Dive Brief:
- It's one thing to create learning and development programs for employees; it's another to get employees to participate or engage in learning, says Kris Dunn, CHRO at Kinetix and founder and executive editor of Fistful of Talent. He shares 5 truths about learning and development in the workplace.
- Employees will often express the desire to learn more, but they don't follow through. Worse yet, employees do not care for certain accepted methods of training, but won't say anything. Dunn advises that learning should be more about the individual's experience and learners should be held accountable. All learning content, including videos, should be fun and somewhat entertaining.
- Corporate learning needs to be focused on end-results. That is how the learning will be connected to real business objectives. Employees should be able to take the new learning and experiment with it in their jobs to make it stick.
Dive Insight:
If corporate learning is going to be effective, then it must be based on reality. This comes from both the side of the company as it creates learning experiences that are of value to employees, and from employees as they need to be able to put this new knowledge into practice.
When companies create learning and development based on statistics about what they should be doing, they are only lying to themselves and employees. Christopher Pappas, founder of eLearning Industry, wrote an article about the ROI of corporate learning, and he makes similar points to what Dunn says here, particularly the section on improved knowledge retention. Companies looking to invest in learning and development need to be mindful of the true motivation behind this effort before they jump in.
