Darren Winterford - Founder & CEO EdApp
Overnight, organisations have been forced to completely change how they develop and deliver their training and learning experiences.
Prior to March 2020, the L&D industry was not known to be agile, fast-moving, or highly reactive. Courses often took weeks or months to develop the training content, put it into your PowerPoint or LMS of choice, get sign-off from senior management, and organise a suitable time for your employees to get together for an hour in a white-walled conference room.
Obvious shifts in the landscape mean the industry has been forced into the future led by three main changes:
Limited opportunities to meet face-to-face.
Tighter budgets due to shifting priorities
Rapid change dictates the workplace
Time was not on anyone’s side when workplaces had to evolve overnight. This meant that teams had to completely reinvent systems, workflows, and team structures without being able to plan ahead. As a result, L&D teams needed an agile approach to rapidly upskilling and reskilling teams.
Along with these challenges comes the opportunity to rewrite the playbook. We have had an incredible period of experimentation, and we can’t go back to outdated training and development.
The new future of learning is about creating flexible modes of learning that adapt to the constantly changing landscape of 2021. It’s about listening to what learners want and delivering it to them in response to their needs, rather than the needs of the business.
Here are the three principles learners are asking organisations to follow:
Provide Control: Our learners want to be measured by outcomes, rather than output. With more freedom in how they complete their work, employees also learned in what areas they wanted to further develop their skill sets. This led to a shift from top-down management and development to employees taking the initiative to share what they want to learn to further their careers.
Digestible Content: Prior to the pandemic, face-to-face learning experiences were often the norm. However, now that teams have realised that they can learn in non-traditional settings, employees now want to digest content in a significantly different format – they want it to be bite-sized. This enables learners to quickly learn new concepts and skills in as little as 5 to 10 minutes that will enable them to better perform in their roles.
Provide consumer-grade experiences: Learning experiences in the workplace just don’t stack up to the experiences we have in the real world. Employees have access to consumer-grade technology at their fingertips through their smartphone and laptops, but the learning interventions they receive from their business are often clunky, long and not user-friendly. Our learning experiences need to compete with attention from employees alongside their favourite apps, so the experience needs to be just as good.
EdApp is hosting at Rewrite the Playbook on Thursday 29th April. The free virtual summit will address how L&D has evolved since the pandemic and the future of training.
Register today to confirm your place and get more tips from keynote speakers, including Netflix’s former Chief of Talent Patty McCord, former Arsenal FC manager Arsene Wenger, and NBA all-star Magic Johnson.