In the current dynamic market, agility is key. In Part 2 of our Enterprise Learning and Development series, experts Michael Hendrix and Kristen Carreno explain how establishing an agile learning organization is pivotal to achieve excellence in both learner experience and content ecosystem.

In today’s workplace, learning and development (L&D) organizations must meet the demands of evolving regulatory and compliance requirements, widening employee skill gaps, and competing with employee learning experiences outside the office.

It’s more important than ever for organizations to make their learning solutions modern, agile, and learner centric. This has put a spotlight on L&D within organizations that recognize it as a competitive differentiator.

Executives and HR leaders understand the strategic significance of learning, however, in 2022, only 12% of organizations effectively delivered learning at the point-of-need. Where is the disconnect? The failure to develop this modern and responsive learning environment is often because L&D organizations aren’t structured to meet the needs of their evolving learning landscape.

Organizations need their L&D structure to be agile, so they can continuously upskill or reskill employees in the flow of work and on demand. This will enable continuous innovation and growth for the business.

Organizations need a seamless learning experience and robust content ecosystem, but how do they foster this agile L&D environment? Based on cross-industry research, we’ve identified several L&D elements companies should establish to enable an agile framework.

Market trends that lend themselves to an agile L&D organization

We’ve categorized these L&D agile elements by two of our four key dimensions, which we mentioned in Part 1. These are the learner experience and the content ecosystem.

Learner experience

There’s a strategic shift across industries to focus on enhancing the learner experience.

• Learning in the flow of work: Embedding learning opportunities in day-to-day tasks to increase productivity without interrupting daily workflow. 49% of employees prefer this approach as it’s personalized to their unique needs.

• In-app experiences: Includes bots, tooltips, beacons, interactive walkthroughs, and contextual workflows often facilitated via a digital adoption platform. It cuts down overall training and onboarding time and improves employee productivity.

• Micro-learning: Five-minute, or less, learnings, including in-app tool tips, walkthroughs, short videos, and daily task lists that employees can search for as they have an immediate need. It can improve retention by as much as 80%.

Content ecosystem

Learning content ecosystems enable continuous improvement with the help of data insights to ensure content is accessible, connected, and relevant.

• Data-driven decision making: Content rationalization exercises that are driven by data insights. Capture and capitalize on L&D data, including course completion rates, performance improvements, learner satisfaction, instructor ratings, learning competency and proficiency, etc.

• Knowledge sharing ecosystem: An intentional approach to knowledge management where content is appropriately tagged and easily accessible in a universal system for fast employee access. Often, this enables employees to contribute self-created content and is facilitated by technologies such as Microsoft Stream, Fuse Universal, 360 Learning, and Docebo.

• Content repurposing: Repurposing existing training content into multimodal learning content by reformatting across various media, including audio, video, reading, and visual content.

4 techniques that enable agility

Organizations can enact these L&D agile elements through four techniques, these are:

1. Instructor-led training
2. Virtual instructor-led training
3. e-Learning
4. Master class

These techniques facilitate learner-centric experiences and help organizations establish a diverse portfolio of high-quality training content within their learning ecosystems. They can help organizations address the growing globalization of their workforce, enable learning in the flow of work and support a micro-learning training approach. In addition, each technique has its own set of benefits highlighted in the image below:

Criticality of an agile learning organization

In a time when skills, regulations, and learner expectations are rapidly changing, L&D organizations must be agile. Successful business outcomes are now more than ever directly tied to responsive, relevancy, and modern learning content.

Agility also requires a base-level of in-depth knowledge from current experts and employees, so that it can be easily communicated to new joiners. In Part 3, we will discuss how you can capture your company’s deep smarts and overcome the challenge of losing significant knowledge and expertise.

To discover how our Direct Instruction Portfolio can unlock value for your organization, please watch the overview video below and reach out to our experts for more information.

READ MORE FROM OUR ENTERPRISE LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT SERIES: 

Part 1: The importance of maturity in a learning and development strategy framework

Part 3: Capturing your organization’s tacit knowledge