Ceaseless effort goes into content creation, not just in learning and development (L&D) but across different areas of business. Organisations are constantly producing masses of information on everything from wellbeing and HR to inclusivity and legal guidance – leading to an overwhelming amount of endless resources. Many large organisations are struggling with clarity and need to examine how to pool their resources and invest in training that would achieve their learning goals.
How can we provide employees with relevant, engaging and meaningful learning content? Here are some approaches to help you bring clarity into your learning content.
1. Define your outcomes and impact from the outset
You need to build from the ground up. Creating effective learning content starts with defining the user journey, from awareness to anticipation to engagement. There needs to be an uncluttered path through the chaos. Essentially, this means designing holistically for the full learning experience to drive performance.
2. Think of learning as a campaign to drive actions and behaviours
Design your learning journey from awareness to action. Learning is the process of changing your employees’ actions and behaviours. Course completion should only be a minor metric in how you evaluate the success of your course. It’s important to consider how you can measure the impact of your learning content on behavioural change. Rather than learning outcomes, set your behavioural outcomes - this will give you a wider, long-term view of your learner journey.
3. Curate your content
Take stock of what you already have. How does it all piece together? Can it be curated into the learner’s journey? Tools like Filtered’s Content Intelligence support this step: it helps you to locate your valuable content quickly without a lengthy manual search. As a result, you’re able to focus the learning designer’s time where it is most valuable: creating the contextual wrapper that makes your organisation’s content relevant in the workplace and creating those key pieces of content that are unique to your business and people.
4. Make it easy to find your content
Think about the employee’s experience when it comes to accessing content in your organisation. How do they find it? How do they tune out the noise and focus only on relevance? From the outset, you should let your learners know:
- how much of their time will be needed
- how the content is relevant to their needs
- whether it’s worthwhile and valuable
You can communicate this information through productivity platforms such as MS Teams, Workplace or Yammer. We support numerous clients and create bite-sized assets and nudges that can be used in this way. Our developers can also automate the scheduling and release of such assets by building tools into the Microsoft Power Platform.
5. Make it relevant and personal
Whether training is mandatory or self-directed, its effectiveness hinges on the perceived value to the learner and those around them. This needs to be reinforced before, during and after the training. Relevance can be built into digital learning through role filters, pre-testing and options to select personal priorities. Personalisation and relevance go hand in hand; to engage audiences, you need to focus on what matters. Ultimately, you need to understand where your learner is in terms of experience, confidence, and motivation. Leveraging adaptive learning platforms such as Obrizum can help you to create a truly personalised learner journey.
6. Use human-centred design
Once you have the building blocks of relevance and effectiveness, you can begin to craft content that connects. Evoking an emotional connection can be difficult if you’ve not fully understood your learner. Purposeful storytelling, multi-media production, and thoughtful design can all create the emotional resonance for learning. Try not to look at this just within the confines of the course itself: think about how you can level up the value of an asset through the accompanying communication. The way you package your content will play a critical role in determining how your learners perceive and engage with your curriculum, as well as how they derive value and impact from it.
Remember:
- Declutter the learner experience.
- Focus on impact.
- Create value through clarity.
- Build engagement.
To find out more about digital learning, and taking your learning content from chaos to clarity, contact us on digitallearning@capita.com
Caroline Freeman
Head of Experience & Content, Capita
Caroline works at the intersection between storytelling, people and technology. Throughout her career she has led multidisciplinary creative teams, designing award-winning, emotionally compelling learning experiences across a range of media and platforms. She is particularly interested in the purposeful use of technology to support behavioural change and proactive learning cultures. Caroline is currently Head of Learning Experience and Content at Capita Digital Learning.
