Accelerate your learning performance
At Guroo Producer, we are committed to helping organisations reinvent the way their people learn. In today's ever-changing landscape, learning is fundamental to empowering people and businesses to grow, adapt and compete.
However, for too long workplace learning has been broken - unable to meet the challenges of today because it's still stuck in the paradigms of yesterday. Focused on content, not experiences. Blind to data and insight. Driven by compliance, not outcomes.
If people and businesses need to continuously reinvent themselves, we need to start by reinventing how we approach learning at work. Like learning, reinvention is a journey. It can be taken one step at a time. You don't need to reinvent everything at once, but you do need to start somewhere. Read below to learn how you can start reinventing your learning today.
Before you can design effective learning, it's important to know what you need that learning to accomplish. Remember that the end goal of learning isn't simply to create content for the learner to absorb, but to develop learning journey that meets the needs of your learners and helps them to build the skills to meet your goals.
Begin by identifying the goals you have for the learning, building an accurate picture of the people that the learning is designed for, and planning how the learning delivered will deliver the results that you need. What is the challenge that is facing your organisation, and how will learning help you overcome it? What skills will your learners need to develop? How will your learners engage with their learning, and are there any barriers to their engagement? Starting from a clear understanding will make it easier to create learning that solves the right problems, in the right way, for the right people.
Too many learning programs fall into the trap of being created as a box-ticking measure, assuming that equipping learners with a set of knowledge is all that is required for success. In reality, good learning is about more than just equipping learners with the same sets of information. Successful learning provides learners not just with knowledge, but with the skills and capability they can transfer into real-world behaviours and practice.
When designing learning, don’t just consider what the learner needs to know but what they need to do to carry out their role successfully; think of ways to establish and reinforce the behaviours and actions that will be required for that success. Most of all, consider what the real drivers of performance will be, and build learning that contributes to those key performance indicators. By putting performance, not rote learning or compliance, at the heart of your learning journey, you can better ensure that your learners will not simply be equipped with knowledge, but also the behaviours and practices that will contribute to your organisation’s goals.
Every learner is different, and no two people learn at the same pace or need the same support. To get the best results from your learning, it needs to both be able to meet the needs of each individual learner, and to be delivered at scale across your organisation – two goals that can often seem difficult or impossible to reconcile. Thankfully, modern learning systems make it possible to achieve both of these goals, by allowing you to create learning that can adapt to the needs of the learner, creating a more personalised learning journey.
With adaptive learning, you’re empowered to create learning that is more meaningful and relevant to the learner. Adaptive learning can allow a learner to bypass material that would be irrelevant or which they can demonstrate they are already familiar with – and, correspondingly, can provide additional support and assistance when required. It can create a bespoke experience based on a learner’s role, capability, aptitudes or context, all in a format that can be employed at scale. With adaptive learning, you can respond to each learner as an individual, wherever they are within your organisation.
It’s difficult to create great learning in a vacuum. However well we prepare, however much work we put into scoping and planning our learning, there will always be room to make improvements based on how well the learning performs in the real world. To make the right decisions on your learning, you need relevant, accurate and timely information.
Learning analytics and data-driven learning give you the feedback that you need to optimise your learning. With learning analytics, you can get deeper insights into learner behaviour, track key performance indicators and measure the effectiveness of your learning, both in the classroom and in the real world. Data-driven learning also opens up new possibilities for refining and customising your learning, working alongside adaptive pathways to allow for deeply personalised content. With the right information on your learning, you can ensure that the learning you create is meeting the goals you have set.
We often talk about ‘the learning journey’ when we discuss creating effective learning, but what does that mean in practice? A learning journey makes the learning that you create something more than just the sum of its parts, changing the learning you create from being a series of separate elements and making it, instead, a series of connected moments that support and reinforce the core learning experience as the learner experiences them.
When you consider your learning as a complete learning journey, it allows you to create experiences that add context, personalisation and relevance to the learning experience. As the learner progresses through their learning journey, they have the opportunity to put what they have learned into practice, blending theory and practice and making it easier to transfer the skills that they have gained beyond the classroom environment.
Though compliance has long been one of the major drivers of learning and development for organisations, it should not be the be-all and end-all of learning programs. To remain competitive in a changing world, organisations need to be able to identify and close the skills gaps that stand between them and the completion of their goals.
Upskilling programs provide a number of benefits for organisations, helping to maintain a workforce that is flexible, adaptable and capable. Upskilling programs are also useful in both attracting and retaining staff, enabling companies to equip their workers with the right skillset success. Even in circumstances where compliance is a main goal, upskilling can help by providing staff not only with the knowledge they need for compliance, but the skills and context to understand the reasons behind compliance and the regulatory environment, leading to greater appreciation for correct behaviours. Making upskilling, not compliance, the backbone of learning and development takes your organisation’s learning from being a cost to a driver of organisational success.
The end goal of any workplace learning program is real-world change. Getting the right results means not just imparting information, but developing behaviours and building an understanding of how what has been learned relates to the workplace. Action learning, combined with coaching and mentoring, can help to contextualise learning and promote skills transfer.
Action learning promotes skills transfer by presenting the learner with real-world problems and scenarios and encouraging them to find workable solutions, building a link between the theoretical skills they have developed in their learning and practical applications. Through coaching and mentoring, the student is supported to integrate learned knowledge into their skillset, and given guidance as they apply their learning in the workplace. Supporting learners in this way ensures that learning contributes meaningfully to workplace improvement and promotes lasting change.
The world of business is constantly changing, and your learning has to be able to keep up. The right learning strategy is vital to your organisation, ensuring a skilled workforce and helping to meet your goals, but that strategy must also be flexible and agile enough to react to change as it occurs.
The ability to not just plan, but also create and deliver learning rapidly and at scale is essential. Though you may not know what tomorrow will bring, you can prepare for change by ensuring you have the tools and systems in place to streamline and scale learning development. The right development tools will enable you to quickly build, test and deploy your learning across your organisation, allowing you to respond to provide the right solution to the right problem at the right time - every time.
