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With a Straightforward Learning Experience Platform Built for Teams
Discover Your True Learning Power
Discover Your True Learning Power | 2
Learning technology hangs on the brink of disruption. Young workers, desperate to grow their careers, are crushed by over $1.5 trillion in student loans, while soaring tuition prices leave formal education out
of reach for many more.Organizations have stepped up, investing massive resources
into corporate learning and development (L&D), according to
LinkedIn’s 2020 Learning Report. Many large organizations
are also dropping bachelor’s degree requirements; they’re
emphasizing skills development over formal education.
This leaves the field wide open for tech-enabled learning to take the lead.
But traditional learning technology has failed to keep up with the myriad
demands and formats of content, media, and user experiences today’s
world requires. Add to that the structural changes undergone within
organizations — flatter, leaner, and remote networks of teams — and you
have a recipe for category confusion.
No wonder RedThread Research analysts have called learning technology
the “wild, wild west” and offered the term “learning tech ecosystems” to
define next-generation learning platforms.
In short, L&D leaders today need a flexible, nimble
platform to get courses up and running quickly, with
embeddable content, social learning, and analytics that
drive real business outcomes.
And that’s called a learning experience platform (LXP).
With an LXP, you can discover your true learning potential and amplify the
performance of your people.
Let’s see what that looks like — and how your organization can discover
your true learning power.
Discover Your True Learning Power | 3
The Learning Experience Is Changing FastWork itself is going through dramatic changes, leading many
organizations toward reskilling their employees to keep pace.
PwC’s 2020 Global CEO Survey found that researchers and
respondents concluded that four key forces are driving the
reskilling and upskilling imperative:
• Increasing job automation
• Decreasing talent availability
• Decreasing mobility of skilled labor
• Aging talent
Along with these trends, COVID-19 has forced organizations to
shift to remote work nearly overnight.
We’re seeing hard data on these trends, and organizations are
responding. Some are doing well, some are doing poorly.
Discover Your True Learning Power | 4
A Wall Street Journal article, “Why Companies Are Failing at Reskilling,” highlighted
several organizations having difficulty reskilling their people. Why? Because the digital
transformation has transformed industries. To keep up, organizations have hired talent
from external sources. But the labor market grew tight, so leaders had to find a new way
to transform their talent pools. As the article pointed out:
“Sometimes, the required skills aren’t easily taught to existing
employees, experts say. It’s also often because companies have
only a hazy sense of what their internal talent is capable of, and
migrating large numbers of employees into new positions requires
time, money, and commitment.”
Other researchers, such as those at IBM, argued in “The Enterprise Guide to Closing the
Skills Gap” that learning is key:
“While lifelong learning has always been critical, our digital world
now requires new ways of working, which makes lifelong learning
a must to the long-term success of organizations and individuals.
As such, organizations should consider the propensity to learn as a
top skill in employees. The propensity to learn and embrace lifelong
learning should be encouraged and empowered by organizations
and considered key requirements in hiring.”
As a result, at the heart of this
transformation is a robust learning
strategy and a platform to create an
environment of learning. Josh Bersin, as
just one example, argued — and continues
to argue — that learning technology
is quickly evolving, that platforms are
becoming integrated across the employee
experience, and that “learning in the
flow of work” will transform the learning
technology market for good.
Though the COVID-19 crisis has disrupted
the talent market and organizational
structures of businesses, it’s still clear
that a new future of corporate learning is
taking shape.
So, what does this new future look like?
We believe learning leaders need four key
solutions to develop critical talent and
maintain a competitive advantage in this
new future.
Discover Your True Learning Power | 5
4 Key Solutions for Future Learning Technologies
To stay competitive and reskill a
dynamic workforce in a more dynamic
environment, you need to lean into
these solutions that are forming the
future of learning technology.
Discover Your True Learning Power | 6
Because the pace of change is
accelerating so quickly, as a learning
leader you need an LXP that lets you
quickly create and update courses.
And by quickly, we mean in a matter
of minutes, not days. We see next-
generation technologies accomplishing
this in three ways: modular approaches;
embeddable, third-party content; and
simple user experience.
MODULAR APPROACHES
Though course design may sound like an esoteric concept, it’s critical
that LXPs have a modular approach to designing courses so your
creation, revision, and distribution of learning content can occur as
quickly as possible.
Similar design methodologies have been adopted by other
disciplines — front-end web design, email marketing, and other
drag-and-drop approaches. Not only does this approach speed up
the creation process, it expands the accessibility of users, who can
now create courses themselves. Traditionally, only experienced web
administrators could build content and distribute it to their teams.
We’re betting that all of that can change.
With this approach, whole sections of content can be deleted or
repurposed in seconds to retain only the most relevant content.
Seamless Course Creation1
Discover Your True Learning Power | 7
EMBEDDABLE, THIRD-PARTY CONTENT
Speaking of content, the internet has given learning leaders
a basically unlimited resource library from which to draw
nearly all information known to our species. YouTube alone
has courses from world-leading experts — for free — on
sophisticated topics like corporate finance and Python
programming, and nuts-and-bolts topics like negotiation
and public speaking. Learners can also find written content,
podcasts, tutorials, sandboxes, and communities for any
subject they have a desire to learn.
Of course, this isn’t meant to exclude the important content
that’s unique to your organization — especially for training
and compliance or content that requires subject-matter-
specific expertise that your organization requires. But it’s vital
to recognize the sheer volume of information that’s freely
available to your people online.
If you’re a next-generation learning leader, it’s become your
job to curate, craft, and moderate these courses so your
learners can consume them in a reasonable amount of time
and in a way that has a direct and positive impact on their job
functions and careers.
SIMPLE USER EXPERIENCE
To help your learners consume the content in a reasonable
amount of time, they’ll need an extremely simple UX to guide
them through the information they’re meant to learn.
You also need a simple UX for your administrators to create and
manage the content, to pull reports and analyses, and to facilitate
discussions and feedback throughout the learning experience.
In our conversations with leaders, the most requested solutions
we hear center on the experience of the platform for leaders
and learners: quick, embeddable content, user-friendly video
players, and assignment creators and graders, and many others
experience-related functions and features.
We won’t belabor the point here. Many of you understand the
value of a great user experience. But it is and will continue for
some time to be a key component of any learning technology.
By making the course creation and administration seamless
and simple for every user, we believe we can usher in
the future that learning is poised to transform.
Discover Your True Learning Power | 8
Another key to the learning experience
is to incorporate social aspects of the
modern learning environment. You never
learn in a silo: Instructors or experts
explain the content, learners debate the
points or ask clarifying questions, and
then they validate their findings with
peers, friends, and family.
Why should learning in an
organizational context be any
different? That’s why we’re seeing
the rise of social learning take hold in
many leading organizations.
Within the modern business, you have more than just departments or
business units. You’ll find affinity groups based upon race or religion,
or have networks of distributed teams working with other teams
in the office or with contractors, vendors, and SMEs both internal
and external. The modern organization is more like an ecosystem
comprising individuals who are all learning different things from
different groups for different purposes.
Much like a modern social media platform or wiki site, we see the
need for LXPs to create communities of like-minded groups taking
courses with each other, commenting and leaving feedback for each
other, all with their own feeds and with content built in.
Unfortunately, we know too many organizations that are afraid to
take these steps and to lead the future of learning. They’re afraid
of letting go of control. With so many distributed teams, dynamic
feedback and course materials seem like a “dark web” waiting to
happen. However, we embrace this future. We learn best when tools
are put into the hands of the people, when questions are surfaced,
and when we all learn from each other — expert or not.
Social Learning Experiences2
Discover Your True Learning Power | 9
That’s why we aim to create deeper
integrations with many other
platforms — from Google Docs and
Microsoft Office to GoToMeeting,
Zoom, Stripe, and Zapier.
We want to harness the power of the open internet to facilitate learning at every level.
That’s how we all progress as a
society and as businesses — by
giving everyone access to the
information they need, so they
can spark innovation and growth
to drive us forward.
Discover Your True Learning Power | 10
Meaningful Analytics
Data and analytics is the future of business.
We don’t have to convince you of this. So, how
can analytics transform learning and learning
technology? A few important ways.
FIRST, ANALYTICS CAN HELP DETERMINE WHAT KIND
OF CONTENT YOUR LEARNERS ARE LOOKING FOR.
For example, a data collection from Google shows that
“how to” videos are the most watched content category
on YouTube, and that 7 in 10 viewers use YouTube for help
with their work, studies, or hobbies.
Information like this can help you as a learning leader
double down on quick, pragmatic content that helps your
employees learn new skills that help them complete daily
activities, like how to advance their Excel wizardry or how
to enhance their PowerPoint presentations.
SECOND, ANALYTICS CAN HELP DETERMINE HOW TO
DISTRIBUTE CONTENT TO YOUR LEARNERS.
It’s no secret that large firms like Netflix and Facebook use
advanced analytics — machine learning, for example — to
personalize relevant content to their users. However, you don’t
need bleeding-edge technology to make a big impact on making
your content more relevant. With just a few reporting features, you
can distill insights into actionable tasks for your L&D team.
Here are two examples:
• Pull weekly reports on the most visited courses and
communities to get a pulse for what your organization is
looking for.
• Use data to see what content learners want to narrow the
scope of the content library.
From these very simple reports, you can generate insights to more
effectively use your seamless course-creation tools to create
content your people are already otherwise consuming.
As a leader, you know data and analytics are the future of business. Our point here is this doesn’t have
to be intimidating. You don’t need to spin up neural networks and quantum computers just to help your
people learn. A few basic reports on how your employees are navigating your platform will do the trick.
3
Discover Your True Learning Power | 11
Transparent Pricing
It’s uncommon for learning technology providers to
price by administrator. That’s a more typical pricing
model for a content authoring tool or other SaaS
platforms. Traditionally, however, learning technology
vendors price by the user, which can cause a problem
for larger organizations that have thousands of users.
They eventually will want to limit the amount of users —
limiting the amount of learning.
We believe the future of learning must be
completely different.
A while back we were brainstorming durable ways we can
better support companies and their learners. We know
the importance of resilience, action, connection, and
continued learning, so we wanted to make sure we were
empowering organizations, leaders, and teams in the best
way possible.
Without diving into too much detail, it was a profound
meeting for our team. We asked ourselves, “Wouldn’t
it be crazy if we didn’t charge per learner?” And then,
“Wait, why do learning management systems charge
per learner?”
It’s as if the whole industry were set up to
disincentivize its own usage. And we were right there
with them! So, we decided to make a major change.
That’s why we committed to pricing our LXP by the
number of administrators. Now, your organization can
get your people — all of your people — back to learning.
Innovations like these will help us stay far ahead of
whatever the future of learning may bring.
4
The Future of the Learning Experience Is Yours to DiscoverThe future of the learning experience is wide open, and it’s up to us
as learning leaders to bring it to fruition. We hope you’re excited by
the possibilities of learning technology.
NextThought was built to create accessible learning for all of your
employees, administrators, and beyond, so you can achieve your
business goals — and discover your true learning power.
For all the talk of learning experiences in the flow of work, learning programs haven’t
evolved. Learning is still tied up as a department when it ought to be operating as a
mindset for individuals and teams.
NextThought is a learning platform built for teams. With social learning experiences,
seamless course creation, and meaningful analytics, NextThought delivers the learning
technology your organization needs to drive consistent outcomes for your business and
your customers. You know what you do best, so NextThought provides just what you
need to help your teams thrive. A straightforward solution built for learning.
That’s NextThought.
Request a Demo
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