What To Consider When Choosing An LXP For Onboarding Training

What To Consider When Choosing An LXP For Onboarding Training
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Summary: Choosing an LXP is not just about changing up your training platform or stepping away from your LMS. It’s not just about adding new features. It can have a wide-ranging and positive impact on the entire way you conduct onboarding.

LXP For Onboarding Training: What To Bear In Mind

Organisations are increasingly turning to LXPs to enhance their training provision. Adding an LXP to the training mix can benefit onboarding hugely.

eBook Release: Power Employee Onboarding Using A Learning Experience Platform (LXP)
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Power Employee Onboarding Using A Learning Experience Platform (LXP)
Bringing the onboarding process into the 21st century with AI-driven LXP technology.

More Than Just An Upgrade

Reviews of LXPs generally list their key features—from the range of content to the benefits of using AI-based systems. And there’s no doubt that these features can dramatically improve the training you give. But the introduction of an LXP is more than just a simple upgrade on what you currently have. Implementing an LXP goes beyond moving training out of the classroom and the LMS. In fact, adding an LXP drives your training in a radical new direction.

A review of onboarding training neatly illustrates the fundamental nature of the change an LXP can make. Typically, onboarding has been a set process with a series of milestones to be met and stages to be completed before employees are signed off as onboarded and ready to fully enter their new working environment. This approach concentrates on directing and managing new hires. Information is pushed at them, often in large volumes, a policy that can in the worst instances turn orientation into disorientation.

An LXP Changes That Focus And Perspective

For one thing, it’s designed to improve the experience of learning. One way it achieves that is by putting the learner in control. In the world of LXPs, information is pulled rather than pushed, and delivered on a need-to-know and timely basis.

This begs the question: if the learner is in control, what is the role of HR and L&D? And, also, what are the implications then for the type of onboarding training you deliver? These are examples of the bigger questions you need to consider beyond the purchase price and implementation costs of the LXP.

An LXP transforms the way we think about and conduct onboarding training, so deciding to implement one means careful and detailed consideration of its impact. That said, doing your due diligence regarding the rewards an LXP offers, not just in content delivery but in reconfiguring onboarding training too, can be really significant.

Where Are You Headed?

In choosing an LXP, you’re clearly making a move away from onboarding training delivered in the classroom or via an LMS. But what’s your destination—beyond using the shiny new features of the LXP?

The LXP’s shift of emphasis toward the learner not only has implications for the way training is delivered and accessed, but it also affects how it’s managed. For a start, it opens up the prospect of more targeted, adaptable and agile training. You can move away from the catch-all model of onboarding training and really begin to know your audience.

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From a new hire’s perspective, the delivery of onboarding via an LXP means they can judge what they need to know and when they need to know it. Each new employee is going to come with the benefit of their previous experience. Having a self-serve model of training delivery means this can be recognised and they’re not repeating what they already know. Moreover, some elements of onboarding only become relevant once work has started. Having the LXP's always-on, easily accessible approach to training makes this possible. These options help boost relevance and engagement, which are areas in which onboarding has frequently struggled.

Also, the introduction of an LXP changes the way HR and the organisation think about and deliver onboarding. Firstly, it offers the opportunity to make onboarding a more continuous process, rather than an episodic one. This in turn means it’s less constrained by time and allows training to run alongside work. So instead of having onboarding first and then work starting, you can run the two simultaneously. By doing that, you bring onboarding into the workflow, which means not only the employee but also the organisation can more easily see the relevance and assess the benefits. This represents a fundamental cultural shift and has implications for work-based learning across the wider organisation.

Changing Roles

The array of features contained in an LXP is impressive. But what’s more so is the effect deploying them has on the whole business of onboarding training.

With its recommender systems, powerful search engine, range of content, and embedded chatbot, the LXP gives the learner the ability to take control of the scope, incidence, and direction of their learning. It becomes targeted, relevant, and personalised. In onboarding terms, this means they can begin to onboard themselves.

So, if new employees are conducting their own onboarding, what is HR doing? In fact, self-onboarding with an LXP frees up HR to analyse what’s working well and, if something is not, to make critical interventions. It’s helped here by the ability of the LXP to track user interactions and feedback data on them at a really granular level. This data can be aggregated in the form of customised reports and easy-to-read dashboards. HR can then track the onboarding journey of an individual at a micro-level to make sure that no employee is left behind and that every new hire successfully achieves onboarding.

Designing And Delivering LXP Content

The ability of an LXP to personalise the learning experience depends on the scope and structure of the training content. LXPs work best with microlearning. This means serving up easily digestible chunks of learning that offer key learning points and outcomes and can be consumed in a matter of minutes. This approach has been characterised as "resources not courses."

The task for L&D and HR is to provide micro-content. This can be done by editing and repurposing what you already have. But it can be done more dynamically by creating new content using free access to technology that’s readily available on PCs and mobile devices. L&D in effect becomes LXP designers, focusing on how to make the best use of the content repository, recommendation features, social-media-style interface, and collaborative tools of the LXP.

LXPs also allow you to upload and curate User-Generated Content, so that the organisation can make use of the knowledge residing in the heads of their most experienced and successful employees to help mentor employees as they ease their way into a new working environment and culture.

LXP users can enhance the concept of the automatic mentoring of new hires by making use of the notification systems of the LXP. This will help keep employees on track through onboarding. It can be extended further still by using an embedded, AI-powered chatbot that can respond instantly to new hires' questions and nudge them toward a variety of interactions.

Moving Onboarding Into The Workflow

If the use of an LXP for onboarding training becomes continuous, it makes sense to locate it fully within the workflow. By enabling onboarding to co-exist with working, you’re effectively fast-tracking new employees into work. This way, you minimize the risk of onboarding becoming an isolating process and you’re rewarded by allowing new hires to become engaged and perform more quickly.

Locating onboarding in the workflow, making use of mobile connectivity, also extends HR’s care of new talent as onboarding training becomes part of the working environment. This also means that employees recognise that the organisation has a culture that not only stresses the importance of learning but situates it squarely in the workplace. There’s no artificial divide between training and working. They co-exist, side by side.

A Sea Change

Running your onboarding training with an LXP alters training delivery and conception. The change not only impacts employees by making them more independent but it also profoundly affects the role of HR in onboarding.

Using an LXP makes onboarding more efficient and allows the fast-tracking of new hires into the working environment. The potential benefits are higher levels of engagement in onboarding training, a more seamless and extended onboarding process, and mitigation of the well-documented risks associated with the onboarding period. Namely, that you could lose your investment in new talent with a poor onboarding experience.

The considerations for choosing an LXP for your onboarding go broad and deep. But the rewards of more engaged, better performing and more contented new hires are well worth the investment. Download the eBook Power Employee Onboarding Using A Learning Experience Platform (LXP) to discover more about the topic, and join the webinar for supplementary insights.

Sources:

The HT2 Labs Guide To Learning Experience Platforms

Are you experienced? An insight into Learning Experience Platforms

10 Keys for a Successful Onboarding Program