5 Custom eLearning Expert Tips And Strategies To Optimize Your Employee Training Plan

5 Custom eLearning Expert Tips And Strategies To Optimize Your Employee Training Plan
G-Stock Studio/Shutterstock.com
Summary: Discover key custom eLearning expert tips from Instructional Design, performance consulting, and project management strategies to improve your employee training plan.

Design Strategies for Employee Performance

Boost Your Employee Training Plan With Custom eLearning Expert Tips

Designing and deploying an effective employee training plan is difficult, but continuous evaluation and optimization are vital to increasing the impact that training has on your organization. Careful planning and measurement will help, but it takes time and resources to put into place. Here are a few custom eLearning expert tips for enabling your L&D team to optimize your training and move your business goals forward.

eBook Release: 8 Tips For Boosting Your eLearning With Performance Consulting
eBook Release
8 Tips For Boosting Your eLearning With Performance Consulting
Discover Instructional Design and training delivery best practices from experienced performance consultants.

1. Be Prepared To Scale

The learning environment is always changing, so it’s crucial to be able to adapt in order to optimize your training. One major challenge your business may face as it does so, especially if it is successfully meeting goals and expanding reach, is accounting for scale. As the number of employees to train grows, your current training solution might not be enough. There are 3 important areas to focus on your ability to scale.

First, there’s content scaling. This is the increased scope of content that learners need to access and absorb as your organization grows. Creating customized eLearning is difficult to accomplish as your workforce grows, so having the right LMS or portal support is vital to the effort. The portal can utilize scheduled events to structure the time, pace, and path of the learner’s experience with the training, which can all help personalize the learning experience at any organizational scale.

The second area as suggested by custom eLearning experts is to consider your audience, the people who your training will reach. You must account for a learner experience that can engage each part of your audience. Aside from your employees, you might want to expand training to include sales partners, vendors, consultants, or customers. This extension of the employee training plan can reduce risk, strengthen your brand, and improve your business processes.

Third, examine your User Experience. There may be different requirements depending on audience size, content depth, and industry standards. Because the modern workplace favor on-demand learning, training technology must help learners access information when and where they need it most. Making sure your training works on mobile devices with a responsive UX will help you reach your employees at their point of need.

2. Custom eLearning Expert Tip: Be Agile

We employ an agile process to ensure that the project stays aligned with your goals and needs throughout the project development lifecycle and can adapt to unexpected changes and findings. Our performance consultants and Project Managers work in tandem to facilitate this process and iterate where needed, to ensure that your business needs are met. In short, we move with you and adapt to the changing nature of your needs. To work efficiently, those on the project team need to operate according to standardized processes. But we avoid models that dictate rigid, detailed steps for design, development, and deployment in favor of hybrid variations of the ADDIE and Agile Project Management models. Each consists of phased development and review cycles that deliver tangible products.

3. Focus On The Individual

Now, custom eLearning experts don’t mean that you need to focus all your employee training plan on one person. Instead, consider how personalization can impact each of your employees. Personalized learning is key to engaging your workforce and getting them what they need at the right time. After all, everyone is already consuming personalized media outside of work, so why can’t it happen in a learning and development context?

Creating a framework for personalization can be tricky. We recommend focusing on the following factors to ensure your employee training plan stays on the right path:

  • Devices & access to technology
  • Motivational factors
  • Knowledgebase
  • Cultural values
  • Language(s) spoken

4. Improve Continuously

To ensure you can change as your organization does, plan for new technology. Continuous learning is vital according to custom eLearning experts to companies that want to stay relevant. but designing, developing, and deploying a new training solution takes time. Changes to technology and processes can be so frequent to match the transformation of the outside world that L&D teams often can’t keep up. It’s unrealistic to expect a content overhaul every time a new process is adopted, or new business technology is available.

To optimize your employee training, make sure your training modules are flexible and designed with updates in mind. Typically, this will come down to your training technology, such as content management platforms, learning portals, performance support systems, etc.

5. Custom eLearning Experts Should Measure Results

Measuring results is key as suggested by custom eLearning experts. It is difficult to effectively optimize your training if you don’t have any data to look at. Ideally, the data should show if there was any impact on business objectives. Sometimes L&D teams don’t have the means to measure results to that degree, though. That’s why it’s important to design a method of performance measurement before you build a learning solution to make your decisions substantially easier. We apply the Kirkpatrick Model to determine what we should measure when planning for a new project, using the following key points to guide us:

Performance results

  • Business impact
  • Measure before and after a training initiative

Acquired behavior

  • Surveys and observations
  • Immersive learning experiences

Knowledge transfer

  • Assessments
  • Diagnostics

Experience

  • Engagement time
  • Completion rate

Conclusion

Your employee training plan and your technology both need to impact your organization, custom eLearning experts suggest. While it’s an intensive process, we pride ourselves on developing training that creates real results. Not only do we have over 35 years of experience in the business, but we also bring our extensive performance consulting and instructional design expertise, agency-level creative teams, and innovative learning technologies to optimize your training plan and bring a Return On your Investment.

To learn more about employee performance evaluation, check out our eBook, 8 Tips For Boosting Your eLearning With Performance Consulting. Also, join the webinar to find out additional information about virtual learning best practices and more.