research findings might differ, but they all show that finding knowledge is a challenge.
A good learning and development strategy paired with a platform designed to drive engagement can help you beat those discoverability and engagement. We’ll talk care of the second, you just need to book in for a demo of our learning experience platform.
Check out our other learning and development resources
Use marketing techniques to amplify your message and get people bought in
Good marketing can help L&D solve two common problems:
Altering its perception so that people see value in it.
Amplifying the message so that more people see, find, and engage with your efforts.
By now, you will have understood the current perception of L&D in your business, and that will give you an indication of how much work needs to be done. But even if it’s a glowing one, remember that people might have past training baggage from other jobs.
Awareness and discoverability of content can play a huge role in whether you’re able to drive impact. What if the perfect resource exists to tackle a problem, but the person facing it doesn’t know where to look or struggles to locate it?
The L&D Marketing Funnel
In marketing, we view our customers going on a journey – typically through a funnel called AIDA: Awareness, Interest, Desire Action.
Something similar happens in L&D, something our CEO and author of Learning at Speed, Nelson Sivalingam, calls The Marketing Funnel.
Essentially we’re moving people through four stages:
Awareness: We have to communicate which performance problems or business challenges we’re solving, otherwise people won’t seek a solution.
Activation: The first step or action, which might be clicking on a resource or signing up for a course.
Retention: How do we keep them on that learning journey until we see a performance improvement or change in behaviour?
Referral: Positive learning experiences turn people into advocates who spread the message about why our L&D offering is so useful.
Marketing activities that’ll drive better L&D
Before we get into these tactics, a quick note:
You probably have a marketing team internally, use them.
They’re doing all of these things every day, in the context of your business, and are ripe for leveraging.
If you’re not willing to leverage experts in your own company, you’re not a great advertisement for learning and development…
Building a learning brand
Remember that step to work out how L&D is currently perceived?
You already have a learning brand – intentionally or unintentionally – and this step helps you figure out if it’s a positive or negative one.
But you should be intentional about it! A brand gives people something tangible to invest in and attach themselves to. It’s why people queue around the block for new Apple products or openly promote their favourite clothing lines to anyone who’ll listen.
Asking yourself four questions will help you create a strong learning brand:
You’re standing in a supermarket with a shelf of similar-looking soft drinks in front of you, you can’t base your decision on taste, so you go by the best packaging. The branding acts as a shortcut to decision-making. That’s where most people think a brand’s influence ends, and they’re wrong!
Imagine the branding or slogan connects with you so much that you share it on your social media stories after, and then the taste or experience is so good that you commit to a full post to shout them out. The more you scroll through their feed, the more you realise that brand has the same values as you, and engaging with them adds a net positive to your life. Suddenly, you’re engaging with all their content and telling your friends and followers about it.
Now replace that soft drink with your learning platform or strategy and picture how sweet that would taste.
Your learning brand would be flying off the metaphorical shelves! People would connect to its message and values, use it more often, and become brand advocates who get more people to buy-in. By creating a strong learning brand, you can replicate the same loyalty, communities, and connections at work!
Why does a learning brand matter?
Aside from that connection and giving people a positive experience that they’re willing to share? Brands make people feel something, and that keeps them engaged! Or another way to put it is that they create long-lasting relationships. Almost 50% of food and beverage brands that were so popular in the US in 1923 were in the top five in 1997, more than 70 years later (source).
And with hopefully our last reference to food or drink, think about all those blind taste tests where people can’t identify their favourite brands from the rest. That brand has created a perceived quality that’s hugely powerful to how people interact with it.
We can’t always rationalise our connection to a brand, but it quite often gets passed down by our parents or a friend gets us hooked onto it. That’s a real tangible benefit of creating a strong learning brand! If you become an advocate, then you might encourage disengaged colleagues to buy in or share your good experience with friends outside the business.
As we’ll discuss later, that can make your company a far more attractive place to work. Even to the point where an employee who’s moved onto pastures new remains and an advocate in their new position!
Sometimes, a strong brand is used by companies to make noise and let you know that their product exists, especially in crowded markets or where one big player dominates. Sound familiar?
A big barrier to L&D is often a lack of awareness, whether that’s of the solutions altogether or what they can be used for. Or even worse, it’s a case of apathy! Well, a strong learning brand is something people can buy into far more easily, helping you tackle those two dreaded A’s.
Building your learning brand from scratch
One of the key things to keep in mind is that your brand can be crucial in making learning part of the higher conversations and help normalise development as a key part of the business. And it’s going to be much more successful at that if you involve the company’s wider goals and values, plus the key people.
Sit down and create a mission and vision statement for your brand, one that helps you understand your people and purpose. Ask yourself who your learners are, which problems they need us to solve, which goals you can help them achieve and so on. Define clear goals, objectives and an approach with your people at its heart. Your vision statement is much simpler, it’s where you want the brand achievements to take you further down the line.
Once you start to create the brand, make sure you’re involving people from the off! When people are more connected and have more influence over a project, they’re more likely to be engaged, invested, and an advocate once it’s live.
You might start by testing the water over what they’d like to see in your learning brand or strategy. When it comes to naming, logos, the colours, and all those other visual elements, ask away! Not only are you ticking that involvement box, you’re creating more awareness and familiarity with the learning brand. When brands offer an aspect of community, 37% of people stick with them because of that social appeal (source: the Content Marketing Association).
If you’ve already got a learning platform, brand or strategy, use that to guide you. If you were to rip it all up right now, which parts would you keep? Ask the same questions to the people using it, if there’s an aspect that really turns them off then that’s best left behind too.
Curiosity might have killed the cat, but it could be the lifeblood of your learning brand! The more you speak with people, the more you’ll spot those with genuine intrigue about L&D in your business. Harness that curiosity to convert them into genuine brand advocates, because their passion will help get others on board and your brand’s suddenly snowballing nicely.
Pitching and selling the brand
This section’s more about buy-in, we’ll come to more specific marketing tips shortly. So, how do you achieve that buy-in from all the right people? You’ve got to sell your brand effectively, and that means pitching the benefits effectively, while also considering that different departments will benefit in different ways.
For example, it’ll be an easier sell to your HR team if they understand the role it can play in talent acquisition. 50% of employees view employer branding as a key part of their HR approach, while those with a strong employer brand see hiring costs fall by 43%. Your learning brand offers a tangible way for them to demonstrate this to candidates and demonstrate the importance of development in your business. Not to mention the word of mouth difference that your people can make to talent acquisition when they shout about how good things are.
Apply the same thinking in the early discussions with stakeholders and other departments, which problems could your learning brand help them overcome? Pitch that in your messaging, and it’s much easier to see what’s in it for them. Don’t stop there either, as your brand evolves over time, ensure you continue to consult them and collect feedback. If they feel like they’re shaping the brand over time, you’ll create those longer-lasting relationships.
Everybody hates those ‘do as I say, not as I do’ people, so don’t be one of those when it comes to your learning brand. If you’re not using it consistently, why should anyone else? When you deliver onboarding and when you send out communications, incorporate your brand logo, messaging, values and voice.
One final thought on pitching your brand, never underestimate the power of rewarding people for their time and engagement. We’ve all seen those social media competitions where the prize is something pretty basic, and yet there’s hundreds or even thousands of engagements on the post.
A giveaway could be the gateway to buying into your brand, so think about the actions you want people to take and which rewards would encourage them to adopt those behaviours. They don’t have to be five-star holidays or a sports car, sometimes a badge or certificate will do the trick.
Marketing your learning brand
If your organisation has a marketing department, that’s the first door you should be knocking on! Not only do they have the skills needed to sell your learning brand effectively, they’re also the custodians of the company brand and should have a strong understanding of the business values. Essentially, this means they’ll help you position your brand as aligning with the wider strategy and identity.
If you don’t have a marketing team to lean on, you can still create an amazing promotional strategy and message. There’s a great phrase that features tell and benefits sell, which loosely translates to people only care about what they stand to gain from what you’re offering. Try to resist telling them technical things the brand or learning platform offers and create simple messaging about the benefits of buying in.
Another tip is to think about storytelling and making people feel like the ‘hero’ in your messaging. Help them understand how they’re personally going to engage with learning. Tap into the emotional aspects over pain points and frustrations they’re experiencing, possibly around growth or accessibility of resources and knowledge.
Creating a clear communications plan is another step you should take. Think about the timeline for release and how far ahead of that you’ll need to create a buzz. Also, consider how easy it is for people to share your communications and become advocates, that will determine the channels and messaging you use. For example, a 10,000-word internal press release is much harder to share than one visual infographic that covers a few key ideas or benefits.
We already hinted at the idea of a name, slogan, identity and tone of voice for your learning brand, and their power in marketing can’t be overlooked. We all have those brands that we have an irrational adoration for just because we love the way they talk or their imagery strikes a chord with us.
If you’ve understood your audience’s needs and interests well, you should be able to tap into that. For example, is there an informal term people already use internally that you could transform into a slogan or brand name. Do you know that people detest boring course names and having a little fun in them would catch their eye?
That ties in nicely with our final tip, think about where your audience is already engaged and tap into that. If the current intranet gets terrible response rates but the internal newsletter is everybody’s must-read each week, where are you going to have more luck?
Want to see how you can create a learning brand?
Of course you do! The good news is that we’ll happily show your around HowNow and have a chat about how you could create the right learning brand for your business. Just complete this product demo form and we’ll take care of the rest…
Check out our other learning and development resources
And this paved the way for social media influencers to make full-time careers from their followings.
Now, we can apply the same principle to ramp up the impact of our L&D efforts! Which people internally can help us communicate the value of engaging with a particular course or resource?
Remember, influential people exist at every level of the organisation – it’s not just the people at the top of the tree.
These three questions will help you find influencers:
What’s their reach? What’s the quantity and quality of the people they connect with?
How much engagement do they get? Whether it’s on LinkedIn or when they post a Slack message, the engagement they get demonstrates their influencer credentials.
Do they have the experience and authority needed in the organisation? Have they built up evidence and credibility that they’re a useful source on the topic at hand?
Get social
People spend more than two hours on social media every day, and yet we so infrequently use it to shout about our learning initiatives.
Work out which channels your audience spend most of that time on.
And then repurpose parts of your learning content so they work natively on that channel.
This is a quick win in engaging people but also demonstrating the value of your content.
Harness the power of SEO
Before content marketers write anything, they research! Looking into the keywords people use when they have questions and the content that’s currently trying to answer it.
Why?
So they can match their content to people’s intent! It not only makes what we create more useful, it increases the likelihood of it being found.
And we should be doing the same thing in L&D.
Speak to your people, ask them to describe a problem and listen to the language they use!
There’s no use naming a resource ‘The Sales Narrative’ when your people phrase their problem as ‘How do I pitch our product’.
The former is an assumption based on the language we might use, the latter is what people will tap into your search bar when they need answers…
Spend more time naming your resources
This ties into the point above, but it’s another excellent marketing lesson you can learn.
How long do you spend writing the title of the resource you just poured your heart into.
Probably not long enough!
But it could be the difference between clicking on the resource or not! And remember that activation and retention are the two middle parts of our funnel.
Apply the Four U’s each time you’re writing a headline, and you’ll increase your chances of communicating value!
Useful: Does the intended audience understand what they’ll get from this?
Unique: What is it about this specific resource that makes it appropriate?
Ultra-specific: Be detailed about the problem this solves.
Urgency: Why should people act now/why is it relevant now?
You don’t need to use all four, just the ones that apply! Here’s an example:
How to deal with difficult customers when our system is down
It’s ultra-specific about the problem it solves (system being down), it’s unique because we’re dealing with a particular customer (difficult ones), and it’s useful because it’ll talk us through how to deal with the situation.
We don’t need to shoe-horn in urgency because it’s evergreen content and urgency is already implied by the situation it’s dealing with. But an example of that would be adding something like ‘pre-event’ or ‘2023’ to communicate the time sensitive nature.
Update and optimise your content
We mentioned evergreen content above. This is essentially a marketing term to describe content that should remain relevant to our audience and continue to drive traffic over time,
And there will be content like this among your L&D resources.
The thing is, it’s only evergreen if we keep the content in it up to date and relevant.
Like a marketing team would, set aside time to revisit old pieces and ensure they’re still relevant.
At the same time, resist the urge to just upload a new resource. That’s how we end up with Pricing A, New Pricing, 2022 Pricing, Latest Pricing, and however many other resources targeting the same thing.
Some ways you can update and optimise effectively are:
Listening for when people say a resource is ‘missing this’ or ‘would be great if it had…’.
Understand when context has changed. Maybe one part of a process is now different, or we’re operating in a new market – you can update content to reflect that.
When new insights and evidence have emerged, include them. Maybe an internal expert brings a new approach to an old problem. The resource that currently outlines the approach could be updated with these insights.
Create stronger calls-to-action
Another way we can encourage people to click on our resources is with a stronger call to action.
Rather than enrol now, how about become a better public speaker?
That kind of thing!
One is generic, the other conveys value. Now imagine you’ve added social proof, like your current reviews or testimonials, and then position them at the point where people make decisions.
We went into this in more detail here 👇
Direct-to-consumer brands are reinventing fairly mundane products off the back of engaging and exciting marketing!
Whether it’s mattresses, tooth brushes or even toilet paper, promotion is being used to turn the products we perceive as boring into things we’ll shout about to friends and family. So, maybe there’s no such thing as a boring product, just boring marketing…
But what does this have to do with L&D?
Well, learning fails without engagement.
And when people aren’t engaged with learning, or we’re struggling with buy-in, we presume it’s an L&D issue.
In reality, it’s a marketing issue. We are not communicating the value of what we’re offering effectively enough to get people to want it.
Learning is an easy sell if you think about it. This is something that’ll improve your performance and make you better at what you do. Which will help you progress in every sense of the word.
Luckily, there are some marketing techniques that lend themselves to driving engagement in learning.
The L&D Marketing Funnel
We shouldn’t rush into action until we understand the problems we’re trying to solve and the journey our audience is going on.
That’s where The L&D Marketing Funnel comes in, and we’ll summarise the four stages for you here.
Awareness: We don’t seek a solution unless we’re aware of the problem we’re solving! So, we have to communicate the business challenges or performance problems we’re solving to our audience.
Activation: Getting people to take that first action or step to engagement, like signing up for a live class or opening a course.
Retention: But it doesn’t stop there, we need to keep them on the journey until we see the desired behaviour change or performance improvement.
Ask questions like, have they now got the skills they needed? Have they dropped off, and do we need to re-engage them?
Referral: Our learners have seen the value and are now our biggest fans, shouting out the benefits to others.
1. Building a learning brand
Ever wondered why people queue round the block for Apple products? Or why Tesla had a high market cap when the market share for electric vehicles was low?
The answer is brand!
And a good brand is more than a flashy logo or vibrant colours, it’s the sum of all the interactions people have with L&D in the business.
This means we essentially have some kind of learning brand already, the question is whether we’re aware of it. And if we’re not aware of it, let’s be honest, it’s probably not very good.
L&D teams need to take control of how that learning brand is received and start shaping it…
Four questions that’ll help you create a better learning brand
Who is it for?
Don’t go with a broad answer like your employees. You need to build a more specific persona of your learner!
What roles do they do? Where are they from? Which behaviours do they typically display?
Why does it exist?
A great why connects us: the individual, the business, and the L&D team.
So we need to define why L&D exists in the business and build a mission or vision statement that gets others on board. Connecting the L&D mission to the overall company one is another great way to do that.
What’s your brand identity?
A great brand name can not only create excitement in the business – especially if you tie it back to that why and mission – but it offers a visual identity for people to connect with.
What’s your tone of voice?
How do we speak? Informally or with authority? Friendly or very down the line?
This’ll inform how we create content, the ways we describe L&D and the guidelines we set for others to talk about learning.
2. Putting social media to work
People spend an average of 144 minutes per day on social media, and yet we so rarely use it to promote learning to our target audience.
So, why don’t we?
What’s stopping us creating an Instagram page to share highlights from learning resources and driving our internal customers to follow it?
That’s just one example of how we can tap into existing behaviours to drive learning!
We shouldn’t be dragging people to where learning is but taking the learning to where our people are.
So, ask them which social media channels they use, deliver value-adding content there, tag relevant people so they’re more likely to share and learn what impact it has.
3. Leverage internal influencers
First of all, we need to find them! And there are a few things to consider:
What’s their reach? And not just in terms of quantity, but the quality of the people they reach?
How much engagement do they get? When influencers are posting in channels like Slack, do they get a lot of engagement? That’s great validation of their influencer capabilities.
Do they have the experience and authority needed in the organisation?
And remember, hierarchy isn’t directly tied to influence! You don’t need to be high up in the org chart to influence others.
Give your influencers a platform and empower them
We all want to be recognised for our abilities, skills and achievements among our peers, it’s why we post on social media or share useful content in the first place.
But L&D can give influencers a platform to share what they know. And it’s not about trying to change them because we want it be in their voice and feel authentic, but we can give them the platform!
It might come in the form of our company blog or Instagram page, but it’s essentially about amplifying their influence.
And co-creating content with them is another way to do it!
We’ve seen great examples through HowNow customers, like internal influencers creating a video around the consequences of GDPR non-compliance. Filmed on a phone, nothing flashy, but people watched it because their colleagues starred in it.
4. Optimise for search
Think about how you use Google. A moment of need arises, and you search for the answers.
You’re hoping that there’s content that meets your intent. And you’re often lucky that brands are fighting to optimise their content for that term and give us the answers we need.
But as L&D professionals, how much thought do we put into keywords and search intent?
Not enough…
Go and speak to your end users. Ask them to describe a problem and listen to how they respond. The language they use will help you optimise content to meet their intent in moments of need.
5. Stronger calls to action (CTAs)
It would be a shame if all that good copywriting and well-branded content went to waste.
But too often, it does! Because our calls-to-action are an afterthought! We don’t consider how we’re going to encourage and compel people to take the desired action.
Good news is, there are four best practices you can follow to improve your CTAs.
Use Value-focussed calls-to-action: What sounds better: Enroll now or Become a better public speaker? Definitely the latter, because it communicates the value of signing up.
Position your CTA at the point of decision: – Let’s say we’ve just shown someone a video or success story about how a course transformed someone’s life. The moment after that is the perfect time to use a strong CTA, as it’s when someone is likely to make a decision.
Use social proof: Convince your audience that similar people have benefited from it. Whether that’s ‘join the 200 people who…’ or a direct testimonial from a real person.
Make the CTA stand out: Use odd shapes, bright colours, eye-catching contrasts – consider how, in that moment and context, you can get more people to click.
Check out our other learning and development resources
Remember that first rule of L&D success: Solving the right problem?
Searching for tech is one of the most pivotal times to stick with this outlook.
Look for something that solves that problem! Not the latest acronym you’ve heard or the buzzword that’s dominating the L&D chatter.
If you go looking for an LXP or LMS, that’s what you’ll get. But what if there’s something out there better suited to solving your problem? Those blinkers will stop you finding it.
Let’s say you own a small bakery, and you want to improve your delivery efficiency during the busy periods of the day.
You’ve always used a van, so you head to a van dealership. Unsurprisingly, all they can offer you is a van.
If you adopt the problem-first mindset, you might say to yourself: well, traffic is our biggest issue and we only make a few deliveries at a time.
Lightbulb moment: A moped is probably a better fit! We can weave through the traffic in busy areas and improve our delivery efficiency while reducing costs and environmental impact.
Don’t go to market looking for a particular solution, take your solution to the market and see what comes your way.
Having said that, there are a number of common problems and pain points companies typically face in L&D, and we know because many of them turn to HowNow to solve them!
Could an LXP help solve my problems?
Remember our common problems with L&D from the very start? A lot of those come from frustrations with the old-school LMS.
And remember that part on how learning should look today? Well, that’s why we (at HowNow) developed our learning experience platform! In general, LXPs are far better suited for delivering the engaging learning we expect today.
The fact that they curate, integrate, personalise, report in real-time and deliver content on demand also makes them ideal for solving these typical pain points:
Onboarding: By building personalised pathways and incorporating tests, assessments, and practice scenarios.
Developing leaders: If they’re new leaders from within, by building pathways that give them the required skills. If they’re external leaders with lots of know-how, by giving them contextual knowledge that’s business specific.
Upskilling employees: Building skills profiles to understand which are lacking, then delivering content and development opportunities to close those skills gaps.
Capturing and sharing knowledge: By acting as a collective brain and empowering all your best minds to contribute to it.
Compliance training: Typically the activity that gives L&D a bad rap, LXPs help you deliver more engaging compliance content, report in real-time, and automate time-consuming parts of the process.
Want to see the LXP built to engage your people?
Too often, when L&D’s getting little traction, they think there must be a problem with our content or the platform.
It’s not. It’s a lack of engagement!
Without engagement, L&D is like a car with no wheels – it’s going nowhere.
A lot of what we’ve been talking about so far addresses that lack of engagement: solving the right problems, communicating value, and winning over the right people.
And HowNow is the platform built to help you close The Engagement Gap!
From integrating with the tools people use every day (so learning can be applied in moments of need) to empowering internal experts with a frictionless way to share their expertise, we’d love to show you around our LXP.
See HowNow In Action
Complete this short form and one of our friendly experts will be in touch!
L&D lessons from six innovative companies
Gymshark: Build a search-first culture by empowering internal experts
If someone’s going to ask the same question twice, it needs to be captured! That was the view in Gymshark’s support team, and they used HowNow’s Nugget feature as a way to collect those answers.
Essentially, they empowered everyone in the support team to capture what they knew, which allowed them to cut down on the repeat questions that might typically interrupt their day.
Rather than someone asking the question, having a company brain encouraged people to think, ‘there’s a good chance someone’s already captured this’, and that’s how a search-first culture gets off the ground.
It’s those positive feedback loops we mentioned before, and if you want to learn more about how Gymshark build those in their approach, read their story:
Direct-to-consumer brands are reinventing fairly mundane products off the back of engaging and exciting marketing!
Whether it’s mattresses, tooth brushes or even toilet paper, promotion is being used to turn the products we perceive as boring into things we’ll shout about to friends and family. So, maybe there’s no such thing as a boring product, just boring marketing…
But what does this have to do with L&D?
Well, learning fails without engagement.
And when people aren’t engaged with learning, or we’re struggling with buy-in, we presume it’s an L&D issue.
In reality, it’s a marketing issue. We are not communicating the value of what we’re offering effectively enough to get people to want it.
Learning is an easy sell if you think about it. This is something that’ll improve your performance and make you better at what you do. Which will help you progress in every sense of the word.
Luckily, there are some marketing techniques that lend themselves to driving engagement in learning.
The L&D Marketing Funnel
We shouldn’t rush into action until we understand the problems we’re trying to solve and the journey our audience is going on.
That’s where The L&D Marketing Funnel comes in, and we’ll summarise the four stages for you here.
Awareness: We don’t seek a solution unless we’re aware of the problem we’re solving! So, we have to communicate the business challenges or performance problems we’re solving to our audience.
Activation: Getting people to take that first action or step to engagement, like signing up for a live class or opening a course.
Retention: But it doesn’t stop there, we need to keep them on the journey until we see the desired behaviour change or performance improvement.
Ask questions like, have they now got the skills they needed? Have they dropped off, and do we need to re-engage them?
Referral: Our learners have seen the value and are now our biggest fans, shouting out the benefits to others.
1. Building a learning brand
Ever wondered why people queue round the block for Apple products? Or why Tesla had a high market cap when the market share for electric vehicles was low?
The answer is brand!
And a good brand is more than a flashy logo or vibrant colours, it’s the sum of all the interactions people have with L&D in the business.
This means we essentially have some kind of learning brand already, the question is whether we’re aware of it. And if we’re not aware of it, let’s be honest, it’s probably not very good.
L&D teams need to take control of how that learning brand is received and start shaping it…
Four questions that’ll help you create a better learning brand
Who is it for?
Don’t go with a broad answer like your employees. You need to build a more specific persona of your learner!
What roles do they do? Where are they from? Which behaviours do they typically display?
Why does it exist?
A great why connects us: the individual, the business, and the L&D team.
So we need to define why L&D exists in the business and build a mission or vision statement that gets others on board. Connecting the L&D mission to the overall company one is another great way to do that.
What’s your brand identity?
A great brand name can not only create excitement in the business – especially if you tie it back to that why and mission – but it offers a visual identity for people to connect with.
What’s your tone of voice?
How do we speak? Informally or with authority? Friendly or very down the line?
This’ll inform how we create content, the ways we describe L&D and the guidelines we set for others to talk about learning.
2. Putting social media to work
People spend an average of 144 minutes per day on social media, and yet we so rarely use it to promote learning to our target audience.
So, why don’t we?
What’s stopping us creating an Instagram page to share highlights from learning resources and driving our internal customers to follow it?
That’s just one example of how we can tap into existing behaviours to drive learning!
We shouldn’t be dragging people to where learning is but taking the learning to where our people are.
So, ask them which social media channels they use, deliver value-adding content there, tag relevant people so they’re more likely to share and learn what impact it has.
3. Leverage internal influencers
First of all, we need to find them! And there are a few things to consider:
What’s their reach? And not just in terms of quantity, but the quality of the people they reach?
How much engagement do they get? When influencers are posting in channels like Slack, do they get a lot of engagement? That’s great validation of their influencer capabilities.
Do they have the experience and authority needed in the organisation?
And remember, hierarchy isn’t directly tied to influence! You don’t need to be high up in the org chart to influence others.
Give your influencers a platform and empower them
We all want to be recognised for our abilities, skills and achievements among our peers, it’s why we post on social media or share useful content in the first place.
But L&D can give influencers a platform to share what they know. And it’s not about trying to change them because we want it be in their voice and feel authentic, but we can give them the platform!
It might come in the form of our company blog or Instagram page, but it’s essentially about amplifying their influence.
And co-creating content with them is another way to do it!
We’ve seen great examples through HowNow customers, like internal influencers creating a video around the consequences of GDPR non-compliance. Filmed on a phone, nothing flashy, but people watched it because their colleagues starred in it.
4. Optimise for search
Think about how you use Google. A moment of need arises, and you search for the answers.
You’re hoping that there’s content that meets your intent. And you’re often lucky that brands are fighting to optimise their content for that term and give us the answers we need.
But as L&D professionals, how much thought do we put into keywords and search intent?
Not enough…
Go and speak to your end users. Ask them to describe a problem and listen to how they respond. The language they use will help you optimise content to meet their intent in moments of need.
5. Stronger calls to action (CTAs)
It would be a shame if all that good copywriting and well-branded content went to waste.
But too often, it does! Because our calls-to-action are an afterthought! We don’t consider how we’re going to encourage and compel people to take the desired action.
Good news is, there are four best practices you can follow to improve your CTAs.
Use Value-focussed calls-to-action: What sounds better: Enroll now or Become a better public speaker? Definitely the latter, because it communicates the value of signing up.
Position your CTA at the point of decision: – Let’s say we’ve just shown someone a video or success story about how a course transformed someone’s life. The moment after that is the perfect time to use a strong CTA, as it’s when someone is likely to make a decision.
Use social proof: Convince your audience that similar people have benefited from it. Whether that’s ‘join the 200 people who…’ or a direct testimonial from a real person.
Make the CTA stand out: Use odd shapes, bright colours, eye-catching contrasts – consider how, in that moment and context, you can get more people to click.
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Remember that first rule of L&D success: Solving the right problem?
Searching for tech is one of the most pivotal times to stick with this outlook.
Look for something that solves that problem! Not the latest acronym you’ve heard or the buzzword that’s dominating the L&D chatter.
If you go looking for an LXP or LMS, that’s what you’ll get. But what if there’s something out there better suited to solving your problem? Those blinkers will stop you finding it.
Let’s say you own a small bakery, and you want to improve your delivery efficiency during the busy periods of the day.
You’ve always used a van, so you head to a van dealership. Unsurprisingly, all they can offer you is a van.
If you adopt the problem-first mindset, you might say to yourself: well, traffic is our biggest issue and we only make a few deliveries at a time.
Lightbulb moment: A moped is probably a better fit! We can weave through the traffic in busy areas and improve our delivery efficiency while reducing costs and environmental impact.
Don’t go to market looking for a particular solution, take your solution to the market and see what comes your way.
Having said that, there are a number of common problems and pain points companies typically face in L&D, and we know because many of them turn to HowNow to solve them!
Could an LXP help solve my problems?
Remember our common problems with L&D from the very start? A lot of those come from frustrations with the old-school LMS.
And remember that part on how learning should look today? Well, that’s why we (at HowNow) developed our learning experience platform! In general, LXPs are far better suited for delivering the engaging learning we expect today.
The fact that they curate, integrate, personalise, report in real-time and deliver content on demand also makes them ideal for solving these typical pain points:
Onboarding: By building personalised pathways and incorporating tests, assessments, and practice scenarios.
Developing leaders: If they’re new leaders from within, by building pathways that give them the required skills. If they’re external leaders with lots of know-how, by giving them contextual knowledge that’s business specific.
Upskilling employees: Building skills profiles to understand which are lacking, then delivering content and development opportunities to close those skills gaps.
Capturing and sharing knowledge: By acting as a collective brain and empowering all your best minds to contribute to it.
Compliance training: Typically the activity that gives L&D a bad rap, LXPs help you deliver more engaging compliance content, report in real-time, and automate time-consuming parts of the process.
Want to see the LXP built to engage your people?
Too often, when L&D’s getting little traction, they think there must be a problem with our content or the platform.
It’s not. It’s a lack of engagement!
Without engagement, L&D is like a car with no wheels – it’s going nowhere.
A lot of what we’ve been talking about so far addresses that lack of engagement: solving the right problems, communicating value, and winning over the right people.
And HowNow is the platform built to help you close The Engagement Gap!
From integrating with the tools people use every day (so learning can be applied in moments of need) to empowering internal experts with a frictionless way to share their expertise, we’d love to show you around our LXP.
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L&D lessons from six innovative companies
Gymshark: Build a search-first culture by empowering internal experts
If someone’s going to ask the same question twice, it needs to be captured! That was the view in Gymshark’s support team, and they used HowNow’s Nugget feature as a way to collect those answers.
Essentially, they empowered everyone in the support team to capture what they knew, which allowed them to cut down on the repeat questions that might typically interrupt their day.
Rather than someone asking the question, having a company brain encouraged people to think, ‘there’s a good chance someone’s already captured this’, and that’s how a search-first culture gets off the ground.
It’s those positive feedback loops we mentioned before, and if you want to learn more about how Gymshark build those in their approach, read their story:
McDonald’s: Re-inventing your employer brand through training and development
If you’re from the UK and around a certain age, you might be familiar with the saying ‘you’ll end up working at McDonald’s ‘…
It was meant to be a bad thing. A way to frighten you into applying yourself better at school or that this would be the worst case scenario – a career low, perhaps.
But through a commitment to developing people and investing in learning, 85% of people might now answer that question with a simple, ‘good!’.
Each year, the company invests £40 million in training to develop people, and this is the outlook on how it’s spent:
“Together with our Franchisees, we are committed to providing training, education and career pathways to empower Restaurant Staff (people working in a McDonald’s-brand restaurant globally). We want to make McDonald’s one of the best places to work by offering development opportunities that simply can’t be found anywhere else.
“By creating an environment of continuous learning and development, McDonald’s and its Franchisees are focused on attracting and retaining the very best people. We and our Franchisees are dedicated to providing learning and development opportunities for people at all stages of their journey, whether they choose to build a career with McDonald’s, or beyond.”
Hamburger University (HU) is the flagship program, helping people build skills in key areas like operational excellence, leadership, development and innovation, and business. A platform for people internally to develop the skills and earn qualifications that make them successful at McDonald’s and beyond.
ORC: Remove learner friction by bringing everything into one central place
Did you know that employees can waste up to 25% of their time looking for the information they need to do their job!?
And according to Beezy, more than half of employees (56%) have been unable to find digital documents while working remotely.
Normally because resources are scattered across tools, shared drives, desktops and loads of other places. As ORC found out, bringing everything together in one place reduces the friction for people in their moments of need.
“The more that we started putting things into HowNow, we realised that our content and our resources were pretty scattered, we were utilising SharePoint, which then transitioned to Dropbox for a lot of our files.
“But having the permissions and restrictions in two different folders kind of did create barriers every time you wanted to share a document. Today, HowNow is where we’re anchoring everything related to learning.” – Kayshia Kruger, Director of Organisation Development.
Analyse data on your workforce and hiring for the past five years 👉 establish your fastest-growing, highly-skilled jobs 👉 upskill your people in these areas.
Seems simple, and possibly unrelatable given the scale of their workforce, but we can absolutely learn from Amazon’s approach.
They discovered that data mapping specialist (832% growth), data scientist (505%), solutions architect (454%), security engineer (229%), and business analyst (160%) were the highest-growth roles. While in customer fulfillment, highly skilled roles increased by over 400%.
And they put their money where their mouth was in 2019, announcing that they would spend $700 million to upskill 100,000 of their US employees in these areas by 2025.
Whether you look at the departments of highest-growth, the areas of high-turnover, the biggest skills gaps or whatever performance and learning data is at your disposal, there are insights there to inform your strategy.
Disney: Connect everyone to the mission and purpose
The first thing all Cast Members learn is the Traditions course – regardless of which role you’ll be taking moving forward.
And as the quote below shows, it’s an intentional act to establish expectations, set standards, and help people understand why Disney does what it does.
“Instead of first providing them the technical skills they will need to complete the tasks of their new roles, we share with them the big picture—their purpose, which is to create happiness. Sharing our common purpose empowers each and every Cast Member right from the start to begin providing outstanding service to guests.”
When they move onto the role-specific onboarding, they’ll feel more connected to the purpose and apply what they learn more intentionally with the mission in mind.
intent.ly: Let people shape and build the learning space
Intent.ly did two excellent things to get buy-in early on:
Empowered their managers to create content ahead of launch.
Allowed employees to have input into what the space looked like.
By engaging managers early on, intent.ly populated the space with relevant content and reduced the burden on L&D to do it all.
“The first stage of me trying to do the content by myself probably took about 6 weeks. We then launched it out to managers and had more content in 10 days than we did in those 6 weeks.” – Rebecca Lee-Webb, Head of Operations, intent.ly
Employees were engaged by getting input into the branding and identity of the learning space. Case in point is the name intelligent.ly, suggested in a Slack channel and voted for through internal surveys.
“So that was rolled out company-wide and we landed on the name intelligent.ly, which is so funny. We rolled out about 60 names, and everyone was like, That’s okay, that’s okay, that’s okay.
“And then one person just sent this message in the Slack being like, ‘What about intelligent.ly?’. And the whole company was like, that’s amazing.”
The future of L&D: Which skills will be useful in a fast-changing world?
The world is changing so fast, and our role as L&D teams is to help people keep up!
There are certain skills that’ll help us do that more effectively – evergreen ones that it’ll always be worth keeping in our arsenal.
We were lucky enough to be joined by Ross Stevenson (Founder of Steal These Thoughts) and Lavinia Mehedințu (Co-Founder of Offbeat) on L&D Disrupt Live to learn about future skills winning L&D leaders will need.
Context is the master, and L&D needs to master its application
If our learning initiatives are going to be effective at solving problems and driving performance, we have to master that context angle!
What’s going on in the business, the industry, and when people are trying to apply information?
Here are a few tips for mastering context:
You need awareness of your organisation and where it’s going.
Build an understanding of where you’re hoping to go in your L&D career and your career in general – that will help you understand how to future-proof yourself.
Think about whether and where you want to specialise in your skills.
Approach skill analysis as you’d approach that process of working out the skills your people need and want to learn.
Become more problem-focused and think about the North Star you’re aiming for.
Curate more than just content: bring people and opportunities together
Lavinia gave us two great quotes on how we can apply this mindset, and a lot of it comes back to relationship building.
People:
“As L&D, we’re connected to so many people in the organisation, and we get a chance to know them. Their strengths, their projects, their knowledge, and we can leverage that to facilitate social learning…”
Career opportunities
“If we’re connected to our recruitment counterparts and understand what they’re looking for, at the same time we have these programs where we meet people and know the skills they have and what they’d like to do next in their job. And then we can them tell about opportunities.”
Honing the ability of agility
Our strategies have to be fluid in the face of rapid change! At the end of the day, your stakeholders are going to be asking: did the L&D team help us solve a problem?
And that means we have to create something that responds to their needs. Whether that’s by streamlining content creation, managing touchpoints better or creating project-based strategies over big-bang ones.
As our CEO Nelson Sivalingam wrote in Learning at Speed:
“In the face of exponential change, no employee has the time for training for the sake of training. Paradoxically, they require less learning to perform better.”
Our strategy should be about connecting the right people to the right resources at the right time, and we have to factor in flexibility to get that right.
Thinking and communicating like a marketer
Marketing again!? Didn’t we read a whole section about that earlier…
Yes, and this is your reminder that you not only need to learn those skills to communicate value clearly.
You’re also advised to keep up with the new tools and tactics used by marketers.
Case in point – TikTok.
Even people who graduated with marketing degrees in 2019 will have little theoretical or classroom-based knowledge of TikTok, and yet it has revolutionised video content.
Not just natively but on every other platform.
It’s also transforming how people learn – short-form, visually appealing video nuggets of wisdom.
Now, the next time something like this comes along, wouldn’t you rather tap into its potential earlier?
Keep learning from marketers to keep others learning what matters…
Diagnosing problems and finding solutions to continue driving impact
We’re bookending this pretty much where we started: if L&D is going to be successful now and in the future, it’ll have to get better at identifying the problems.
Pushing back to truly understand the issue at hand.
Analysing data to proactively find issues.
Maintaining relationships so you can have the right trust, communication and buy-in.
And how you do that will change over time too, so you have to evolve and grow that muscle.
At the same time, the real forward-looking part is to identify new, emerging solutions to issues.
What got you here might not get you there.
So you have to keep your finger on the pulse and make sure you truly understand both the current problem and all the solutions in the tool box.
Meet the LXP that supercharges your people development
From bringing all your resources to the end of a single search to empowering subject matter experts to share wisdom with teammates, HowNow is designed to give your people the skills and knowledge they need to perform their role effectively, everywhere they already work!
Let us show you how 👇
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