Establish a Learning Culture

Appian Max Team — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 13:10:51 GMT

Current Revision posted to Guide by Appian Max Team on 4/23/2024 1:10:51 PM

Skills Covered

This guide teaches you to put together an action plan to promote your learning culture and make educational content more accessible.

Skills Checklist:

Identify how a learning culture impacts an organization.
Learn how to make your educational content more accessible.
Build a solid content strategy for your resources.
Put together an action plan to promote your learning culture.

Why a Learning Culture Matters

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.

Learning Experience

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.

Provide Targeted Content

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.

Promote Your Learning Culture

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:

Involve leadership. Solicit top down support by making the business case for learning programs. This can include things such as business metrics, compliance, employee retention and satisfaction, etc. Once there is buy-in from leadership, get senior leaders actively involved in the learning culture, whether as speakers for live training sessions or through active championing at company meetings.
Support personal development. Provide managers with the tools they need to to guide development discussions with individuals on their teams. Managers should set the expectation that each employee owns their own personal career development, but will be provided with the necessary tools and resources to help them achieve their goals. Regular sync-ups should be scheduled between managers and employees to discuss their development, ideas on how to apply their new skills, and to set new learning objectives.
Reward and recognize. Build a mechanism to recognize learning at your organization. One example would be to award online badges to recognize course completions or achievements. Promoting certifications is another way to recognize learning achievements, and also double notable credentials for many jobs. Encourage learning champions to share their experiences with others, whether through webinars, training sessions, or mentoring.
Promote and advertise. As you grow your content library, use the resources available in your organization to regularly promote and advertise your learning content. This can be done via regular internal announcements, a department newsletter, or call outs during larger company meetings. Be sure to also get feedback on your content, so that you can share testimonials from those finding value in the resources.

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.

Tags: Training, People

Establish a Learning Culture

joel.larin — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 02:05:08 GMT

Revision 4 posted to Guide by joel.larin on 2/9/2024 2:05:08 AM

Skills Covered

This guide teaches you to put together an action plan to promote your learning culture and make educational content more accessible.

Skills Checklist:

Identify how a learning culture impacts an organization.
Learn how to make your educational content more accessible.
Build a solid content strategy for your resources.
Put together an action plan to promote your learning culture.

Why a Learning Culture Matters

Learning Experience

Provide Targeted Content

Promote Your Learning Culture

Involve leadership. Solicit top down support by making the business case for learning programs. This can include things such as business metrics, compliance, employee retention and satisfaction, etc. Once there is buy-in from leadership, get senior leaders actively involved in the learning culture, whether as speakers for live training sessions or through active championing at company meetings.
Support personal development. Provide managers with the tools they need to to guide development discussions with individuals on their teams. Managers should set the expectation that each employee owns their own personal career development, but will be provided with the necessary tools and resources to help them achieve their goals. Regular sync-ups should be scheduled between managers and employees to discuss their development, ideas on how to apply their new skills, and to set new learning objectives.
Reward and recognize. Build a mechanism to recognize learning at your organization. One example would be to award online badges to recognize course completions or achievements. Promoting certifications is another way to recognize learning achievements, and also double notable credentials for many jobs. Encourage learning champions to share their experiences with others, whether through webinars, training sessions, or mentoring.
Promote and advertise. As you grow your content library, use the resources available in your organization to regularly promote and advertise your learning content. This can be done via regular internal announcements, a department newsletter, or call outs during larger company meetings. Be sure to also get feedback on your content, so that you can share testimonials from those finding value in the resources.

Tags: Training, People

Establish a Learning Culture

Devon Lee — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 16:06:08 GMT

Revision 3 posted to Guide by Devon Lee on 3/22/2023 4:06:08 PM

Skills Covered

This guide teaches you how to monitor application health and leverage platform-level metrics to monitor application performance.

Skills Checklist:

Identify how a learning culture impacts an organization.
Learn how to make your educational content more accessible.
Build a solid content strategy for your resources.
Put together an action plan to promote your learning culture.

Why a Learning Culture Matters

Learning Experience

Provide Targeted Content

Promote Your Learning Culture

Involve leadership. Solicit top down support by making the business case for learning programs. This can include things such as business metrics, compliance, employee retention and satisfaction, etc. Once there is buy-in from leadership, get senior leaders actively involved in the learning culture, whether as speakers for live training sessions or through active championing at company meetings.
Support personal development. Provide managers with the tools they need to to guide development discussions with individuals on their teams. Managers should set the expectation that each employee owns their own personal career development, but will be provided with the necessary tools and resources to help them achieve their goals. Regular sync-ups should be scheduled between managers and employees to discuss their development, ideas on how to apply their new skills, and to set new learning objectives.
Reward and recognize. Build a mechanism to recognize learning at your organization. One example would be to award online badges to recognize course completions or achievements. Promoting certifications is another way to recognize learning achievements, and also double notable credentials for many jobs. Encourage learning champions to share their experiences with others, whether through webinars, training sessions, or mentoring.
Promote and advertise. As you grow your content library, use the resources available in your organization to regularly promote and advertise your learning content. This can be done via regular internal announcements, a department newsletter, or call outs during larger company meetings. Be sure to also get feedback on your content, so that you can share testimonials from those finding value in the resources.

Tags: Training, People

Establish a Learning Culture

joel.larin — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 16:34:02 GMT

Revision 2 posted to Guide by joel.larin on 12/9/2022 4:34:02 PM

Skills Covered

This guide teaches you how to monitor application health and leverage platform-level metrics to monitor application performance.

Skills Checklist:

Identify how a learning culture impacts an organization.
Learn how to make your educational content more accessible.
Build a solid content strategy for your resources.
Put together an action plan to promote your learning culture.

Why a Learning Culture Matters

Learning Experience

Provide Targeted Content

Promote Your Learning Culture

Involve leadership. Solicit top down support by making the business case for learning programs. This can include things such as business metrics, compliance, employee retention and satisfaction, etc. Once there is buy-in from leadership, get senior leaders actively involved in the learning culture, whether as speakers for live training sessions or through active championing at company meetings.
Support personal development. Provide managers with the tools they need to to guide development discussions with individuals on their teams. Managers should set the expectation that each employee owns their own personal career development, but will be provided with the necessary tools and resources to help them achieve their goals. Regular sync-ups should be scheduled between managers and employees to discuss their development, ideas on how to apply their new skills, and to set new learning objectives.
Reward and recognize. Build a mechanism to recognize learning at your organization. One example would be to award online badges to recognize course completions or achievements. Promoting certifications is another way to recognize learning achievements, and also double notable credentials for many jobs. Encourage learning champions to share their experiences with others, whether through webinars, training sessions, or mentoring.
Promote and advertise. As you grow your content library, use the resources available in your organization to regularly promote and advertise your learning content. This can be done via regular internal announcements, a department newsletter, or call outs during larger company meetings. Be sure to also get feedback on your content, so that you can share testimonials from those finding value in the resources.

Tags: Training, People

Establish a Learning Culture

joel.larin — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 16:31:35 GMT

Revision 1 posted to Guide by joel.larin on 12/9/2022 4:31:35 PM

Skills Covered

This guide teaches you how to monitor application health and leverage platform-level metrics to monitor application performance.

Skills Checklist:

Identify how a learning culture impacts an organization.
Learn how to make your educational content more accessible.
Build a solid content strategy for your resources.
Put together an action plan to promote your learning culture.

Why a Learning Culture Matters

Learning Experience

Provide Targeted Content

Promote Your Learning Culture

Involve leadership. Solicit top down support by making the business case for learning programs. This can include things such as business metrics, compliance, employee retention and satisfaction, etc. Once there is buy-in from leadership, get senior leaders actively involved in the learning culture, whether as speakers for live training sessions or through active championing at company meetings.
Support personal development. Provide managers with the tools they need to to guide development discussions with individuals on their teams. Managers should set the expectation that each employee owns their own personal career development, but will be provided with the necessary tools and resources to help them achieve their goals. Regular sync-ups should be scheduled between managers and employees to discuss their development, ideas on how to apply their new skills, and to set new learning objectives.
Reward and recognize. Build a mechanism to recognize learning at your organization. One example would be to award online badges to recognize course completions or achievements. Promoting certifications is another way to recognize learning achievements, and also double notable credentials for many jobs. Encourage learning champions to share their experiences with others, whether through webinars, training sessions, or mentoring.
Promote and advertise. As you grow your content library, use the resources available in your organization to regularly promote and advertise your learning content. This can be done via regular internal announcements, a department newsletter, or call outs during larger company meetings. Be sure to also get feedback on your content, so that you can share testimonials from those finding value in the resources.

Tags: Training, People