Forward-Focused Learning by Tamar Elkeles;

Author:Tamar Elkeles; [Elkeles, Tamar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781950496686
Publisher: Association for Talent Development
Published: 2020-08-13T21:00:00+00:00

Match Learning Capabilities With Business Capabilities

Perhaps shockingly, and yet fortunately for learning leaders, the biggest capability gaps in learning professionals are also the gaps facing many businesses. They include understanding the customer (human-centered design), adopting Agile and an Agile mindset and learning design, and using big technology platforms and solutions as well as smaller technologies in the right way and at the right time.

Human-Centered Design

As the art, science, and technology of learning continues to evolve, so do your customers’ expectations. How do you ensure your team truly understands the needs of its customers? Much like business product and service design can benefit from placing customer needs front and center, learning leaders and professionals need to master techniques and tools from human-centered design. Consider this CLO’s tale of how her team failed to understand their customers’ true needs and ended up backing a solution based more on flash than substance.

A CLO at a Fortune 10 company once shared her biggest mistake with a crowd of hundreds: She cost her company millions of dollars because she truly didn’t understand how her customer consumed learning. She listened to other companies and vendors talk about their sleek learning portals—award-winning learning management systems that included fun, five-star rating feedback capability and splashy landing sites. As all good CLOs would do, she asked her team to be customer-centered and conduct numerous focus groups on the employee experience, gathering global input on content and appearance before implementing this new shiny global system. The global project team worked countless hours to standardize processes and policies. Initially the team received glowing feedback, but usage wasn’t improving after the initial uptick from the employee launch. She was convinced that this was just a communication or marketing issue, and that she just needed to get the word out in a more meaningful way. Again, her team assembled focus groups and engaged marketing experts to understand how to market this new system in a better, employee-friendly way. Again, the usage initially ticked up, and then tapered.

This CLO did a quick experiment: She sat with different employees and asked them to show her how they found learning content. Her company had an intranet site with a search function. In all cases, they typed in the search function—just like they did with their search engine at home—and came up with thousands of entries not relevant to their search, causing hours of frustration or simply loss of interest. Some were tenacious enough to ask their supervisor. When she watched their supervisors look for the learning content, they did the same thing—even though the intranet site had a key link on the home page to the content. When she asked employees to show her what they did after a class or online viewing, employees told her they were not interested in filling out the five-star rating. Why? Most classes were mandatory or dictated by the job so they wouldn’t use a star rating to choose a class. “I’m not buying a product—I have to take the class,” they told her.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.