Benefits Of Campaign Learning: 12 Ways It Can Boost Your Training Method
We don’t consume media the way we used to. There was a time when we got all our information from a single newspaper, but things are different now. We snatch a snippet from Twitter in the morning, a little bit from Facebook in the afternoon, and perhaps read an article on the Guardian Online on the bus ride home.
At a time when it’s harder than ever to engage learners with traditional training methods, many training managers are looking for a better solution. Rather than expecting the learners to interrupt their day with a marathon eLearning session, these training pioneers are creating training that fits the way the learners already behave.
Campaign learning is characterized by bite-sized learning assets that are typically delivered on a mobile platform. These campaigns don’t seek to 'deliver training' – at the heart of a successful campaign is the desire to spark a conversation and get people thinking and talking about the learning objective. In this respect, a learning campaign is the ideal way to capture informal learning and put it to good use. Check the following benefits of such a learning campaign, which:
1. Improves Knowledge Retention
It’s no secret that knowledge retention is a big challenge for learning managers. Because of the forgetting curve, we tend to retain only 10% of new information a week after discovering it. The only way to get around this is to reinforce the information on a regular basis. Since a campaign, by its nature is a series of regular events, you can stop knowledge loss in its tracks (or at least slow it down).
2. Creates Excitement And Anticipation
In the traditional model, a training event is something that happens every few months. In the meantime, nobody really looks forward to a date with a click-through slide deck. With learning campaigns, every day holds the promise of a new piece of microlearning content and another opportunity to engage with the training. By conditioning your learners to expect the training, you’ve taken another step toward embedding it in their behavior.
3. Bite-sized Learning Isn’t A Chore
Even if your training isn’t inherently dull, it’ll still be difficult to convince anyone to spare 45 minutes of their time to sit through it. This isn’t your fault – since the dawn of memes and cat GIFs, we don’t have the attention span we used to. In a learning campaign, your learners only need to commit to a few minutes each day. Since you’re not asking the world of them, they’ll be much more likely to engage with the campaign.
4. Creates Culture Of Learning
It’s hard to run a successful training program if your organizational culture doesn’t celebrate and encourage development. A learning culture isn’t something that a single person can action or sign off – it’s something that’s ingrained in the fabric of the organization. The easiest way to do this is to use a learning campaign to push regular training content, keeping it at the front of your learners’ minds.
5. Gets Everyone Involved
With a culture of learning comes a sense of community. When you roll out a learning campaign, everyone in the business is engaged with the same learning content at the same time. This has a huge impact on the effectiveness of the training as it gives informal learning a chance to truly flourish. With a common learning goal, your learners are more likely to spark discussions and take part in the same conversations. You never know what new insights these informal discussions might reveal…
6. Encourages Autonomy
A learning campaign is like a daily invitation to engage with the training content. Since your learners will be visiting your platform more frequently, there’s a greater chance of them exploring. You simply need to make sure that when they do embark on their own journey of discovery, they’ll be able to find what they’re looking for easily.
7. Encourages Knowledge Sharing
We know that campaign learning gives you a chance to engage your learners daily. If the learning is only flowing in one direction, your learners will get bored pretty quickly (as will you!). You can allocate one or two days per week to asking for the learners’ own insight. How did they apply their learning? What tips would they add? Again, by regularly reinforcing knowledge-sharing behaviours, you stand a better chance of transforming the company culture at a grass-roots level.
8. Creates Relevant Learning Assets
Despite your best efforts, some people will look upon your company-sanctioned formal training with cynicism. What can a training manager possibly know about the realities of the job? With a learning campaign in place, you don’t need to rely so heavily on the formal content. It will now act as a seed for learner-generated content. Since this type of content comes from real people that your learners might even recognize, it’ll carry more weight.
9. Helps Find Experts
Once you start seeing the same faces popping up in comments, and the same people answering your learners’ questions, you’ll be able to make your learning campaigns even more effective. By delivering your training in a bite-sized campaign, your hidden experts have more chances to demonstrate their expertise. If you can get these people involved in the learning program, you’ll have an entire auxiliary training team on your side!
10. Takes Learning To Learners
The trouble with traditional methods of training is that they usually require the learner to go somewhere. It could be a training centre 100 miles away, or it could just be the comfort of their home desktop. In any case, you’ve added an inconvenient step that stands between your learners and their development. A learning campaign is designed to engage the learners wherever they are. It’s for this reason that mobile content is essential if your learning campaign is to be a success.
11. Learning Happens In The Right Environment
Following on from the previous point, learning is much more effective if it occurs at the moment of need. If you ask somebody in a training centre to name 5 health and safety hazards in the workplace, they might struggle. If they get the same question while they’re at work, all they need to do is look around their environment. With a bit of luck, they might identify the hazard and correct it before somebody gets hurt!
12. Adapts To Change More Easily
Like much in today’s world, the training plan you’re working on now may well be obsolete in a month’s time. If that plan revolves around a single colossal eLearning unit, you might have to create yet another monster module from scratch! Learning campaigns are more organic and more versatile. If something does change, you don’t need to scrap your entire program – simple edit the relevant microunits and adapt your approach.
Conclusion
The role of today’s training managers is evolving fast. It’s no longer about creating chunky, all-encompassing units (that nobody can stay awake through) and gazing at reports. Now, training managers need to encourage a culture of learning and facilitate the big discussions in the organization. Learning campaigns give you the freedom and flexibility to craft a learning experience that can empower your learners and transform your organizational culture.
