How To Make Learning More Engaging In 2022

Companies choose to implement employee learning programs for a wide range of reasons. For some, it is to boost company growth, sharing and delivering the knowledge needed for staff to develop and grow in their careers. For others, it may be simply a matter of sharing important details of procedures and regulations.

Many companies coming out of two years of challenging restrictions and pandemic related issues are using learning as an incentive for their staff through offering professional development packages designed to attract and retain valuable skilled employees. Considering that 76% of employees believe companies with additional training opportunities are more attractive as employers, this is a wise investment.

At Esus, we work with companies to produce bespoke E-Learning to meet all of our clients needs and requirements. Our clients regularly ask us for tips for increasing teams engagement with learning. Here’s what we tell them.

Understand Learner Motivation

Whether training is a requirement of the job or is an optional professional development module, the most motivated employees will be the most engaged. Engaged learners make a conscious psychological investment in the learning materials presented to them.

Encouraging engaged learning means motivating your audience and to do that, you need to understand their individual and group motivation.

Learner motivation is powered by two main forces; reasons that come from the self (intrinsic) and external motivation (extrinsic). Intrinsic reasons might include a desire for personal and professional improvement. An extrinsic motivator might be the incentive of gaining a promotion or rising up a salary scale.

Understanding intrinsic and extrinsic deterrents can also help you understand your audience’s barriers to learning. Someone whose previous experience with learning was difficult or fraught with problems might fear repeated failure or discouragement.

Part of any effort to make learning more engaging should include strategies to inspire your audience to want to learn. This might include providing recognition for previous achievements and encouraging the development of career plans.

Aside from motivation, the most important consideration for engaged learning is the learning content. We all learn in different ways and, in a world full of distractions, keeping someone’s attention takes effort. Here are some steps to making learning more engaging.

Make Learning An Obvious Priority

If you are introducing new training initiatives, one way to help employees adapt and engage is by demonstrating its importance. This can be achieved by taking into account the following three points :

1. Start the learning process early to show new members of the team that learning is part of your company culture. Use the onboarding process as a way to introduce training and learning and to let employees become familiar with the training platforms. In the first six months of a new role, employees are more engaged and will absorb learning as part of their role.
2. When training is prioritised and actively engaged with by company leaders and senior staff, that influence will trickle down. Seeing that their managers and team leaders are happily and willingly taking part in learning illustrates its importance.
3. Recognising and rewarding teams for learning is another way to show that it is an important part of the culture. Incentivising training for individuals and teams and offering career growth are both effective motivators.

Even if learning is an existing part of your company fabric, these methods can help boost engagement.

Demonstrate The Relevance

Whatever the theme or topic of your training, your employees need to understand its relevance to their role. When an audience understands how learning will improve their work or make them better in their roles, they will engage more. Relevance sparks interest and interest helps people focus and retain new information.

Vary The Delivery Style

Using bespoke E-Learning to deliver training and upskilling increases engagement of learners through the diversification of content. For example, in place of laborious training manuals, elearning modules are rich in media content (audio, video, and graphics.)

Unlike white label e-learning options, bespoke solutions invigorate your training content and raise it to another level. Delivery is tailored to client’s precise needs and a variety of interesting and engaging formats are used. At Esus our bespoke solutions include:

• Be-spoke imagery – proven to encourage better memory retention
• Gamification – to enhance the learning experience and increase engagement
• Video and animation – to present complex information in easy to digest video format
• Audio – to foster deep learning and improve memory retention

Engage The Learner’s Emotions

Studies have shown that emotions play a real part in memory function and help people recall information more easily. Using case studies and storytelling within your bespoke learning solution can introduce impactful images and language to boost memory performance. A case study, for example, could demonstrate the positive impact your service or product had on the life of a customer.

Make Learning Active

When learning is active it involves the learner in a more participatory way. A key component is to incorporate knowledge checks so learners can test their know-how as they progress. Knowledge checks, such as quizzes between modules help learners process what they have learned. It also helps them identify gaps in areas of knowledge where they can study again by re-doing a module or topic.

Talk To Us About Making Your Learning Materials Engaging

Contact Esus E-learning today to see how we can help you develop an engaging and bespoke e-learning solution info@esus.ie.