How Do You Provide Personalized Learning At Scale And Ongoing Growth Opportunities?
Aisling MacNamara is the Director of Learning, Enablement & Inclusion at LearnUpon. One of her professional passions is developing learner-centered programs that help achieve company objectives. Today, she shares her insights with us regarding learner engagement, putting L&D into context, and the findings from her team’s six-month skills development pilot project.
Based on your experience, how will onboarding and training in a post-remote working world impact design and engagement?
We are now in a more challenging time when it comes to designing engaging onboarding training. You are likely to have new hires based in various locations, with some at home and some in an office. For onboarding in particular, it would be more effective to align that new hires are all at home, or all in the office. This is, of course, hard if you are running a global program across time zones. I think organizations will start to move back to having a global online program that is standard for all new hires and then have more localized sessions in person. Despite the many changes over the last five years, new hires still want the same things from onboarding: manager support, a good buddy, a clear agenda for day 1 and week 1, and to have fun. Design with these key needs in mind, and you will be able to deliver an engaging and impactful program. I would like to see companies invest in better tech to support global multi-location onboarding. There is nothing worse than having some people in a room, some on Zoom, and then the facilitator—it feels quite disconnected.
Why is it so crucial for organizations to provide learning that’s context-specific in order to give employees continuous growth opportunities and fuel engagement?
It’s really interesting to observe that even though learners may choose the same skills to develop, they do not want generic training. For example, we will have learners across our security, finance, and customer experience teams all wanting to develop project management skills. However, the context in which they use them is completely different. We consistently get feedback that while courses were somewhat helpful, it wasn’t context-specific enough. Learners become instantly disengaged if they feel that it’s not directly applicable to their role. Therefore, it’s crucial for organizations to understand the needs of each department. There is a big focus in the learning industry now around cataloging skills, building matrices, and creating in-depth hierarchies. However, this will be low-impact unless we have learners actually completing relevant learning, both formally through courses and by learning on the job. This will help support organizations to upskill their workforce, close gaps, and be agile to market changes.
Can you tell us more about the insights you gathered from running a six-month skills development pilot? What are some of the most significant challenges that L&D leaders face?
The skills pilot has been a great opportunity to connect with leaders across our business and understand what is a priority for them. We have gathered some key insights which help highlight the challenges that L&D leaders are facing. First up, and no surprise to anyone, is time. This was the number one reason that learners did not complete their personalized learning plans. We built custom plans that outlined “on the job,” peer, and formal learning options to increase proficiency in a chosen “micro-skill.” So even though these were context-specific and engaging, learners were not able to prioritize development. We saw a number of reasons for this, and while some were genuinely experiencing high workloads, we also saw that manager support and permission for development are crucial.
Another learning we had was around right-sizing the learning and growth opportunities for each department. Some teams are more engaged with external learning, such as formal exams, certifications, and professional diplomas. Other departments find more value in team- or department-based training that can upskill the whole group; think sales, CX, and engineering. I think having an in-depth understanding of what each department needs can help inform a growth and development strategy that truly supports your people. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to skills development!
What is one of your biggest eLearning client success stories?
One of our biggest success stories comes from GTreasury. They are the leading innovator in integrated SaaS treasury and risk management solutions for digital treasurers.
Wanting to achieve its ambitious goals of developing its people, satisfying its 700+ customers, and growing the business, GTreasury leveraged LearnUpon to achieve all three. By introducing standardized learning, the business is transforming how it trains its people, leading to remarkably efficient employee onboarding and better-served customers. Some of their key achievements are saving 900K in onboarding costs, having a 90% reduction in onboarding support costs and a 50% reduction in average time to close a support ticket.
Is there a recent development project, product launch, or another initiative our readers should know about?
We are very lucky to be customer zero at LearnUpon and have access to our LMS platform. This involves testing new features, sharing feedback, and ultimately helping create a better product for our customers. We have had early access to our Learning Journeys capability, which has enabled us to build personalized learning journeys. We have several projects that we can use these learning journeys for, including new hire onboarding and our Managing @ LearnUpon program. Essentially, we can build journeys in our LMS, which will route learners based on location, role, previous course completions, etc. So we have one new hire journey that supports us to onboard and train new hires in all locations—they can complete all the general courses before being routed based on location for topics such as health and safety and benefits. We also have all new and promoted managers complete a program to help them lead the LearnUpon way—this includes a mix of experience and requires us to build out some role-specific courses and assignments. With journeys, we can now seamlessly route managers, directors, and executives to the appropriate learning and avoid anyone being disengaged.
How can organizations scale through their learning systems to offer their employees training that aligns with their roles and responsibilities?
Learning systems are the backbone of any small (and large!) L&D team who wants to have a big impact with limited resources. Understanding what skills are relevant to each role and pairing it with great learning content is an effective way to scale your efforts. Creating team- or role-specific learning journeys for key skills topics is another way that systems can help you scale. Empowering managers to view reports and assign content to their team is another important element—it can often all fall to the L&D team. You can also support learners by giving them autonomy over their learning and choosing from learning experiences on your learning system. This enables them to choose the right topic at the right time for them.
Wrapping Up
A big thanks to Aisling MacNamara for participating in our Q&A and shedding light on onboarding obstacles, context-specific learning, and providing training at scale. If you’d like to learn more about how to welcome your new hires and prep them for emerging challenges, check out Build An Employee Onboarding Program With An LMS.