Unlocked Learning—why your audience matters | Coassemble

The most powerful and crucial part of any training process is your audience. If you create learning with no consideration to who’s consuming it, you’re already guaranteeing failure. To create an effective process that enables the best learning for your team, you need to start with your audience.

Traditional training silos training inside a separate environment from where your team works. Unlocked Learning is the next stage in Coassemble’s evolution and with it, you’ll be able to meet your audience where they engage the most. With Unlocked Learning, you’ll be able to:

• Rapidly create rich and engaging training content.
• Share courses via enrollment links and share URL’s.
• Measure analytics on every interaction, from any learner.

With this guide, you’ll learn how to recognize your training audience, how to train in-the-flow of work, and build engagement. Get ready to learn everything you need to know about why your training audience matters.

Why your training audience matters

Coassemble has always fought for the learner’s benefit in any training process. Every feature and tool we offer is to create a better end-user experience. To that end, we’ve built our platform so trainers can create engaging content and effectively analyze it. We even wrote a guide, the Learner-First model that explains how to put your learners first in any training process. In the ebook, we cover steps on how to create repeatable processes so you can automate some of your training tasks.

Focusing on your audience to build training content also provides insight into what knowledge they need to succeed. You might not necessarily send your sales team content marketing lessons any more than your product team lead capture strategies. Recognizing what your learning group needs can help you decide what the best knowledge to share.

It can be difficult to assess the best way to gather learners into similar groups. Some easy signifiers that can help you group your audience in learner personas:

• How long have they been with the company? Are they entry-level, mid-tier, or senior staff?
• What role do they serve in your business or team?
• What previous experience do they have already?
• Other similarities that are shared by your team.

Once you’ve started recognizing commonalities within your team and business, you can start creating audience groups. This lets you share a training course with them where they work. You accelerate this process by sharing knowledge with a team lead and encouraging them to share it with their staff. And by knowing who your training audience is, you can start delivering training where it’s most effective for your team.

💡 Pro Tip: If you want to get a jumpstart on building your learner personas, here are three resources for you. The first is a free, downloadable template that you can use to create your personas with. The second and third are our in-depth blog articles on exactly what steps you need to take to get the most out of learner personas and evaluations.

How learning in-the-flow of work builds engagement

Since traditional learning began transitioning to online training platforms, keeping knowledge sharing separate from work was always standard. You had one space for training and another space or platform where everyone communicated and worked. Being able to share knowledge where teams engaged with most (ie. Slack, Intercom, Hangouts, etc.) just wasn’t an option. But that’s exactly where the best training can, and should be delivered.

Ryan, our CEO has worked with several of our customers to consult on the best options for delivering training. He found that many of their teams were already sharing knowledge internally. Rather than setting up a separate training space, Ryan suggested some ways to deliver training where learners engaged most.

Understanding how knowledge is already shared internally helps you locate key areas your team would benefit from training. Learning in-the-flow of work as all about training right when your team needs it. Cues such as:

• Being stuck on a specific task.
• Having difficulty entering info correctly.
• Interacting directly with customers.
• Communicating with team members.

Any of these can become learning moments if you can deliver training to your team right then and there. This is where Unlocked Learning shines brightest. Instead of directly training, you can send team members a course when they need it, so they apply that knowledge immediately.

Learning in-the-flow of work is fastly becoming the latest learning trend according to this article by the Havard Business Review. The ability to complete training inside other platforms also standardizes how training can be fulfilled in a workday. Learners can also pursue learning they believe to be beneficial to their role, allowing for autonomous learning.

The power of social learning

As innately social beings, humans are able to rapidly share knowledge in social settings, exceeding even standard training processes. With many teams already sharing knowledge internally, creating training content for social learning can benefit teams and companies. Social learning also saves trainers a lot of time by empowering teams to train each other internally.

Also known as peer-to-peer training, the idea behind getting your team to train each other isn’t new. But providing tools and leveraging your training platform to benefit this style of knowledge sharing can make or break this powerful learning experience. Brandon Hall Group found that “it’s clear that one-time formal events have poor knowledge retention rates. Connecting learners to one another so they can share their insights and experiences helps mitigate that retention loss.” By enabling the space for your team to learn from each other, knowledge retention can dramatically improve.

Leveraging Unlocked Learning to provide social learning tools creates a focus on the learner’s benefit (the most important aspect). According to the Learning Technologies Awards 2019, almost half of all organizations believe their culture does not support social learning. What’s actually the case though is that social learning isn’t being recognized for what it is—teams fostering and building relationships. If your culture supports strong, team-oriented dynamics, then chances are you already have social learning practices occurring with your staff.

You can encourage social learning by creating fun activities like sharing a course with one co-worker or setting up training buddies. The point is to make it fun, engaging, and rewarding for your team to use. Whatever you think will strengthen your team’s relationship will most likely help with their social learning practices.

How accessibility can unlock your team’s potential

One of the most powerful features of Unlocked Learning is the ability for self-enrollment. This removes the friction point that separates direct training from social learning. You’ll still have insights into each learner’s interaction and progress, but you won’t have to administer the enrollment process. Self-enrollment also allows learners to actively pursue their learning, enabling autonomous training moments.

Ensuring your content is mobile-friendly or amplified through mobile use is another way to open your training accessibility. Giving your learners that option to learn through a mobile device means they can learn when convenient for them. This provides more room for autonomous learning and social learning by giving learners more options for their training.

Unlocked Learning is able to help you better understand and train your learning audience where they are engaged most. Learning in-the-flow of work is clearly going to be the standard for future training—why not get ahead of the curve? Start sharing knowledge with your team, encourage social learning, and enable true peer-to-peer training to succeed.

Over the next few months, we’ll be releasing some exciting content weekly on Unlocked Learning and its benefits including:

• How content can be both rapidly created and engaging.
• Why contextual relevance is important to training delivery.
• What traceability can do to improve your training process.

If you’re ready to set knowledge free for your team and want to learn more, sign up for our Unlocked Learning newsletter! We’ll be sending exclusive downloadable content and tips on how to train your team where they engage most.

Originally published at https://coassemble.com on June 16, 2020.