Keeping Your Learners Engaged With An Agile Business Training Course

Keeping your learners engaged with an agile business training course
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Summary: The traditional approach to facilitating a business course is outdated. Technology has made courses more efficient and cost-effective. Making a transition from top-down, Instructor-Led, off-site training to bottom-up training independent of location and time ever more relevant. The act of having to attend a course at a specific time and location causes for indispensable employees to be removed from critical tasks, making them non-productive for elongated periods.

The Necessity Of New And Innovative Methodologies When It Comes To Business Training Course Development

The new learners are not truly engaged. They don't retain information. Employees forget it all, almost as soon as they have completed their tasks. So, it makes sense to conclude that it’s time to abandon your organization’s L&D strategy and hand it over to online tech companies. Leadership training can have a bright future and agile training courses, as long as it conforms to a cultured working environment and involves learners. One essential step towards that future is to remove the false and harmful separation between training and work; bringing training fully into the workflow. This means using some of the technology that intimidates training programs. This way you can build a learning culture that is inclusive and versatile. Learning professionals are beginning to embrace a strategy founded in software development. AGILE (Align, Get - set, Iterate and Implement, Leverage and Evaluate) learning design is about the process of learning which is ever expanding and improving, incrementally and iteratively. It’s an alternate version to the ADDIE process that treats learning development as consecutive stages, where one step is completed before another begins. In this process, there is always a dependency on previous finished or unfinished processes.

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Improve Team Performance In Your Organisation: Leadership Skills Training In The Workplace
Learn why training needs to be flexible and accessible if it’s to keep pace with disruption and change.

The Call And Case For Agile Development

Agile development, by contrast, calls for rapid and collaborative creation or repurposing of educational material in small pieces. Right from the start, stakeholders are involved. Teams address what runs well and what needs improvement. This iterative procedure means that evaluation and improvements are a regular part of the development cycle. As opposed to simply a conclusion as it is with ADDIE. The agile method facilitates a wide variety of features that modern learners have come to expect, just-in-time learning, ease of access to resources, self-paced and self-directed learning and learner control. Adopting an agile learning design is one step, but there are many more options to increase agility. For starters, an agile resolution needs a culture to support it. Agility in business training begins with setting and meeting expectations and adopting a philosophy of learning. More so than just focusing on an L&D design process. It’s about identifying needs and delivering training into an environment in which training is very necessary. For that, you need a vision and the engagement of important stakeholders.

Applying A Vision To Your Work

The vision means recognizing where training fits into the business and where and how it can be most effective. Without that insight, even business training courses that are developed with agile methodology will fail to have an impact. Moreover, if you build training quickly and efficiently, there’s no guarantee that they will come. In challenging traditional approaches, it's important to not totally disregard practices of the past. There is a certain wisdom to past practices. One adagio never gets old, "know your audience". In particular, know how your audience has developed and how their needs have changed. The exceptional openness of information helped by improvements in information technology, including mobile connectivity and Artificial Intelligence is beginning to affect learner behavior and expectations. If you have a wealth of knowledge and know-how at your fingertips whenever you want it, why not use it? And, this is the real challenge for Instructional Designers and trainers, why would you bother using anything else? If I need to know how to do something, I’m pretty confident I can find someone on the internet who’ll show me how.

Making Real Progress With Your Business Training

These advancements, both in computer software and user perspectives, present both a challenge and an opportunity for business training. You need to make sure that technologically advanced employees have access to and are choosing the right information, relevant to their working context and methods. On the other hand, you now have ways of communicating, notifying and teaching them beyond any location or LMS. The omnipresence of mobile, smart devices presents great opportunities for business training and the development of business training courses. If you can make your training available to a wide variety of these devices, you’re closer to reaching a point where all of the supplied training content fits a just-in-time learning model. With their mobile devices, learners are carrying a training tool with them, all the time, everywhere they go. The challenge for Instructional Designers and leaders of businesses is to make learning accessible on these devices. Moving away from traditional business training courses which need a considerable amount of time for the learners to take the information in and grasp it. Instead, adjust your material and divide it into small pieces. Chunks which can be digested in minutes and which are easily searchable as part of a database of resources.

Microlearning As A Part Of Your Business Training Strategy

Microlearning delivers knowledge and education where necessary, on the bus, in a waiting room or at home. Simultaneously it also places accountability and a sense of control directly with the learner. Allowing employees to direct their own learning increases motivation and commitment. The disconnect of employees who undergo traditional training has been established a long time ago. eLearning modules which consist of a multimedia approach, ease of access, self-assessment and self-paced learning, have made training more immersive and responsive. But to provide truly agile business training we need to dig deeper. The steps described are really about building a culture of agile learning. They are designed to redirect attention away from learning paths which are associated with traditional training methods.

Classroom-Based Traditional Training Methods VS eLearning Modules

Whether these traditional training methods are classroom-based or via eLearning modules, they can identify the changes to training brought about by developments in technology, especially the predominance of mobile devices and mobile connectivity. While they expose the boundaries of Instructor-Led training, they also emphasize that education continues to be necessary. It’s not about eliminating practice but rather about shifting its importance and position. To be really appealing and in order to stimulate engagement, leadership training needs to move into the working environment. Rather than require learners to abandon their work to attend training, it is better to bring training into their workplace. This helps them to see it as part of their work and working day. Just as employees outside of work would turn to their smart device to look something up, we, therefore, want to inspire them to regard workplace training in the same way.

What Is Wisdom In The World Of Agile Business Training Course

To do that, we need to make the training resources as accessible as something like an internet search request and to have the response as quick, targeted and short as a tutorial video. We need to make the information we offer appropriate, so, that it’s recognizably relevant to employees and the functions and tasks they perform, as well as the responsibilities they have to attend to. A culture of agile learning both enables learners and makes them more accountable. This means not only implementing the use of engaging material but also fostering real engagement and use of business training on-the-job, in the workflow. Download our eBook Improve Team Performance In Your Organisation: Leadership Skills Training In The Workplace to discover how you can successfully change your own training strategy for your business, in order to help employees develop leadership skills, improve training and support.