This guide teaches you to put together an action plan to promote your learning culture and make educational content more accessible.
Skills Checklist:
The demand for up-skilling and re-skilling employees to support current and future business needs is growing. The challenge many organizations face is keeping up with developing the skills sets and being ready to deploy new skills. At the same time, your learning culture enables your employees’ desire to learn new skills and grow great careers, with the added benefit of helping further your employees’ engagement and retention. According to Gartner research, a “learning culture also has a significant positive impact on other key employee outcomes such as application, satisfaction and Net Promoter Score, discretionary effort and intent to stay.”
The result is a challenge for your organization to evaluate the right strategies for skills development that promotes curiosity and a culture of learning. According to the Association for Talent Development (ATD), a learning culture is one where employees continuously seek, share, and apply new knowledge and skills to improve individual and organizational performance. To start to build your learning culture, focus on a few important areas: learner experience, learning relevance, and supportive learning environment.
To drive participation in learning objectives and opportunities, the content provided must be easy to access and ideally hosted on one system (education environment). Through that single access point, you’ll be able to optimize accessibility and curate your learning content as best fits your organizational needs. To ensure learners are quickly finding what they need, consider creating content for specific roles, establishing learning paths, and tagging your content so as to optimize keyword search capabilities. Providing this ease of access, along with an intuitive content navigation experience, is a key first step in building a learning culture.
After establishing an accessible learning environment, you’ll want to consider your content strategy. That is, ensuring there’s relevant content for learners across your organization, while also aligning learning objectives to meet the needs of the business and learner alike. This typically includes organization-specific material, as well as a wide variety of content that covers related technical skills, leadership, and personal development.
For example, let’s say you’re developing content geared towards your IT department. It’s a good idea to provide in-house training material to cover company-specific IT processes, while also supplementing that training with access to vendor-created courses on specific systems or industry-technology skills.
In every organization some employees readily make time to seek out new learning opportunities. These employees, often called learning champions, might then find ways to apply what they’ve learned to a current business problem, or share their newly acquired knowledge within their circle of influence. It’s a good idea to leverage learning champions when establishing a learning culture.
However, for many people, taking the time to leverage learning opportunities can be a challenge due to the demands of their day-to-day role. To foster an environment that encourages and sustains a culture of learning you’ll need to engage leaders at all levels of an organization. Support from local leaders and managers goes a long way in getting employees at every level to carve out extra time in their day (or week) for learning. Following are some suggestions on how to actively promote your learning environment:
Building a learning culture is a journey for any organization and should be thought of as a long term goal. However, with a guided focus on making learning experiences accessible and relevant, you can start to build such a culture. The result for your organization will be skilled employees ready to tackle current business challenges while at the same time keeping an eye towards the future.