“But my team doesn't have time for learning!”
Absolutely every L&D manager has heard some variation on the above - most likely every week! There aren’t many employees who feel like they have plenty of time to learn alongside their day-to-day tasks, but there are a whole lot who believe that workplace learning is just a time-consuming distraction from getting through their spiralling to-do list.
That’s why today’s organisations are prioritising hyper-efficient learning where learners can get in, learn what they need and get back to their jobs. After all, why force learners to click through a 45-minute elearning course if you can direct them to the exact information they need?
At 5app, we’re big fans of saving time through simplicity, so read on to discover our five time-saving tips…
A common complaint we often hear is that it takes too long for learning admins to send out notifications and reminders to complete content. Once you’ve identified everyone who needs a reminder, then sent the message, then dealt with any back-and-forth in the replies, a simple notification can easily seep across days.
Automated internal comms (we call them nudges) make it so much faster to get those reminders out and get people ticking off their training. For instance, if you have annual compliance training, you can set up automated nudges to remind everyone ahead of time, with automated follow-up messages for anyone who’s lagging behind. This cuts out a lot of tedious admin for your L&D team and gets the message across faster to your learners.
Users form an opinion on a website in just 0.05 seconds. That’s twice as fast as a blink! In that moment, 94% of first impressions are related to the design of your site, so it pays to ensure everything is crystal clear and looks great.
But it goes beyond look and feel. Users spend an average of 6.44 seconds looking at the main navigation menu when they first visit your site, second only to the logo. Your site navigation is the most important tool you have to connect the right people to the right content, so it should be one of your main focus areas when you’re planning the structure of your learning platform.
Best practices for ensuring intuitive navigation for your learning platform include:
Imagine if someone asks you when Anne Boleyn was beheaded and you send them to the Wikipedia page about the Tudors. Sure, they’ll find the answer eventually, but it’s certainly not the quickest way to connect them to the relevant information.
That’s why content curation is so important. The L&D team should work closely with team managers to create curated collections of content so employees can get their questions answered quickly.
5app academies solve this challenge by empowering every team to build their own customised space that contains all the content a team needs, and nothing they don’t. These hyper-relevant, targeted academies are focused on the unique needs of a specific audience, whether that’s by location, skill, level of seniority, department or something else entirely, and contain information in one place, meaning nobody has to go on a wild goose chase to find what they need.
74% of learners access learning from their mobile devices at least once a week, and a staggering 89% of millennials access workplace learning from their phones. The more accessible your content, the lower the barriers to entry, and the better your engagement will be.
Additionally, not all learners will be based at a desk or have regular access to a desktop computer. Instead of forcing these employees to track down the right device to access learning, putting it in the palm of their hands (literally) ensures they get what they need, when they need it, when it can make the biggest impact.
Sometimes, L&D just needs to get out of its own way. If you require employees to complete a request form, or go via their managers, or generally jump through hoops to access learning, you’re making it much harder than it needs to be!
Self-service resources remove the middleman, whether that’s L&D or the line manager, allowing employees to take control of their own learning and development. By creating a comprehensive knowledge bank or pool of learning resources that’s easy to navigate, filter and search, you’re putting the power into the hands of learners, which is far more operationally efficient than adding unnecessary steps into the learning process.