Creating A Mobile Training Strategy: The Age Of Adaptive Learning
In the first part of this article, we saw how training is no longer performed in a limited context and timeframe, but is becoming an opportunity for any time of the day. The mobile device also allows an integrated learning experience that is adapted and customized according to learners’ needs, at any moment of the day and wherever they are. The mobile phone announces a new age, which we refer to as mobile learning. This training will truly support collaborators in facing their professional challenges.
Mobile marketing innovations are numerous and offer integrated experiences that play a multi-channel role: from the website all the way to the store, user data is saved and provides users with the best purchasing experience, not only adapted to their habits and preferences, but achievable at any moment of the day and wherever they are.
It is possible to adapt this logic to training, hence delivering personalized experience to collaborators in order to support them as they face multiple changes in their professional lives, particularly caused by the effects of the digital revolution.
Case Study: The Adaptive Mobile Learning Experience Of Thierry, Sales Representative For A Major Cosmetics Group
In order to illustrate these concepts, we have chosen to share the story of Thierry, who has been the sales representative of a cosmetics brand for 6 years. We will see how mobile learning has revolutionized his learning experience and helps him improve his performance while achieving his goals. We have specifically decided to present Thierry because he volunteered to test the beta release of our mobile application.
Thierry has to carry out meetings daily with various pharmaceutical industry representatives to present new product ranges. When he’s on his way to his meetings, he receives “push” notifications on the screen of his smartphone, with an interactive sheet that reminds him of the 10 key points to retain from the training he is currently following on customer relations.
He goes on to revising these key points and also views the videos shared by his colleagues on his Timeline dedicated to the training, on which they show how they position themselves to showcase their products. This way, Thierry shows up at his meeting fully geared and ready, and most of the training’s content is presented to him at the right moment – that is, before his meeting takes place.
All data from Thierry’s training is stocked and displayed on a dedicated dashboard that allows trainers to rapidly identify the strengths and weaknesses of Thierry. They issue personalized reminder alerts. The mobile device becomes a tool that enables users to offer content at the right moment and to the right person, hence establishing a far more direct and relevant relationship with learners.
Should Thierry ever get promoted as his team’s Sales Manager, the department will be in a position to identify his change of position and automatically offer him adapted onboarding or adaptation training as part of his new role.
Knowledge Transfer, Interaction, And Commitment
In creating new forms of interaction and new space-times to commit and involve your collaborators and trainers, the mobile device has the potential to focus primarily on your training strategy. It also allows for the emergence of an “integrated learning experience” capable of adapting at any time, in any context and no matter your learners’ locations.
At the end of the day, it is the relationship between learners and your training that will be revolutionized: it becomes closer, more personalized, and more appealing to them.
In this digital age, commitment to training is a crucial issue faced by traditional companies and organizations who wish to remain leaders without suffering disruption. Indeed, being able to commit collaborators to one’s training projects is key in order to transform one’s company culture and thence live up to the challenge of digital transformation.
As underlined by Marshall Luhan in his visionary 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, it is technology and tools that shape human interactions and associations. In the same way that the electric light bulb made it possible for men to fearlessly gather at night and socialize, the mobile phone now constitutes a new that you will be able to leverage in order to create new frameworks for exchanges and interactions.
Knowledge transfer rimes with interaction and commitment. Mobile learning stands as an undeniable revolution with respect to your training strategies and business objectives, quite comparable to the invention of electricity which allowed the similar development of opportunities for life and exchange.
It also constitutes a goldmine for data, which is now able to detect new trends and user behaviors. In the healthcare industry, the cellular data of mobile Internet users in Senegal allowed experts to better anticipate the spread of Ebola in 2014, as highlighted in the MIT Technology Review[1]. This also applied to the training sector: we can better analyze, forecast, and leverage the paths followed by learners, as well as learning innovations.
When speaking of mobile devices today, we generally picture the traditional smartphone, but the growth of connected objects and “wearable devices” announces the advent of an entirely different “mobile world”. A world where body and data blend together, in which human beings are somewhat transcended by technology.
The mobile device is not announcing profound changes – it has already revolutionized the world we live in.
Reference:
[1] Cell-Phone Data Might Help Predict Ebola’s Spread
