The way that individuals are learning is changing quickly. This presents organizations with an opportunity. Individuals arrive at work with increased expectations that we have previously not seen within the workplace and only in a consumer dynamic.
This shift from relying on L&D to self-directed has left many organizations wondering what their next move should be.
The best place to start is putting yourself in the learners' shoes and examine the human behaviours around growth and development.
The rise of this consumer learner if acted upon correctly enables organizations to engage their workforce to new levels and reap the benefits in this age of fast paced change and drive for innovation.
HMCS Max Bernays Pre-Deployment Brief (May 2024).pptx
4 Effective Strategies for Engaging the New Consumer Learner
1. 4 EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES
FOR ENGAGING THE NEW
CONSUMER LEARNER
March 16, 2017
Ollie Craddock | Mind Tools
Deputy CEO
ollie.craddock@mindtools.com
Sarah Danzl | Degreed
Content and MarComm
sdanzl@degreed.com
+
2. +
WHY LISTEN TO US
More than 28 million
learners around the
world use our
resources every year
Our clients are
some of the biggest
organisations
in the world
Three global surveys
of more than 2000
managers, conducted
in 2016 and 2017
Specialists in
management and
leadership
development
5. +
UK HSE Labour Force Survey, Oct 2015
440k
cases a year
of workplace
stress
9.9m
days lost in
2014/2015
Work
overload
a main cause
70%
experience
stress from
work
22%
of people
“under extreme
stress”
American Psychological Association, Jan 2012
VERY BUSY, AND VERY STRESSED
10. +
EVERY DAY EVERY WEEK EVERY MONTH EVERY QUARTER ONCE A YEAR
FROM A VARIETY OF SOURCES
Source: Degreed, How the Workforce Learns in 2016, 1/2016
Coaching &
mentoring
e-learning courses
Instructor-led classes Conferences &
trade shows
Web search
Peer/team
interaction
Articles & blogs
Videos
Books
Apps
Online networks
Webinars
Live networking
Online
courses
Podcasts &
audio books
Live classes (external)
SELF-DIRECTEDL&D-LED
13. +
1. PUT LEARNERS’ PRIORITIES FIRST
LEARNERS WANT… SO L&D SHOULD.
Solve
Find
Access
Value
Create
Manage
Control
Track
Assemble
Empower
Enable
Guide
or
or
or
or
14. +
2. MANAGE LESS, EMPOWER MORE
Source: Bersin by Deloitte, 2015 Corporate Learning Factbook, 6/2015
-20% +29% +13% +90%
Less training
via ILT, vILT or
e-learning
More learning
via on-the-job
experiences
More learning
via collaborating
and coaching
More learning
via on-demand
resources
Higher-Impact L&D Organizations Deliver…
15. +
3. MAKE IT RELEVANT AND PERSONAL
THROUGH CURATION
Source: Degreed, Curation and Personalization Framework, 10/2016
PROFESSIONAL
L&D
Curating
PERSONAL
Individuals
Collecting
PEER-TO-PEER
Teams
Sharing
TECHNOLOGY
Algorithms
Recommending
16. +
4. RECOGNIZE AND VALUE ALL KINDS
OF LEARNING
Source: TinCanApi.com, Who’s using the Tin Can API?, 6/2015; Degreed internal data, 6/2015; SkilledUp, Do Open Badges Matter To Employers
Or Admissions Officers?, 7/2014; Behance, 6/2015; GitHub, 6/2016; Forbes, Memo To LinkedIn: Please Fix Endorsements, 2/2014
17. +
THE
TAKE-
AWAY
“Employees at all
levels expect
dynamic, self-
directed, continuous
learning
opportunities from
their employers.”
Global Human Capital Trends 2016 (Deloitte University Press)
19. +
TODAY’S WORKFORCE HAS DRIVE
Source: Degreed, Bring Your Own Learning, 2/2015; Degreed, The Importance of Informal Learning,
7/2015; Degreed, How the Workforce Learns in 2016, 1/2016
5X 61% $339.00
Workers spend 3.3
hours learning on their
own each week, 37 min.
from employer training.
61% would put in even
more time on their own
if they got professional
credit for it.
75% invested their own
money (average of $339
each) on career-related
learning last year.
20. +
THE WORKFORCE LACKS SKILLS
FOR THE FUTURE.
PWC 18th Annual CEO Survey
81%
of US CEOs are looking for a much
broader range of skills when hiring
than they did in the past.
Skills
22. +
DON’T TAKE OUR WORD FOR IT:
MASTERCARD’S STORY
MORE FREQUENTLY.MORE PEOPLE… LEARNING SMARTER…
23. + People are motivated to learn. But they’re just
hyper-busy.
Busy people are learning, but in a different way.
This presents an opportunity if we share control.
4 key strategies to engage:
1. Understand your learner as a customer
2. Empower, don’t control
3. Relevant and personal
4. Value and recognise all learning
The consumer learner expects a self-directed,
continuous learning opportunity.
A more productive learning culture delivers
impact to your business results.
KEY
TAKE-
AWAYS
Welcome to this webinar from Degreed and Mind Tools.
From the recent Deloite paper
Don’t worry – were here today to help provide some clarity around these things today!
The fact is, most workers do spend time learning every week. Just not necessarily in ways you might expect, recognize or value.
Formal, L&D-led training is still a valuable part of how workers learn, of course.
- We asked people how they learn for work; are these things they do every day, every week, every month, once a year, or less.
- Around 70% told us they take live, virtual or e-learning courses from their employers at least once a year.
- However, on average, they only do those things once every three or four months.
However, they use informal, self-serve learning to connect the dots and fill in the gaps in-between. All the time.
- Almost 85% said they learn things for work by searching online at least once a week. Nearly 70% learn from peers or by reading articles and blogs every week. And 53% learn from videos in any given week.
Most of that, though, is happening outside your control or view.
What this data says to us is that people progress every day, in all kinds of ways – not just sometimes, in courses or classrooms.
- So your L&D environment should enable self-directed development as well as formal training – and it should do that through both micro-learning, which everyone is obsessed with right now, and through old-fashioned macro-learning.
They both have their place. It’s just that the balance needs to be adjusted.
The reason they’re both essential is that workers already spend a lot of time learning outside your influence and view.
Most workers don’t confine their development to offices, shops, factories and warehouses – or even to “normal” working hours.
- While 85% of people said they learn at work, 67% do so on personal time and 18% are learning during travel or commutes.
- And almost 40% of them are learning across multiple venues.
The learning itself is traveling across multiple screens, too.
- I don’t want to state the obvious. But mobile is a core part of how most people live and work now.
- People we surveyed estimate that 70% of the time they spend learning on electronic devices is still on PCs. But smartphones and tablets account for 30%.
- 70% said they’re doing at least some learning on mobile devices.
That finding not exactly surprising, but it’s probably the most disruptive shift for L&D teams. This really does change everything.
- People can already learn anywhere, anytime, all by themselves. So you should spend less time worrying about how to manage and track all of the workforce’s training and more time figuring out how to channel and feed their curiosity.
- Whenever we talk about these trends this always comes up: How do you know if people are learning the right things? And that is still a role for the learning professional. It’s just a different one.
We’ll explore that in the next section. But first...
And most importantly, value all learning. Recognize that it’s happening outside of your control.
Learning at - and for - work has changed. Radically.
Support numerous types of learning
The third way to add context is to do more than just curate. At an event last year, I heard Elliott Masie say, “the value of curation is reduction – not aggregation.” That stuck with me. Because curation – at least the way you usually hear it talked about in L&D circles -- is only one way to do reduce and add context. And if it’s the L&D team doing all the curating, then it doesn’t really scale.
At that same event, I saw some people from McDonald’s learning group talking about their early experiments with curation. They had lots of content, it was all over the place, and a lot of it was out of date – all the problems we just mentioned.
So they created an online roadmap that pointed people to the most current resources McDonald’s had on a bunch of topics.
It was a big hit – simple. But they found out quickly that it was time consuming and difficult to do all the gathering and pointing for people.
The point is that you being the curator can be a solution sometimes, for some things. But we see our more sophisticated, progressive clients doing more than that.
For one thing, they’re empowering workers to discover and collect the best resources themselves. They build the storefront – the learning environment – and then stock the shelves with the best resources they can build or buy or aggregate.
They also engineer connections between people, their jobs and resources. That’s more sophisticated than just sticking forums on the side of an LMS or bolting on an enterprise social network.
And they’re putting the latest tools to work to feed people recommendations based not just on what’s required or some incomplete profile in a TMS, but based on insights (like Facebook does), intent (like Google) and interests (like twitter).
Your employees are already using new tools to crowdsource and curate their own learning. Things like blogs and Twitter and Quora and yes, Degreed.
- In fact, only 4 of the Top 25 Tools for Learning, according to a survey of over 1,000 learning professionals by the C4LPT, are enterprise class products. Only one is an LMS.
- 4 of the top 10 are consumer social networks: Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn.
That means lots of L&D professionals are already using these tools for themselves!
- But few are fully leveraging them in their work.
So do more than just build, buy and push content.
- Crowdsource, curate and assemble it for your learners ...and enable them to do it, too.
Unum, an insurance company, wanted to help people move from “trainer-dependent learning” to independent learning.
- So one of their learning consultants read up on curation - studying the work of folks like Harold Jarche, Beth Canter, Robin Good and Harold Rheingold.
- Then he and his team started sharing RSS feeds around six core business competencies.
- They tried at least four free or low cost tools until they found what he thought was the right platform. They were specifically looking for something with strong tools for discovering and filtering content to make the “Seek, Sense, Share” model work.
- They started to channel relevant content to employees. And many created their own feeds.
- The company credits the shift with improving employees’ digital skills, helping them build stronger internal and external networks, and driving a culture of self-directed development.
- Just as importantly, The L&D team is now finding ways to use that constantly growing library of content to support other learning needs.
And the third thing is the systems for measuring and valuing learning…
- Workers are already using new technologies and systems for tracking and valuing all kinds of learning, not just training.
So are vendors.
- There have been around 150 adopters of xAPI to date, according to the standard’s creators
- But corporate adoption has been slow. When I ask people why, everyone says they’re still kicking the tires, learning or trying to figure out how.
But the choice isn’t just between SCORM and xAPI anymore. And employees are already embracing new solutionsthat show not just what they did, but what they can do.
- Here at Degreed, we’re closing in on ~1m user profiles
- Behance, an online community for graphic designers, showcases over 5m projects by 2m designers.
- There are actually well over 4m+ people with Mozilla open badges in all - and 14,000 organizations issuing them
- GitHub has 9.8m registered IT professionals with 23m+ repositories of code
- And there have been more than 3bn LinkedIn endorsements and hundreds of thousands of people have added certifications to their profiles.
So there’s no excuse anymore. You should measure more than formal training.
- And you should be recognize and valuing all kinds of learning.
The UK’s National Health Service recognizes that a lot of learning doesn’t happen in classrooms.
- It’s also expensive and not always feasible to take doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals off the floor for continuing education.
- So the NHS iis testing xAPI and a Learning Record Store system called WatershedLRS to track and analyze the resources their employees already use -- and to compare their formal and non-traditional learning to application on the job.
The experiment aims to show how the NHS can use those insights to focus its investments on the most cost-effective learning activities - regardless of the format.
Guitar Center – Badges + continuous feedback and recognition http://www.saba.com/media/18562/cs_guitar_center.pdf
IBM - http://www.elearningguild.com/DevLearn/sessions/session-details.cfm?event=380&fromselection=doc.4055&session=7021
One big imbalance between supply and demand: The workforce is heavily focused on developing themselves to be ready for what comes next.
In a similar survey we did last year, workers told us they spend about 1% of the average work week on their employers’ training. That’s just 37 minutes. However, they invest 3.3 hours a week on their own – that’s 5x more time!
- And almost two-thirds said they would put in even more time if they received some kind of credit or recognition they could leverage for professional growth.
People want more than the typical L&D catalog, though. They put almost as much time into personal interests as they do into professional ones.
- 75% invested their own money (an average of $339) in career-related development over the last 12 months.
- In the last four years, since MOOCs started, more than 32m people have signed up with the top 5 providers.
What that says to us is that people will readily invest their time and even some money in development opportunities that fuel their growth and enrich their lives.
- So don't just train workers; you should also aim to transform them – and do it through informal, on-demand learning as well as structured, scheduled training.
- They’re both essential now.
I think it’s notable, then, that what is obviously a critical lever is not being pulled broadly or effectively enough.
ATD – the Association for Talent Development – released some interesting new research just before the holidays. Which means a lot of people probably missed it. The headline, if you’re one of them, is that only 38% of L&D professionals think they’re ready to meet the needs of tomorrow’s learners.
- Almost two-thirds of people in their survey believe that the ways workers learn and develop are evolving. But most are not doing much to evolve or adapt.
Only a minority of learning functions are even trying to understand and prepare for changes in the ways we learn.
- I think that’s only partially right, though.
Mastercard is a client both Degreed and MindTools share, and they also happen to be a global talent development team that does different from most of their peers. And it all started with what we are talking about today – thinking differently about how they approach learning and then what tools they needed to facilitate a learning culture where the learner was in control.
When you talk to people there and ask them what the purpose of the learning function is there, they’ll tell you it’s to connect people to the resources, tool and people they need to do their jobs. You rarely hear the word training.
Conventional solutions like courses are certainly part of the toolkit, but they don’t dominate the conversation the way they do in many companies I’ve spoken with.
Our sponsor there, Steve Boucher, who runs talent development for the company’s operations and technology workers, likes to say all the time that he doesn’t want to tell employees what they have to learn; he wants to show them what they can learn.
That might sound subtle. But it triggers a very different set of priorities. And those priorities – which are tied to helping the company build the capabilities it needs to execute a massive, multi-year digital transformation, always involve asking workers what they need. Back to what we have been talking about with the learner centric approach.