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Imagine you want to throw the biggest rock festival since Woodstock. You hire a venue that’s big enough. You fill out all the permission forms in triplicate. You source the tech with the best reviews. You’ve even paved paradise so you could put up a parking lot.
With all of that taken care of, you’re running out of time, so you hire the only bands that are still available. Now you’ve got a fancy rock venue, but the only music acts you have are an Appalachian jug band, a one-man Reggae act and a dog that can howl the intro to Smoke on the Water. Even if you’d thought about advertising it (which you haven’t), this eclectic mix doesn’t exactly fit your target audience of rock fans.
Now imagine standing in your empty venue on the day of the gig. You’re all alone (except for the dog), you haven’t enriched anyone’s life and you’ve wasted a ton of money. This is what your LMS will look like if you don’t start with a solid engagement strategy.
When you’re planning a training programme, there are a lot of practicalities to think about. How is your business structured? Where are the big knowledge gaps? Who are your subject matter experts and why aren’t they answering their emails?!
On top of all that, you need to plan out the delivery mechanism. Assuming you’re going to host your content online (it is the 21st century after all), you have to choose from the hundreds of learning platforms out there. You’ll need to sift through them all to find out which one has the best reporting capabilities, which one integrates with your HR system and which one fits your training budget.
With all of these considerations, it’s easy to overlook the most important aspect of all – will your learners actually use it?
The sad fact is that most learning initiatives fail to produce any meaningful results. After a promising spike in the launch week, the rate of logins peters off, leaving your learning platform coming like a ghost town.
Even though it’s a sad, sad song, it’s a pattern that repeats itself year after year in organisations across the world. Despite this historic trend, the same ineffective formula is still applied. In an ironic twist, learning departments don’t seem to be learning anything themselves.
Now that we know the problem, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and try something different. Forget about your reporting, your training needs analyses and your organisational objectives for just one moment. Instead, think about your learners.
Step outside of your cosy L&D department and walk amongst them, speak to them and find out who they really are. What do they want? What interests them? What will make them return to your learning platform time and again? When you stop relying on what your reports are showing, you might just see some ways to give your learners a training experience that can have a real impact in their careers.
For too long have training departments been stuck in the groove of spoon-feeding their learners. Instead of making something that rocks, they’ve been producing the equivalent of depression-era country songs. If you want to make a difference, you need to buck the trend and stop making boring training programmes. Once you finally break free of this trap, you’ll find more ways to get them clapping their hands and stomping their feet.
By creating a space where they can express themselves and share their knowledge, a real change in behaviour won’t seem like such a fantasy. If the training experience is designed with engagement at its core, your learners might log in more than once. They might make a weekly habit of it. Who knows, they might even create a never-ending learning festival.
After all the jacks are in their boxes and the clowns have all gone to bed, the training will not only meet your organisational objectives – it might even improve the entire company culture. When you’ve built that momentum, nothing will stand between your learners and professional rock god status!
