Custom eLearning has become a priority for organizations today. As a result, L&D must take certain steps to develop within a company. In fact, 75% of leaders within the industry say that L&D has become more influential than ever over the past year. Custom eLearning serves as a bridge between business growth and employee development.
Business leaders can no longer downplay the role that L&D plays in an organization’s growth. Employees are the building blocks that hold an organization afloat so by enhancing their skills, you’re strengthening the entire company. Here’s some vital information you need to understand when developing workplace training.
What’s In It for Stakeholders?
Stakeholders want to ensure they are making worthwhile investments. In the past, companies would clear out schedules for training, causing the everyday flow of work to suffer. Naturally, this led to a loss of efficiency that was written off as necessary.
Today’s technology provides the unique opportunity to overcome those past limitations, creating less risk for stakeholders. Custom eLearning works around employee schedules, so it doesn’t disrupt their everyday flow of work. If that’s not enough to convince stakeholders, they discover the initial costs are lower, it’s easier to scale, and employee development becomes measurable.
Employee Development is Scaled to their Personal Needs
L&D creates a personalized approach to training throughout the organization. We create systems that allow employers to gauge the performance of their workforce. This comes at a much lower price tag than instructor-led classes.
As a result, we see eLearning becoming an increasing priority for businesses. But is it being given sufficient priority? There’s still room for improvement from leadership to encourage the implementation of custom eLearning programs.
The truth is that managers who think they can simply put a PowerPoint presentation together as a form of training need to reevaluate their approach to meet the modern training methods.
Meet Leaders at Their Level
One of the rules of marketing is meeting the customers on their level. L&D follows that same approach. Organizational leaders don’t really care about the structure or technology behind a training program. They want to know about the results, most notably, how the program will allow for the growth of the company.
L&D must meet them at their level to show how a custom eLearning program will improve the growth of the company. It is then much easier to get them to the discussion table.
The gap between hard goals and soft skills must be bridged. Hard goals are what stakeholders care about and include things like sales and production costs. They are easy to measure. So, our job is to find a way to quantify soft skills, which is a much more complex task.
Better communication, inspired workers, and improved decision-making are all seen as positive benefits to the workplace. There’s no argument here. But how do we put a number on it?
That’s a big obstacle that causes CEOs to pause when it comes to implementing eLearning programs. It takes time for a return on investment to become measurable with soft skills.
Boosting employee performance is one of the primary goals of L&D but the problem is that there’s no industry standard for measuring performance. Therefore, we must measure performance within the custom eLearning program.
Identifying the Right Metrics with eLearning
Show organizational leaders metrics that they can support. Start by identifying current pain points that are causing employees to struggle. Highlight those pain points and then describe how eLearning will eliminate them. Help leaders see how removing these pain points will improve performance.
This form of job performance assessment motivates individuals and drives the business forward. It’s up to you to connect the dots for leaders so they can clearly see the benefits.
Once you’ve set up the initial strategy, ask leaders and stakeholders what they consider to be the most important metrics. What do they want to prioritize?
Custom eLearning Must Resonate with Employees
Once key decision-makers are all on-board with creating a new custom eLearning program, it’s time to build it. Focus on the learning experience. After all, if employees are not engaged, then the program will fail.
Companies create online courses, slap some cool progress tracking technology on it, and call that eLearning but these attempts tend to sit unused on the company’s LMS. They don’t resonate with employees. Without taking the learner experience into account, companies end up creating a learning program that is irrelevant, outdated, or boring.
Consider some of the poorly designed training courses you’ve been forced to endure in the past. Why didn’t they engage you?
- Was there no connection to your current skill level?
- Did it lack clear steps to show you proper application of what you were learning?
- Did it lack inspiration and/or support?
Successful custom eLearning programs all share one important trait. They emphasize learner engagement. Sure, there are other factors that influence a program’s success but engaging the learner is the most important. It’s also a factor that we can fully control.
How do we ensure that a custom eLearning program engages the learner?
- Get leaders within the organization to champion it, thus strengthening the learning culture.
- Collect and evaluate data provided by employees to identify their needs.
When leaders are engaged in the program, they will help connect it to business goals and make it more relevant to employees. That it is why it is essential to gain support from top executives within an organization.
Final Thoughts
One thing that’s for sure is that a great custom eLearning program isn’t built overnight. It’s not something you can just throw together in a single day. It must be carefully planned so that it matches the unique challenges faced by employees within the organization.
Engagement isn’t always limited to eLearning content. There are scenarios where instructor-led assistance might be required so the traditional approach still has a role to play. Custom eLearning merges the two when necessary to meet the challenges within an organization.
The bottom line is that an eLearning program must work off the business goals while providing employees with the right motivation to follow through.
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