4 ways to make corporate e-learning painless

Corporate e-learning is an ongoing process, helping to deliver upskilling in the form of refresher courses, hard and soft skills courses. 

For audit purposes, most organizations also need to deliver mandatory training on subjects such as ethics, safety, diversity policies and more, and confirm that all employees have passed the course.

Unfortunately, many corporate employees see these mandatory courses as boring and a waste of time! This is especially unfortunate as the learning being shared is primarily for their benefit.

Adult learners need to be convinced that the course is worth their time and need to feel that it is directly relevant to their careers and lives. You can get great learning results with the right instructional design.

1. Improve design

As they say, ‘content is king’. That doesn’t mean, however, that it should be presented in large blocks of informative text! Break it up into readable chunks and paragraphs or bullet lists, and support with graphics, illustrations, icons and photographs wherever possible.

Corporate learners are engaging with your course as part of their job, but outside of their usual work responsibilities. That means that you need to use every arrow in your quiver to convince them to invest the time and engage with your course. Aesthetics is an important part of this.

2. Reduce length

For similar reasons, length is your enemy! Keep the content concise and crisp. Don’t worry about repetition and reinforcement in the initial content delivery – this can be done through microlearning delivered across a period of time.

The bottomline: If you can deliver content in 10 slides, do not use 15!

3. Try gamification

Game-based learning is often thought of as being an appropriate delivery mechanism only for children and young learners. However, let’s not forget two things: (1) In 2021, millennials became the largest working population in the United States, and (2) Games are fun!

Only 29% of millennials feel engaged at work. For these young corporate employees, game-based learning can significantly improve engagement and interest at work. 

Another way to improve engagement is through gamification processes. Some examples of this  would be putting up a leaderboard of highest scorers, or even just incorporating a progress bar. This, also, improves engagement and thus delivers better learning results.

4. Incorporate feedback

Even after your e-learning module is rolled out, you need to keep improving it on an ongoing basis. Keep taking feedback from your users, their managers and trainers, to incorporate their inputs and modify the course as needed.

Set KPIs to define success. Track results against these, and keep changing content and delivery mediums based on this data to optimize the course delivery. With this constant feedback and improvement loop, you can steadily improve your course and the learning results that your course delivers.

In the USA, according to a 2020 report, the average worker stays at a role for only 4.1 years. It’s also been found that employee upskilling and training help to increase their time in the same role. So take corporate e-learning seriously. 

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