Currently, Learning and Development (L&D) professionals struggle with implementing learning programs at scale. L&D departments are strapped with limited resources for company-wide learning opportunities and also grapple with time constraints, distance, incongruity across departments, and poor engagement. Moreover, well-designed learning experiences must be tailored to an individual’s learning needs and their everyday work lives. All of this has become an ever-bigger challenge as organizations have adapted to remote learning and developed their remote learning strategies over the past 12 months. In many cases, traditional solutions are not scaling to the challenge.
Enterprise organizations partner with Qstream for its scalable microlearning technology, expert professional services, and implementation teams to address these learning complexities. The platform provides tools to engage and assess learners within an entire organization and analytics for skill gap identification. This complements overall L&D initiatives and enables learners to demonstrate content mastery.
Importance of Scaling Enterprise Learning
Scalable enterprise learning is crucial for two main reasons. First, corporations are in the early stages of an ongoing digital revolution that is changing how people work. Employees and executives contend with a rapidly changing global economy in which there is constant need for upskilling and for a dynamic workforce. Second, as McKinsey explains, “market capitalization” depends on “skilled employees, exceptional leaders, and knowledge” across all levels of an organization. Due to these factors, globalization of streamlined organizational practices – through digital L&D application – is highly consequential and inevitable for business transformation now more than ever. To accomplish this, L&D operations must align with a company’s “business and talent strategies” through large-scale learning across departments and regions. However, since current learning best practices are not implemented effectively in an enterprise capacity, this is achieved only 40% of the time (McKinsey). The Qstream platform proves vital for addressing this gap in scaling learning to an enterprise.
Best Practices for Scaling Enterprise Learning Programs
Scalable Learning Analytics
- Understanding the baseline: In order to realize unmet learning needs throughout the entire organization, companies must administer diagnostic tests to employees. Intuitively, access to this information at a global or organization-wide scale is advantageous for a company in pursuit of furthering its business goals. Such assessments provide invaluable insights not only into opportunities for training and knowledge acquisition but also into areas where an organization is already proficient and hence on pace with market trends.
- Analyze learning data at scale: Analytics must be used to monitor learners’ progress and proficiency levels throughout the duration of a training program. This allows for gap analysis and identification. Consequently, managers are better informed for effective and personalized coaching efforts for performance improvement. According to a report published by McKinsey, “data-enabled talent-management systems can increase the number of people meaningfully evaluated against new competencies and boost the precision of that evaluation.” Ultimately, analytics tell us where training initiatives should be focused and give us insights at high and granular levels for an entire organization. This degree of evaluation for skill gaps also illuminates any overlooked risks for businesses. Correspondingly, organizations are better equipped to make quantifiable (data-driven) decisions for business growth, such as generating more revenue.
SaaS for Learning Scalability
- Digitizing learning: In a globalized and cloud-based economy, L&D efforts need to reach remote learners (and reach them often). Digitized learning is essential for scalability and consistency of L&D initiatives across global or domestic departments and locations and for remote workers. Furthermore, as a business grows, decentralization may significantly contribute to inefficiency if a coordinated channel for the dissemination of homogeneous information isn’t proactively established. As McKinsey states, “technology [enables] faster, more flexible, large-scale learning” that can accommodate work lives and foster leadership development opportunities and communities across an organization.
- Learning technology digital ecosystems: L&D platforms should be easy to integrate on various channels (i.e., Salesforce, email, and mobile) for efficient and effective content delivery.
Aligning Individuals’ Learning Needs with Company Goals
- Learning alignment with business strategy: In order for an organization’s business goals to be realized and advanced, capability building and investment in human capital needs to be cultivated at scale through L&D initiatives. As McKinsey reports, “one of an L&D executive’s primary tasks is to develop and shape a learning strategy based on the company’s business and talent strategies.”
- Customized learning and feedback for the individual at scale: An effective learning platform synchronously accommodates an individual’s learning needs with an organization’s overall learning objectives. To accomplish this, the platform must meet the learner where they are at and provide personalized feedback. Naturally, this drives higher proficiency levels. Additionally, it allows for learning programs to be more accessible to the learner, which ultimately results in more engagement and internalization of content. This also caters to each employee’s busy schedule and privacy to learn at their own pace.
- Enterprise-wide learning: L&D efforts should scale across an entire organization. According to McKinsey, L&D initiatives should be “an organizational journey, not cohort specific.” Studies show that organizations that have been recognized for their successful L&D programs have interventions throughout an enterprise. This also allows for L&D programs to be more aligned with business goals since the initiatives are contextualized to the corporation’s overall leadership-development and business strategy.
- Center of excellence: Organizations should designate owners to manage all aspects of learning technology for an enterprise L&D program from implementation, content creation, deployment, and evaluation of the ROI of the program. The center of excellence works closely with the technology’s vendor expert services team to ensure desired outcomes are achieved.
Engagement
- High engagement: Learning cannot occur, nor can material be retained or put into practice unless learners are engaged. Therefore, successful L&D programs should integrate gamification, scenario based learning, assessments, competitions amongst employees, and real-world application-based activities into their curriculum to maintain high engagement levels.
- Relevancy and reinforcement: It’s scientifically proven that employees more fully relate to the material and apply learnings more effectively in their actual work environment if they engage in scenario-based challenges. Rather than the learning exercise becoming “just more content” thrown at them to digest, scenario-based challenges gain interest through an active cognitive interaction. Ultimately, scenario-based learning challenges create an authentic experience for learners, provide an environment to pilot practices, and allow employees to apply what they have learned with confidence after they’ve completed training. This fosters more robust performance and competency levels across the board. Employees within all levels of an organization are enabled to adroitly and cohesively apply their instruction. Learning should be constantly reinforced to ensure that learners internalize the material and learn from their mistakes.
- Manager engagement: L&D initiatives should have managers involved to monitor learner progress, through analytics, and coach accordingly. To the extent that managers share accountability for learning, their engagement has a multiplier effect on overall employee and team engagement.
How Qstream Incorporates Scalable Learning Best Practices
Through precise incorporation of the best practices into its software, Qstream is the only microlearning software proven to boost learner proficiency and performance at scale through engagement, reinforcement, and analytics. Qstream’s SaaS platform furnishes appealing scenario-based challenges and informative assessments and feedback. From these interactions come extensive analytics that monitor a learners’ journey throughout a program and leaderboards that cultivate healthy competition. As a result, learning is made tangible and accessible within all levels of an organization. Consequently, Qstream seamlessly provides insights for coaching opportunities and allows for enterprise implementation. Qstream’s user-friendly interface, integration functionality, and content creation guidance features allow for an efficient set up process. Accordingly, organizations can rapidly imbed customized, engaging, and effective content and deliver multiple initiatives to the entire enterprise in a short amount of time.
Every few days, Qstream routinely pushes out new and/or previously taught information on any device to increase new knowledge acquisition or reinforce already mastered material. Moreover, the learning exercises are short and spaced out. This accommodates employees’ busy schedules and provides effective training concurrently. Thus, employees are not only consistently engaged and up to date but also have multiple chances to reinforce, refresh, and internalize critical material on their own time. Qstream’s scenario-based challenges don’t just test for completion, as do most learning management systems activities. Instead, they test for proficiency and provide extensive feedback and real-time granular analytics to address learning gaps.
Through deployment of these features, Qstream leverages the spacing and testing effect to promote knowledge retention and assess mastery of a course. This in turn boosts employee performance. Such behavior change solves an organization’s pressing business problems, drives its business strategy, and generates revenue and business growth.
As organizations grow and the economy becomes more global and digitized, scaling enterprise learning is non-negotiable. Microlearning is the new era of corporate training. Qstream’s technology provides a proactive solution to help organizations invest in these efforts, and therefore, in their most valuable possession – human capital.
