There Are Only Two LXPs

There are hundreds of companies that call themselves LXPs but only two distinct methods of enhancing the learner experience have stood out since Josh Bersin started using the term "LXP" years ago.

Static LXPs and Blended LXPs

Ultimately, LXPs seek to address the challenges of Relevance, Engagement and Outcomes for learners to shift the conversation from "compliance-based learning" to a "life-long learning" focus. In the sections below, I'll take a deeper dive into the differences between a Static and a Blended LXP in relation to relevance, engagement and outcomes.

Static LXPs tackle the content challenge by focusing on one of the core LMS challenges of having thousands (or tens of thousands) of learning resources (Interactive content, Videos, Articles, web links...) but almost no way to get the critical content to the right people at the right time.

While an LMS is an excellent system of record, it ultimately only solves the learning need of compliance learning management, which results in the need for better curation of content.

Static LXP companies realized early on that L&D departments are often understaffed and need quick-wins to solve the negative 50 NPS scores that plague them. These LXP companies were able to take the content hosted by the LMS and then correlate profile information about the learner to make relevant content recommendations.

Relevance: Static LXPs are highly relevant, assuming you have the right content in your LMS. A key strength of the Static LXP is that AI and Machine Learning work with tags and observed behavior to better identify what is relevant to specific types of learners, thereby increasing the relevance of the recommendations. This also takes the effort off of the L&D teams so they don't have to worry as much about challenges like Learner Marketing, curation and other specific skills that can be a challenge for less mature organizations.

A watch-out for Static LXPs is that they often don't host content; they generally only aggregate it. So you will often be required to have a hosting solution (usually an LMS) to be the backbone of the LXP. If you lack tagging metadata in your LMS, you may have to invest a lot of time into governance and cleaning up your content before it is useful.

Engagement: As an extra layer of engagement, Static LXPs can often recommend content to others and allow users to create/share their own editorial-based pathways. However, due to the less focused nature of the Static LXPs, organizational engagement around strategic goals can be a challenge for these platforms.

These features can also present challenges regarding governance. As you can imagine, if you have everyone adding content to a platform, you can quickly become overwhelmed with low-quality learning resources that conflict with each other.

Outcomes: This has been the critical limitation for these systems. If you remember the original challenge that Static LXPs were addressing (too much content), this helps you to understand why they are limited in outcomes. Static LXPs have become the homepage of the LMS, and since most of these systems cannot host the content themselves, they become limited to the measurements that the hosting system can provide. These content-focused systems have tended to lack robust tools for reporting meaningful measurements that go beyond "time-spent" and "resources viewed." As a result, outcomes tend to be similar to (if not the same as) what an LMS would be able to provide.

The Blended Learning Experience Platforms (or what Josh Bersin Calls "Program Platforms") have started to receive a lot more attention since the COVID crisis.

Organizations that were predominantly using Face-to-Face (F2F) are now challenged to find ways to recreate the deeper active learning that F2F previously filled. Since Blended LXPs have focused on collaboration and activity-based active learning to demonstrate results, they have largely been filling this need.

Relevance: This is a crucial difference between the Blended LXP and the Static LXP. Blended LXPs create relevancy from the cohorts of learners who are collaborating on a specific development topic. For example, if an organization has identified a strategic need and built a journey on "Managing for the First Time," this course will be highly relevant and tailored to that group of learner's needs.

The challenge for many organizations is that the Blended LXP requires organizations to understand the moments of need and then build strategic programs that translate content into context-based activities that align with the organization's strategic goals. When working with resource-constrained L&D departments, this can be a challenge to implement and often requires collaboration with a strategic partner who can help develop and implement successful solutions.

Engagement: Blended LXPs create engagement by connecting people in your organization and allowing them to control the learning experience. By focusing on active learning in a cohort environment, learners are not only able to better develop skills, but they come back because the experience is connected to their real-life needs. This allows organizations to create call-to-actions and better leverage learner marketing towards a specific goal or purpose.

Blended LXPs also create streamlined (unified) experiences that create a clear path for learners, so redirections outside the learning environment and annoying pop-ups are eliminated. Blended LXPs allow you to integrate all the parts of your learning journey into a single coherent story for your learners, making the training experience feel straightforward and complete. This helps build the macro skills that learners who are newer to a subject need (over 50% of all training today is macro).

Outcomes: Because Blended LXPs focus on active learning activities, they can also export more meaningful data. This is similar to the differences between SCORM tracking vs. Tin Can/xAPI tracking because the system is built around the idea that activities are the elements that drive learning rather than content. These data give you the ability to extract meaningful measurements and causality from your learning journeys.

At a minimum, a Blended LXP will be able to tell you the Net Promotor Score (NPS) of each of the learning journeys you've created, but they can do so much more. Blended LXPs can integrate diverse assessments into all elements of a learning journey and give you the ability to directly assess learners before, during and after the training takes place using sophisticated methods and tools.

Static LXPs are a great solution to solve the problem of too much content and poor accessibility, but they may not be the ideal solution if you are trying to measure organizational change or obtain metrics that go beyond what a traditional LMS would provide you.

Some questions to ask before acquiring and deploying an LXP:

• What are the KPIs that we need to achieve? What do we need to measure? How will we measure?
• What are the strategic organizational needs that a digital transformation can be a part of? How can we align with these organizational needs and ultimately defend the L&D / OD budget in the coming year(s)?
• What does success look like after a digital transformation? What is our direction, and what are our milestones over the next 3-5 years?