In the last five years alone, a global pandemic, economic uncertainty, the explosion of micro-media consumption and the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) have destabilized more traditional training and development approaches. With such rapid change, learning and development (L&D) programs need to become more agile and deliver learning that is personalized to the in-the-moment needs of employees more than ever before. This state of continuous disruption has also underscored the need for a culture of continuous learning, where learning is embedded in the day-to-day activity of an employee to help solve new and emerging challenges in their work and life.
A culture of continuous learning helps ensure that as new challenges arise, new ways of working evolve and industries continue to be disrupted, employees can be upskilled and reskilled quickly and at scale.
Important Considerations When Building a Culture of Continuous Learning
Make it timely and relevant.
The human brain treats information learned to solve an immediate need differently from information learned under the pretense of having some future value. Humans are more motivated to address a problem in the moment, and learning tends to be more impactful when it can be directly applied to a pain point or an opportunity.
Traditional education has generally been oriented towards that future value and has dictated both the time for learning and the reason for learning. As an example, learning geometry as a high school student every day at 9 a.m. is in most cases neither timely nor relevant to the student. While some workplace learning (like compliance-related training) needs to be “pushed” to the employee, a continuous learning culture empowers the employee to leverage resources to learn and solve problems in the moment of need.
The foundation of a continuous learning culture is comprised of learning content and resources that can be called upon by an employee in the flow of work when they get stuck or see an opportunity.
Skills-based frameworks are useful and increasingly adopted models in corporate learning because skills represent the specific behaviors and abilities that an employee needs to develop to solve specific challenges. Consider a retail manager dealing separately with an irate customer and with a disengaged employee. Listening and questioning are critical skills in both problem contexts, but each situation requires a unique combination of those skills plus other skills to address effectively. Specific challenges require unique amalgamations of skills-focused content to facilitate impactful learning.
One way for learning designers to curate and assemble content in such a way is by anticipating the challenges an employee is likely to encounter based on their role within the organization. They can then create learning experiences that align the necessary skills-focused content to those challenges and embed those experiences into existing workflows or make them discoverable through an easy search. To more effectively scale this work and personalize the content to the unique challenges of an individual employee, AI offers the potential to identify the most relevant skills-focused content and deliver a tailored experience in the flow of work.
Use emotion to drive impactful learning.
If the first key to building a continuous learning culture is making the learning timely and relevant, the second is ensuring the employee stays engaged and invested in the content. The content must captivate and sustain their attention and focus while supporting effective application of the learning.
Learning designers often focus on the duration of content when trying to address concerns about engagement, pointing to shrinking attention spans and media saturation as the primary reasons for making content shorter and shorter. What has been given less attention, however, is using emotion to captivate and maintain the attention of an employee. Emotional triggers can not only get an employee invested in the content, but also improve information retention and the impact of learning.
Storytelling in learning content is one way to create emotional triggers and keep employees tuned into the content. Through relatable characters, relevant circumstances, and narrative arcs that build tension and suspense, stories are memorable and therefore the lessons and skills embedded in those stories are more likely to stick. Further, stories offer specific and authentic contexts for understanding the application of learning. Stories can be used to model how skills get translated into real-world situations and can therefore help ensure employees can leverage the learning to meaningfully impact their work.
Maintaining the Human Element
While AI is just scratching the surface as far as its capabilities in storytelling and in creating content that captivates and stirs emotion, there is likely to be a greater desire for authenticity and real human connection in storytelling and in how emotion is leveraged in the development of human-centric skills. Technology and automation will continue to have a significant influence on the ways organizations develop and scale a culture of continuous learning, but it will be equally important that organizations build into this culture a sense of human connection.
