According to TDn2K, one of the best ways to improve employee engagement is to provide opportunities for them to continuously grow and develop within your organization. Failure to respond to this need can result in costly turnover as well as negative impacts that trickle down to your guests.

The obvious way to handle continuous learning is to define a structured development program in a learning management system (LMS). By organizing content into a leadership ladder, you can guide employees through a progressive program that fuels their growth. This is a fairly traditional approach, but you can also drive a culture of continuous learning in a more unstructured way, which is the focus of this article. With the help of some simple tools, you can empower your staff to take advantage of just-in-time learning opportunities that help them stay engaged and enable ongoing growth.

1) Provide Access to On-demand Resources

Providing access to on-demand resources is a powerful way to empower employees in their own development. With just-in-time learning resources, such as policies, how-to videos, menus, job aides, recipes, courses, or links to external websites, team members can quickly access exactly the information they need to solve a specific problem. Solving a problem successfully reinforces the value of learning and helps employees feel productive and engaged.

The key to success in using on-demand resources is to make them easily accessible, and here are a few tips to help with that:

• Use microlearning techniques to keep learning opportunities bite-sized and easy to consume quickly
• Make resources searchable, using tags, categories, and filtering so learners can find just what they need at a moment’s notice
• Target access to resources by location type (such as corporate vs. franchise), role, or skill position, so learners do not have to sift through lots of content that is not relevant to them

 

2) Use Marketing Tactics to Engage Learners

Borrow a page from the marketing playbook by presenting your resources in an appealing manner. Customize thumbnail images to attract learners to content and help them recognize what they’re looking for more easily.

With a 5-star rating system that allows learner comments, your team members can help promote good content to their coworkers. This also provides instant feedback to the training department to help them improve content or fill training gaps.

3) Liberate E-learning Courses

Let learners discover and complete courses that interest them without having to wait for a manager to assign them. By providing instant access to all courses uploaded to your e-learning campus, you can maximize development opportunities with just-in-time training and provide refresher training on concepts that need reinforcement.

Make Continuous Learning a Reality

By leveraging a few tools readily available in popular LMSs, you can put a continuous learning program in place that will help your learners thrive. To learn more about tools that support continuous learning, see details of our Enhanced Resources release of DiscoverLink Talent. If your current LMS doesn’t support continuous learning as well as you’d like, contact us for a free demonstration today.