According to LinkedIn Learning’s 2018 Workplace Learning Report, “Getting employees to make time for learning is the number 1 challenge facing talent development. … The number 2 challenge facing talent development [is] getting managers to take an active role in employee learning.” The report goes on to say that “94 percent of employees say that they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career development.”
If you’ve been in L&D for any length of time, you’ve probably experienced these pain points. We’re constantly challenged to find new ways to create engaging, useful content that somehow doesn’t take time away from our learners’ work. How can we reach our learners if they don’t have time to learn? How can we get their managers engaged when they don’t have time either?
What Isn’t Working
We saw this time allocation problem at our company. The L&D team created a training course for a department’s teams: knowledge assessments and follow-up courses for the learners, plus teaching guides for the managers to train their own teams. But we couldn’t get buy-in from the learners or the managers. The answer was always the same: The learner doesn’t have time to take this course, and the manager doesn’t have time to review the content or teach their teams. Everyone is too busy.One solution we’re testing is allowing learners to test out of training by demonstrating their understanding of the course content before they take the entire course. After enrolling, the learner takes a short test with one or two questions about each topic covered in the course. If the learner gets all the answers about a topic correct, they don’t have to take the rest of that section. Ideally, this saves the learner time, makes learning more relevant, and encourages them to complete the rest of the course.
Unfortunately, there aren’t many automated tools that allow you to opt out of specific sections of training without a labor-intensive manual process. The learner’s manager or a member of the L&D team has to:
- Review the learner’s answers.
- Determine which sections the learner has successfully tested out of.
- Manually mark those sections complete.
- Follow-up with the learner on the sections they still need to complete.
Considering the difficulty L&D teams already have engaging managers to take an active role in employee learning, this time-saver for the learner frequently ends up costing the organization time because the manual review process requires managers’ time and effort.
The Right Tool to Automate the Process
After reviewing what wasn’t working, we started looking for a solution. Our learners don’t have time to absorb all the content we created, and they might not need to. Our managers don’t have time to review the content or help teach their teams. We needed a way to automate the review process and put control of learning back into the hands of the learner.With the introduction of MadCap Flare’s new e-learning tools, we saw an opportunity. Flare already allowed us to create, organize, reuse, and scale our content to fit the learner’s needs. The new functionality added the ability to test our learners on how much they learned from our courses and record their learning results in our LMS.
We had an idea: We could use Flare to create our knowledge assessments. Based on the answers to those questions, the learner would see a personalized list of content they needed to learn to complete the course—the parts they tested out of would be automatically excluded from the list. The learner then goes to each topic and completes the learning content on their own time—no manager review or oversight needed. It’s automatic, all-in-one, and allows the learner to take control of their own development.
After we shared our idea with MadCap Software, they connected us with a trusted consultant to help us turn our idea into a prototype. We’re still working with the consultant, but we’ve already seen that our idea is possible. We can customize the content that the learner sees based on the results of their knowledge assessment.
