How to create people-centered learning experiences
Making people central to their success
“To me, the model of success is not linear. Success is completing the full circle of yourself.”
There’s going to be something of a circular, cyclical theme to this reflection on learning, improvement and the importance of people being at the centre of things. As the quote above suggests, circles and success are no strangers to each other and we’ve been thinking within this area lately, in particular regarding people-centric product design and a cycle for the creation, delivery and review of effective learning experiences. It all stems from a belief that it’s really important to ‘put people into products’ – to ensure that the initiatives and developments we undertake are really focused on and effective for, those intended to benefit from them.
Turning tick-box training into dynamic personal development
Now traditionally, businesses have followed a largely compliance-based approach to training: you must do this, you need to do that, it’s mandatory and so on. But this rather stiff route, focusing on tick-box activities, lacks the dynamism that’s needed for today’s workforces. The result can be a failure to promote cultures of learning, employee disengagement, hits on productivity, a higher churn of staff, and compliance vulnerabilities. Furthermore, tick-box activities in themselves don’t ensure that people have absorbed their training. They may well have just done it and moved on, unaffected, meaning no real improvements to a workforce’s behaviours or safety.
Of course, training all relates to regulatory needs concerning health and safety, data protection and so on, but you and your team also need good soft skills and to be able to retain and nurture people who want to learn and grow. With this in mind, Access recently undertook a raft of research to develop a really people-centred approach to learning and we came to appreciate more than ever that doing so goes much deeper than, say, fancy videos or a set of features. It’s about both the needs of an organisation – e.g. operational efficiency, results, value – and the needs of its individuals – e.g. productivity, a sense of fulfilment, recognition – and that the effective combination of these two sets of requirements is key to delivering the ultimate learning experience for people. It means approaching people-centricity from the user’s perspective, giving them the content that they need and will engage with, and saving them time in the process. Alongside this, from an organisational viewpoint, it’s about being able to aggregate the data so that a business, your business, can learn invaluable information about its population and where any skills gaps might exist.
“One of my greatest fears is not being able to change, to be caught in a never-ending cycle of sameness. Growth is so important.”
Who knew that Hollywood held such wisdom? As it happens, we’ve been devising a very different kind of cycle that will hopefully play its part in genuine growth: a positive, people-centric cycle for creating, delivering and reviewing effective learning experiences. It’s fully focused on keeping people at the heart of the matter, throughout any training and development process, and its stages are described in the sequence below.
1. Know your Learner
This means avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach. We need to consider the Learner and think about: their role, where they work, what they want to do next in their career, what their level of seniority is, their previous learning history and learning preferences etc. All of these considerations profile the Learner and help to identify any skills gaps they may have, how those might be closed and what the most effective and efficient delivery method is to satisfy the person’s needs, personality and career aspirations. This also relates to time-to-value and engagement, or to put it another way: ‘give me learning in a format I enjoy, that gets results fast’. Because if people do things they enjoy, they’re more likely to do it again and in a timely manner.
2. Personalise for and empower your Learner
Typically speaking, we’ll be bringing in data from an HR system and looking to fill in any gaps – such as job roles, learning needs, interests – with additional input, which can be done, for example, via a questionnaire during onboarding. Once this base level data is in place, it can be backed up by actions that the person undertakes in the system, which helps to balance up who people think they are from the information they’ve provided, with who they’re proving to be in the workplace. For instance, if someone often ducks out of videos halfway through them, it’s clear video comms aren’t working well for them, whereas if they complete eLearning consistently and pass any associated tests well, they’re apparently engaged by that form of learning. This all provides data that helps to personalise learning for each user and aggregates information for the bigger picture, to create key metrics for the organisation in question.
From a people perspective, we can use the data to narrow down and tailor content for quicker time-to-value, matching the content to the Learner. We also consider the activity types we use when serving the people undertaking training. So whether it’s videos, modules, interviews, webinars, animations, audio stories and podcasts, or games, it’s about putting the Learner in the centre of the experience so that we understand the different modes of information transfer that are going to be most effective for different people. This personalises the experience and gets the most out of it for each individual, and by extension, the business.
3. Capture and utilise Learner feedback
This part closes the loop on people-centricity, so that we fully understand the Learner, having personalised the experience for them, and we’re in a position to capture their feedback. By doing so we can tailor and modify the solution to ensure we’re constantly, iteratively improving the learning experience being delivered. At the content level, this could entail asking for reviews and ratings, and by looking for such responses we also regularise the notion of feedback, lend a greater sense of process to the training and development, and foster a broader learning culture.
From research to reality
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
Benjamin Franklin
We couldn’t have put it better ourselves. Involving people – putting them at the centre of the cycle described – can make all the difference to your training outcomes. That’s our theory, anyway, but now we’re endeavouring to put it into practice. Access LMS 10.0 is going to be a critical part of this, as we strive to help your learning processes become properly people-centred and create exceptional development experiences for individuals and organisations as a whole. We look forward to putting our thinking to the test!
