How to Offer Personalized Learning at Scale and Continuous Growth Opportunities?
Aisling MacNamara is Director of Learning, Empowerment and Inclusion at LearnUpon. One of his passions in his work is developing student-centered programs that help achieve the company’s goals. Today, he shares with us his insights into student engagement, contextualizing L&D, and the findings of his team’s six-month skills development pilot project.
Based on your experience, riding and training in the remote working world how will it affect design and engagement?
We are now in a very challenging time when it comes to designing engaging riding training. You may have new jobs based in different locations, some at home and some at the office. For boarding in particular, it may work better to align whether the new tenants are at home, or whether they are all in the office. This, of course, is difficult if you use a global system in all time zones. I think organizations will start moving back to having a standard global online program for all new hires and have more localized in-person sessions. Despite many changes in the last five years, new hires still want the same things from onboarding: management support, a good friend, a clear agenda for day 1 and week 1, and fun. Design with these key requirements in mind, and you’ll be able to deliver an engaging and impactful program. I would like to see companies invest in better technology to support multi-country rides. There’s nothing wrong with having some people in the room, others on Zoom, and then an assistant—it feels disconnected.
Why is it so important for organizations to provide context-specific learning to provide employees with opportunities for continued growth and fuel engagement?
It’s really interesting to see that even though students may choose the same skills to develop, they don’t want formal training. For example, we will have students across our security, finance, and customer experience teams who all want to develop project management skills. However, the context they use is completely different. We often get feedback that although the lessons were useful in some way, they didn’t get the context right. Students are dropped immediately if they feel that it does not apply directly to their role. Therefore, it is important for organizations to understand the needs of each department. There is now a lot of focus in the learning industry on cataloging skills, developing student matrices, and creating in-depth categories. However, this will have little impact unless we have students completing relevant courses, both formally through courses and on-the-job learning. This will help support organizations develop their workforce, close gaps, and adapt to market changes.
Can you tell us more about the data you collected by starting the six-month skills development trial? What are some of the key challenges L&D leaders face?
The skills assessment was a great opportunity to connect with leaders across our business and understand what their priorities should be. We’ve collected key insights that help highlight the challenges L&D leaders face. First, and to no one’s surprise, is time. This is the number one reason why students do not complete their personal study programs. We’ve created customized programs that describe “on-the-job,” peer, and formal learning options to expand knowledge on the “less skilled.” So although these were on point and engaging, the students could not prioritize the development. We saw many reasons for this, and although some were really responsible, we also saw that management support and approval for development was essential.
Another thing we have learned is to properly allocate learning and growth opportunities for each department. Some groups are more involved in external learning, such as formal exams, certificates, and professional diplomas. Some departments find more value in team-based or department-based training that can improve team skills; think sales, CX, and engineering. I think a deep understanding of what each department needs can help inform a growth and development strategy that truly supports your people. There is no one way to develop skills!
What is one of your biggest eLearning client success stories?
One of our biggest success stories comes from GTreasury. They are the leading innovator in SaaS financial integration and risk management solutions for digital treasuries.
Seeking to achieve its ambitious goals of developing its people, satisfying its 700+ customers, and growing the business, GTreasury used LearnUpon to achieve all three. By introducing standardized learning, a business transforms the way it trains its people, resulting in more efficient employees and better served customers. Some of their key achievements are saving 900K in onboarding costs, having a 90% reduction in onboarding support costs and a 50% reduction in the average time to close a support ticket.
Is there a recent development project, product launch, or other initiative that our readers should know about?
We are very fortunate to be a zero customer at LearnUpon and have access to our LMS platform. This includes testing new features, sharing feedback, and ultimately helping to create a better product for our customers. We had early access to our Learning Journeys capabilities, which enabled us to create personalized learning journeys. We have a few projects to use for this learning journey, including a new recruitment drive and our @ LearnUpon management system. Basically, we can create a journey in our LMS, which will move students based on location, role, previous course completion, etc. So we have one new hire journey that supports us to onboard and train new hires in all areas—they can finish it all. general courses before they are delivered based on the area of topics such as health and safety and benefits. We also have all new and promoted managers complete a program to help them lead the LearnUpon process—this includes a mix of experiences and requires us to create specific courses and activities specific to a specific role. Through the journey, we can now easily guide managers, directors, and supervisors to the right teaching and avoid anyone being withdrawn.
How can organizations use their learning programs to provide their employees with training relevant to their roles and responsibilities?
Learning systems are the backbone of any small (and large!) L&D team that wants to make the most impact with limited resources. Understanding what skills are important for each role and matching them with good learning content is an effective way to measure your efforts. Creating group or topic-specific learning journeys for key skills is another way systems can help you scale. Giving managers the ability to view reports and provide content to their team is another important aspect—it can often fall to the L&D team. You can also support students by giving them autonomy over their learning and choices in the learning experiences in your curriculum. This enables them to choose the right subject at the right time.
Wrapping up
A big thank you to Aisling MacNamara for participating in our Q&A and shedding light on barriers to boarding, context-specific learning, and providing quality coaching. If you’d like to learn more about how to onboard your new hires and prepare them for the challenges that arise, check out Building an Employee Onboarding Program with an LMS.
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