As the world learned to live with COVID, organizations faced challenges across the board. Organizations were tasked with learning how to run a successful business virtually – from remote onboarding, training workforces on how to use new digital technologies, how to be productive at home, and everything in between. Everyone played their part in making these initiatives a success, but a significant portion of the burden fell to learning and development (L&D) teams.
The pandemic has emphasized the importance of investing in learning and development, along with the added pressure of creating an L&D strategy aimed at reskilling and upskilling entire workforces for whatever may lie ahead. Below are three learning and development challenges that present themselves, and how to approach them.
- Making Time for Training
With day-to-day priorities, training can often fall to the wayside. Companies can mitigate this challenge by scheduling dedicated learning time into employees’ schedules. Remind employees of the importance of learning to their personal development, career path, and to the success of the organization. Agree on a sensible proportion of the work week that can be devoted to learning (one hour, for example) and calendarize it.
Recent LinkedIn research found that 68% of employees prefer to learn at work; 58% prefer to learn at their own pace, and 49% prefer to learn at the point of need. With that in mind, online training stocked with curated courses makes smart sense. Employee training and development is a vital corporate strategy, and with careful planning, consistent execution, and purpose-built technology tools, the inevitable challenges can be overcome.
- Changing the Way We Think About Training
Typical employee training uses a top-down approach, where managers decide what their employees will learn, as well as where and how training will be delivered. With the influx of millennials and Gen Zers moving into leadership positions and technology advancements in the workplace, the old approach to training has diminishing returns.
Consider adopting a “design thinking” model for learning and development. This way, employees, not managers or the company, become the driving force behind training. This approach maximizes learning, increases engagement, and lessens attrition.
- Creating On-Demand Learning Content
Millennials and Gen Zers make up the majority of today’s workforce, and wherever they go, their smartphones go. The most practical solution for continuous training is to make it on-demand and available for mobile devices. While it can become expensive to develop these courses in-house, companies can turn to learning and development providers for LMS platform production and learning content design.
One way to do this is to transform your company’s existing content into learning assets that educate your employees. By harnessing your resources, videos, and documents, you can create an engaging mobile learning experience for your employees to access on-demand.
Overcoming training challenges
We’ve highlighted the main training challenges in organizations, but they’re all easily surmountable. The keys are consistency, logic, and flexibility, as well as an ability to consider the Learning and Development process holistically – and to include your employees in the process.
At Asymulate, we understand the importance of continuous, on-demand, employee-centric training. It’s because of this we have worked tirelessly to craft an on-demand educational experience that caters to accessibility and convenience without neglecting instructional best-practices.
Contact us today to learn more about how asynchronous, on-demand instruction can help eliminate barriers to learning so your team can focus on growth.
