Why employee learning has failed, and how to do better
The corporate training market is now over $200B per year with $5B spent on learning software alone [1]. It’s undoubtedly a huge industry but one that has been designed for the requirements and pain points of large enterprises.
We’ve interviewed 50+ leaders at small companies (mostly technology startups) over the past few months trying to understand their pain points with employee learning. Inevitably, the same few questions come up:
- “Do people really take learning courses offered by their employer?”
- “Why should I pay for learning when my employees learn by themselves?”
- “Isn’t corporate learning only for large companies that can afford to waste money?”
- “How can you prove that employee learning has a positive ROI?”
So how do we improve employee learning and ensure both the employee and employer are receiving meaningful value? We’ve uncovered five key elements that future learning software will need to factor in order to provide a more engaging experience:
- The best learning content is not in your company
Does your company have a library of learning courses offered to employees? When is the last time you went to it to learn a new skill? 90%+ of employees will never log into a Learning Management System or learning content library. Why would they, when better learning content is a quick Google search away?
Employees learn through articles, YouTube videos, blog posts, forums, podcasts, and other forms of online content, not in traditional learning management systems:
2. Learning needs to be social
Employees are more engaged and retain information better when learning is social. Studying a topic once by yourself will typically result in remembering only 28% of material. Repeating material helps bring up recall to 46% but the best way to remember material is to actually discuss with others — this leads to ~70% information recall [2].
When employees are left to learn on their own, they will inevitably learn and retain less. Today, people often try to make learning more social at their organizations via a tool like Slack, but Slack is fundamentally a communication platform and not a learning platform. We think that learning is important enough to deserve a stand-alone solution that is designed for the learning workflow.
3. Learning should occur every day
100 days into a new role, employees start to hit a learning plateau. At this point, they are fully on-boarded and up to speed on the tools and skills necessary to do their job, but not necessarily excel at it. Finding incremental learning opportunities becomes harder and harder — there’s only so much you can learn from your organization’s internal resources. Any additional learning you decide to take on typically requires a significant time commitment outside of work [3] to your already (probably overwhelming) job.
4. Learning should be personalized
Personalization has spread into all aspects of our lives. We expect personalized content when we check our Facebook feed, search for restaurants, or find music. Learning and development must move into this direction as well.
In the first generation of learning management systems, employers were primarily focused on compliance training that was necessarily the same for every employee. In the 2nd generation, focus shifted towards general skills training and enablement (think sales, marketing, finance, etc). In the next generation of learning content, employees will be looking for continuous learning of skills— some potentially unrelated to their current job requirements. Employees, particularly millennials, are changing jobs more rapidly than ever, and learning software will need to keep up with this new reality.
5. Employers must embrace a learning culture
In order for employees to continuously and effectively learn within their organizations, the culture of learning needs to change. Learning should be embraced, employees should be encouraged and rewarded for gaining new knowledge. Learning shouldn’t be something you do on your own, hide from your employer, or have to pay a lot of money for. There is a wealth of knowledge that exists inside and outside organizations, yet very few companies are systematic about organizing and curating the knowledge they have.
At Atla, we’re redesigning the learning experience. If you’ve struggled with effective learning at your organization we’d love to get in touch.
John
john@atla.app
