6 Reasons Why Learning Experiences will Replace the Course

LONDON, UK (April 11, 2017)

It has never been a more exciting time for those in the learning & performance profession. More and more technologies, tools, content & ways of thinking are becoming available all the time. And, although the answer to education has been the same for 5,000 years (since the first Sumerian classroom), for the first time the course is being challenged as the central point in learning design.

As learning professionals, we have fully recognised that "The Course" (face to face or online) was never going to be the utopian solution to develop learners, but without a better option available, all we could do was develop people the best way we could with the tools we had available. Those days are no more! New technology, big data, research and new thinking now allows us to break through the course centric view of learning and change in to something new - Learning Experiences. 

So what are the steps in creating Learning Experiences?

The real innovation that will spur the change of everything is measurement. Just as we have seen the marketing industry transform by monitoring "measurable outcomes" we will see easy access to data and insights become the same catalyst for change in learning and education transformation. Just 5 years ago, Chief Marketing Directors had far less scrutiny on their investments. Today, because data proves or disproves the value of a campaign, a CMO is now far more accountable for what they spend and to show measurable returns. Almost every CEO poses the same questions to their marketing team whenever they consider an event or campaign: "How do we measure the return on investment?" Is it in leads generated, pipeline acceleration or increasing the number of advocates? Exactly the same thing is happening in the learning world. The training companies that can prove, with measurable data, their value will be the winners and those that can't...will decline until they no longer have a sustainable business model.

A great example of measuring the business impact of learning was recently carried out by the UK learning team at Vodafone, who took 18 months of business intelligence data across 5,000 retail sales people and correlated that against learning engagement. They proved the same result as a previous A/B pilot, which showed that the people who are engaged in learning every day achieve 14% higher tNPS scores and 13% higher revenue compared to those not engaged ( an even wider impact was observed in regards to onboarding: 84% tNPS for people engaged to 12% tNPS not engaged) . Many organisations like EY, IHG and Carpetright are making measurement a standard so that they can see how well learning correlates to business impact. I absolutely see this as the start of a new world; the world with a relevant focused and truly appreciated L&D department that is in the heart of the business, valued not just for their opinions but also the insights that their data gives.

For L&D, the pioneers of the new world will become the most valuable and sought after professionals... in the same way that digital experts in retail have become highly sought after over the last few years. In retail, those that have worked out how to leverage offline and online advances in technology, and integrate them in the most harmonious way, are the ones that get first pick of their roles and can define their own package. The same is also true of learning professionals who now know that learning can directly impact business performance. They know how to prove real value in learning design and broadcast their results effectively, as well as compare them to teaching techniques that can be shown to have little or no impact on performance. 

The first step in designing a new modern measurable learning experience is to be critically clear over what we call the North Star - the learning experience is looking to influence and improve. Let us take a practical recurring example: Most organisations want to accelerate the speed to greatness of their sales people from a state of competence towards their highest performers.

So the first challenge is understanding the performance challenge. In this case, a learning architect would use their top performing salespeople as their benchmark,  the ones that are hitting their 150% of their targets and in a more traditional consulting way we digitise the formula for greatness e.g what are the steps across the sales process, which when they happen they increase the chance of succeeding.

The second step is all about bottling greatness in a quick high quality way, where the best person on each concept or step is recorded live in a 2 to 3 minute bite size video There is a new art in interviewing and extracting greatness: making the audience relaxed, asking the right question, so what comes out is the real magic along with great tone and passion. Because it is "captured live", there is no worry about scripting, sign-off and finding ways for instructional designers to explain each concept as you have the person whom everyone else wants to hear from bottled, ready for cutting and editing and animation if we want to add increased stickiness to the message.

Image 1. (right) Learning Plan Overview - Bottling greatness 

Next, is structuring those nuggets into bite size playlists and courses that everyone team can consume within moments throughout the day one bite at a time. One of the reasons why SCORM doesn't work here is that the structure is too cumbersome for people to go back to and we know that the search has to be instant if we expect our learners to go back the knowledge which is unlikely to be recalled from memory the first time they try to apply it. As Google knows, if knowledge isn't available within seconds then people will take a path that is, which is normally a person nearby or worse we simply guess.

Also, we know that just because someone watches someone explaining a concept or recognises an answer in a multiple choice question it doesn't mean they can articulate a key message themselves, so a preference in modern learning design is to use competency based questions where the new member of the team has to record themselves explaining each core concept, which then gets marked by an expert as passed and competent. 

 Most learning design stops at competent (the course) but now this is no longer necessary to limit learning design to stop at competence.

Most of us don't want our people to be competent, we want them to be great and to be the best they can be & to do that we need to evolve their habits and behaviours towards what the highest performers do.

Performance or observation assessments tools are a great way for senior members of the team to capture a record of behaviours in the field, for example capturing a detailed record of how the junior salesperson is doing at each stage of the meeting and sales process. The great thing is about capturing observations live is that the analytics engine now has a record of how a person's behaviours are improving over time, which should be heavily influenced by coaching where technology can also aid if capturing the coaches commitments to change based on the laser like feedback of the observation assessment.

 Image 2 (left): Example of a Learning experience Programme 

So now you've gotten your team to a level where they are past competent and on their way, through regular coaching and mentoring, to greatness. But we are in a world where things change quickly.

We have to learn fast and evolve if we are to keep our competitive edge, so within the learning experience we need the easiest most frictionless way for new knowledge to be captured and consumed by the best people across the company both within content and conversations.

Instant creation tools integrated into the learning platform are often the simplest way to record knowledge through videos or create quick articles but facilitated capture from the L&D or comms team is also a great way to capture new lessons learned internally.  

Culture is key to drive this new way of learning but technology can also accelerate it and this is where machine intelligence has a big part to play in designing effective learning experiences. Machine learning used well automatically suggests the best next bite of peer or top-down content to consume, so as we learn and capture knowledge, the best of this knowledge is automatically surfaced and recommended to people like them to their mobile, desktop or tablet, whenever our learners have 5 minutes to kill and believe your learning platform is a great place to spend those spare 5 minutes. So in essence as learning professionals we are competing for our learners time against YouTube, Facebook, Tinder and LinkedIn to choose self-development enough times that this becomes a daily habit.

However, we also recognise that great knowledge also exists outside of our organisation and we want to make sure that the best of this is also brought into the continuous learning experience, so by deeply integrating fuse in external automatic curation tools like Anders Pink, the sales team can get surfaced the best 5 pieces of bite size content on B2B sales from across the world every day, helping towards contributing to a great discovery experience for bite-size snacking. 

So how do we know if any of this is working? For our clients like Dixons Carphone, Hilti, Rentokil and others, we track everything and then we correlate this back to real business data. In the new world of learning measurement, we accept aspects of Kirkpatrick and evolve it. Learning programs and learning experiences measure backwards from the performance goals they are trying to improve - in the case of the sales team example it may be conversion rates and timescales, opportunity creation and business won. For customer success team, it is likely NPS. The performance data correlated to the organisational KPIs allows us to see that when behaviours improve closer to high performance then business performance moves with it.

Within modern learning experience design, we also correlate and measure day to day learner engagement (every click is now captured) and it is no wonder that there is always a correlation in the data between high performers and continuous learning engagement  - consuming, collaborating and creating. We have seen this statistic reinforced across 4 different customers in retail and hospitality on both sales and service KPIs e.g there is a constantly proven correlation between people whom you give the tools to develop themselves within a modern learning and their measured performance improvement. 

It's a really exciting time as we can measure and correlate learning outcomes and activity with business KPIs then its starts to become easy to choose how to answer that big question that business always asks "Where should we invest more money into learning and where should we invest less?". If we can answer this question open and honestly and with data to back it up then heads of learning and chief learning officers status will rise to the same level as Chief Marketing Officers and L&D (or learning and performance) & we will move closer and closer to the heart of the business, which is exactly where lifelong continuous learning should be.

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