Marketing for L&D. Digital learning health check. Leaders as role-models.

Welcome to the second edition of 'Involve. Inform. Inspire.'

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MARKETING FOR L&D.

Marketers have known forever that you can't just build something and expect people to show up. The same is true of learning. You can’t just deploy learning content and expect instant engagement. You must identify your audience, understand them, seek them out and engage them. The notion of "Build it and They Will Come" just doesn’t work.

"You’ll never catch fish by simply sitting in your boat and waiting for the fish to jump in."

So, you might be thinking - where do I start? Isn't marketing, like, really complicated? How on earth am I going to figure it all out? You’re not alone. L&D professionals find marketing to be?one of their weakest areas .

But you don't need to know everything all at once! You don't need to become a supercharged marketing guru to get results. All you need to do is learn one new thing - one technique - and you'll start to see improvements.

So, here's a practical technique you can use straight away:

LEARNER PERSONAS

In a nutshell, a learner persona is a fictional representation of your target learner. You'll likely need several personas to complete the picture. Each persona will list out this imaginary learner's details, such as their motivations, skill levels, background, and more. This learner-centric approach will help you understand things from their point of view, which will then help you customise and target your learning to maximise appeal.

Enough talking! Just give me the step-by-step guide.

OK - we hear you. If you want to really delve into learner personas and discover how to apply this amazing technique to your L&D work, then help is at hand.

Our friends at MAAS Marketing ?? have kindly offered this 24-page eBook for you to download. It's packed full of great advice and tactics and will get you up to speed with building learner personas in no time at all.

Or, if you really want to get deep into the subject, we're running a certified masterclass - delivered live online for internal L&D teams. Grab a seat here before they sell out!

HOW HEALTHY IS YOUR DIGITAL LEARNING SERVICE?

Find out by asking these 5 questions

Myles Runham , LPI Fellow and Consultant

The real health of a digital learning service is about more than what we make and deliver. That persistent L&D fixation on delivery might sometimes be a sign of poor health, in fact. Well-developed technology and delivery muscles can mask neglect elsewhere.

So, how can you tell if you are in a good state of health with your digital learning? Are you, and it, really ready for the future? In my experience, there are five key questions to answer to understand where you are and where to focus your efforts to ensure future fitness. Every organisation has a unique context, but there are common threads to understanding it properly and thoroughly. These are distilled from many years working with corporate clients, platform and technology businesses and learning service providers.

The fact that none of these are specifically technology or content questions may seem counterintuitive. But real digital health needs deeper insights. It wraps design and delivery of programmes into a broader knowledge of your business context, what your audience cares about and the roadmap of technology delivery to contribute to those challenges over time. If technology and content were all we needed, digital learning health would be universal. It isn’t.?

Good answers to these questions (and the many related queries they uncover) are crucial to arrive at before you get close to technology decisions. They help to understand what you should use the tech for and how you will go about it. Answering them - honestly and with evidence - gives a good sense of those needs. Good answers get to the core characteristics of a healthy digital learning service. Without strength in these areas, sustaining value and impact will be a struggle.

What we need to be good at

To be clear, this is not an org chart or a description of roles. It is a structure for thinking about what your service needs to be able to do and to be good at. Depending on size, resource, and context, they can be organised in a number of different ways. The point is to have the right expertise at hand to steer what you do. That might be you and your team members. It might be contract resources and freelance experts. It could be through partnerships. The point is, without these capabilities, you will struggle to achieve what a valuable learning service needs to.?

The diagram is a shorthand version of what it takes to make and sustain value for your customers and their audiences. In summary:

The experience you offer needs to be managed and designed “from end to end and from front to back”. The whole thing, in all channels. The learning experience is vital but not the whole deal. All points of contact with you are parts of the service, as are the social collaborations you facilitate. You need to know your audience well, what motivates them and what they care about.

Your products (that combination of technology, business, and audience insight) need to focus on relevant problems. The relevance, in turn, needs to be guided by evidence of what your stakeholders and your audience value. One or the other alone will not create real value and will make sustaining it impossible. For many in L&D teams, managing relationships with suppliers of technology is not to be neglected. Vendors, IT, and procurement partnerships are important beyond managing transactions.

Relationships with business stakeholders - customers or partners or bosses - need to be more than transactional. Knowing what they want might not be the same as knowing how to help them most effectively. Hence, the meaningful relationship. This takes time, confidence, and a growing body of evidence to plan with together. Similarly, a genuine marketing approach to your audiences is built on real relationships and ongoing conversation. How do they see what you do? How important is it to them? Where else do they go for it? What do they say about you? This also takes time, confidence, and a growing body of evidence. What they think of the programmes and content you deliver is a good starting point, but not a sufficient end.?

Data is the oxygen of digital. It is impossible to be healthy without a good supply. As a profession, we have some distance to travel here. We need to move beyond learning data analysis and into organisation and business data to understand impact. We need to gather and manage data across our whole service and do it as a matter of routine. And we need to apply this evidence to our decisions. All manner of data can be useful - from an anecdote to an LRS - it’s not just the numbers that offer insight.?

Helpfully, a healthy digital learning service has a strong learning culture. There is a constant curiosity about how well products and projects are working and how to improve them. Experimenting, testing, and finding out are the hallmarks of maturity here. In part, this is about ways of working and taking decisions. It is also a measure of a healthy culture for the team. The cliché of mistakes being learning opportunities resonates. It is how the service improves. For what it’s worth, this is what a learning culture means to me and how we can exemplify it for our organisations.

8 CHARACTERISTICS OF EXCEPTIONAL LEARNING ORGANISATIONS

Giles Hearn FLPI, Chief Marketing Officer, LPI

In this series of monthly articles, we look at eight things that exceptional learning organisations do well - and suggest practical approaches to help you improve. Last month, we first looked at learning as a collective responsibility . Our second area of interest is leadership.

?2. ENCOURAGE LEADERS TO BE ROLE MODELS

There has commonly been a tacit pressure on leaders to appear infallible; an expectation that they have all the answers. But in these times of rapid change, the all-knowing, unquestioned, command-and-control leadership style is becoming increasingly rare.

Today's best leaders are those who can motivate and engage employees by admitting they don't know everything. Instead, they invite constructive feedback and build inclusive teams to tackle tough challenges. They openly show commitment to learning new things and exploring fresh ideas. They seek experiences and challenges outside of their comfort zone and then share what they have learned, and how they are applying it.

These leaders are today's role-models. By not elevating themselves above the struggle but becoming part of it, they are simply more authentic – and, by association, more inspirational.

As James Hampton , Head of People and Culture so eloquently puts it:

“An exceptional learning organisation has a self-aware, emotionally intelligent C-suite with a learning mindset who model learning as an enabler, and create the climates for mastery to take place.”

So, what's the practical take-away here?

As learning professionals, part of our role is to cultivate a learning mindset throughout the organisation - and this includes our managers and leaders. So, when it comes to building leadership programs, we need to:

• Establish throughout strong themes of authentic self-development, humility , and community influence.
• Motivate leaders to regularly document their personal learning journeys, their explorations, and their newly-acquired knowledge and skills.
• Encourage them to share openly with other leaders and with other teams, widening their field of influence and adding to the organisation's collective wisdom.
• Galvanise them to share stories of employee success (including their own) and to support, champion, and defend learning in all its forms.
• Reassure them that they can even admit mistakes and share the lessons they have learned from them.
• Help them realise that, by demonstrating a commitment to learning and performance, and implementing it as a collaborative partnership between themselves and their teams, they improve the whole mood of the organisation along the way.

The power of leaders as role-models cannot be underestimated, especially in today's hybrid working environments. Exceptional learning organisations are developing their leaders to proactively influence talent and learning, embedding them at the very heart of a human-centric mindset. So, look after your leaders!

That's all for now.

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