How are organizations around the world grappling with the ever-changing business dynamics? How are they gearing up for the year 2021 and beyond in employee upskilling and reskilling? With the global pandemic taking a grip across the globe in 2020, most organizations had to rethink their business strategies to train and equip their globally dispersed workforce adequately. As organizations face this disruption, online learning has become the most effective approach to empower the remote workforce. Training can successfully help remote teams in mastering new skills and boosting workforce productivity. Remote teams also feel more prepared to face the disruptions and adapt to the change when they are suitably supported with learning and development.
Unlike traditional classroom training, the eLearning approach is more flexible, personalized, cost-effective, and perfectly caters to the training needs of Gen Z and the millennial workforce. Digitization and the growing use of mobile devices has resulted in the rising scope of the online learning approach. In addition, there is an increasing comprehension of how custom eLearning development is significant to corporate training.
Let us explore the top custom eLearning trends to help organizations tweak their training delivery strategies to boost the overall training impact and increase ROIs. The following trends for 2021 and beyond can help transform your business and unlock their true potential by meeting the training needs of the new-age workforce:
- Microlearning
Due to short attention spans and busy work schedules, employees don’t have enough time to consume lengthy training content. Here comes the role of microlearning. The delivery of short and digestible content chunks helps facilitate higher retention and quick knowledge consumption. The bite-sized content with 3-7 minutes of duration expels the long and tedious text-heavy content.
Microcontent can be created to meet the personalized training objective in a specific learning path. This enables learners to access the content at their convenience, thus making every minute of learning worthwhile. Another benefit of microlearning is that short content nuggets can be accessed across multiple devices- be it a laptop, smartphone, or tablet. This ensures flexibility and helps overcome the challenge of a short attention span.
- Content Curation
There are comprehensive information sources available on the Internet, making it tedious to identify the most relevant content. This is where the need for content curation comes into place. Curation enables users to access the most valuable information or access content that their instructor or trainer recommends.
More importantly, curation helps organizations utilize the existing content and repurpose information whenever required. As per a survey, 80% of leaders said they were veering from content development and shifting towards content curation to deliver relevant and timely information to their leaders(1).
- Upskilling & Reskilling
With an increasing shift towards remote-first culture, organizations have witnessed a change in how their employees learn and digest information. The traditional instructor-led approach is no more effective in keeping the remote teams connected and productive.
Today, soft skills are equally important as hard skills. Upskilling or reskilling on essential topics such as leadership development, communication, team-building, and decision-making have been prioritized over hard skills. It has become even more important for remote employees to hone their soft skills to remain productive. Effective online training on soft skills empowers employees to better fit into their job roles and quickly adapt to the changing workplace situations.
- Adaptive Learning
The increased adoption of Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality has taken adaptive learning to new heights. This popular trend focuses on custom eLearning, analytics, and pre-training and post-training assessments to boost the overall training impact.
Adaptive learning creates custom learning paths to ensure every learner can get the most out of the training process. This also depends on personalized feedback to provide the right content for the intended learners per their specific interests, learning habits, and job roles. With these benefits, adaptive learning will gain more popularity in the next few years.
Now is the time for organizations to reconsider their training strategies and adopt custom eLearning solutions that help engage, upskill, and retain the workforce. Keeping in mind the bespoke training needs, you can think whether microlearning, adaptive learning, gamification, or social learning will serve as the best approach for your workforce.
To know more about delivering personalized learning experiences for the millennial workforce, you can download the eBook ‘Personalized earning Experiences: Gearing up for the Millennial Workforce.’
