It’s no stretch to say that it’s harder to keep people’s attention nowadays. With the current and upcoming generations of employees having YouTube and TikTok at their fingertips, learners have rapidly decreasing attention spans – some studies say it’s down to 8 seconds.
Now, more than ever, it’s important that L&D strategies grab learners’ attention and give them actionable help, rather than having them read lots of content and try to figure out how to apply it. Give learners what they need in a way that they want to receive it and can actually implement it.
So, with that in mind, here are four essential tactics to elevate your L&D for current and future learners’ needs:
1. Listen and action learners’ needs
Asking for learner feedback on their course experience is a vital part of the L&D process. Creating action points based on learner feedback is even more valuable.
Each learner has different circumstances and situations they come across each day. It may be advantageous to understand any pain points that they have during training and share some suggestions for improving the experience.
2. Encourage collaborative learning
Especially in a post-pandemic era, people need people. Hybrid workers need to be able to work easily with each other, bounce off ideas and feel heard—no matter where they are working from.
Training can be a great way to encourage collaboration and keep the conversation flowing between teams. Social learning is a helpful and modern strategy that you should implement in your L&D plans, and really leans into the 20% of the 70/20/10 model.
3. Keep the connections alive through mentorship programs
It’s easy to feel disconnected from co-workers or managers in a fully or semi-remote workplace. By being creative, L&D experts use training and collaborative development to keep the connection between leaders and teams alive.
Mentorship is an important component of any workplace, and when partnered with courses, it can be a great tool to advance an employee in their job and career. It also helps break down silos and ensure structured time between senior and junior associates. Mentorship programs are particularly valued by millennial workers, who are the majority of the workforce today.
Investing in your leaders to help foster a culture of growth and development goes a long way. In remote settings, it’s much harder to foster employee engagement, so giving your organizational leaders specific, actionable tasks to help build their teams can go a long way.
4. Extend learning beyond the classroom
All learning solutions – whether hybrid, in-person, or remote – should focus on helping learners implement training concepts into their everyday work. By extending learning beyond the classroom and giving employees actionable, tangible tasks to complete that reinforce formal learning, you can ensure sustained implementation of training concepts.
The best way to do this is through on-the-job activities—tangible and bite-sized tasks employees can do in their day-to-day to improve skills and capabilities while they carry out their roles.
Pushing the boundaries of learning beyond the classroom and integrating it into an employee’s workday is the best way to ensure long-term behavior change and help prove L&D’s impact to real business metrics.
Want to learn more about how Fortune 5000 companies are implementing these kinds of approaches? Chat with us to discuss innovative and effective learning strategies for your organization.