Creating E-Learning Programs to Leverage Career Development

Are employees reaching their full potential and constantly developing their skills at your organization?

E-learning is a powerful tool for an organization’s training and development program. It not only helps develop an employee’s future at the organization but shows the organization cares about their career development. In a previous post, we discussed the importance of e-learning for employee retention. Employees want to feel satisfied in their growth and confident that they are working toward the next step in their career. 

Why an e-learning program for career development?

In the last 5 years, there have been dramatic shifts in the way e-learning strategies are transforming learning and impacting employee performance. Although instructor-led training is still an extremely popular method to deliver employee training, e-learning continues to rise at organizations because of the ability to individualize the experience and let the employees learn at their own pace. E-learning programs have found their way into organizations as a way to engage employees and add structure to their learning and development. If employees want to grow in their role, whether that be through a promotion or gaining more experience and skills in their current role, e-learning can help support that endeavor. If an organization can provide e-learning, employees will feel that desire for growth is being satisfied and will stay with an organization longer. The cost of losing a good employee is great, but it also affects the organization’s morale and culture. Keeping employees and keeping them happy is a great way to promote a positive culture in the organization.

E-learning allows your organization to have a cutting edge by:

• Aligning with the ways your employees want to learn
• Encouraging a learning culture where employees are able to see a path forward
• Allowing learning to be scalable and tracked (to ensure employees complete necessary training programs related to their role)
• Using a platform that can be easily changed as your industry changes
• Allowing the employee to choose which device they want to learn on (desktop vs mobile)
• Keeping employees motivated to complete training

Now that we’ve touched on why e-learning for your organization is important and allows you to have an advantage over competitors, let’s talk about ways you can incorporate it into your L&D programs.

Because not all learners are the same, providing them a variety of ways to access learning material can improve their engagement.

There are multifaceted ways to deliver training and development to your employees. The following are just some best practices for delivery:

1. Microlearning
   Microlearning (or bite-sized learning) has become an overused buzzword in learning and development, but it’s simply a way to take longer training sessions and break them down into smaller digestible pieces. Employees are busier than ever before, they’re using their devices, and they are attempting to multitask. Microlearning meets employees at this level by creating short, relevant, and brief pieces of training modules that can be done anywhere in a few minutes, which makes corporate training more of a success for both the employee and the employers.
   

2. Video-based learning
   The primary reason information is adopted well via video is because the human brain processes videos 60,000 times faster than it does text, according to a Psychology Today article “Video vs. Text: The Brain Perspective.” Incorporating video into your training programs enables highly interactive learning sessions and assessments. It is great for training subjects like leadership development and technical skills.
   
   
3. Scenario-based learning
   One of the most impactful ways to develop and train your future leaders of the organization is through scenario-based learning. This is an impactful instructional approach and you can use across corporate training while driving the right behavior. By using scenario-based learning, you can create learning experiences using storytelling, which helps learners retain information better than stating facts to them. It is a great approach for training future leaders of your organization by building complex, decision-making scenarios to help build decision-making and problem-solving skills. The different scenarios of their decisions help them understand the impact/consequences of their decisions in a low-stakes environment. 
   
   
4. Gamification
   Gamification for learning uses key elements of gaming to help learners meet the required learning objectives. 80% of learners claimed learning would be more productive if it were more game-oriented, according to a study. Gamification is a very engaging learning strategy for any organization, and a gamified approach that focuses on the learning outcomes will support L&D to meet development goals for employees.

These training techniques offer a highly immersive learning experience for training your employees, whether you’re using them for compliance training or growing employees within the company. Providing a personalized experience for your employees shows that you care about their growth enough to provide continuous opportunities.