When it comes to things smart, driven people love doing, learning is right up there with travel.
Continuous learning keeps people and businesses from stagnation. It drives success.
But, like travel, it can get tough. Really tough. There’s so much to do.
The whole of human knowledge roughly doubles every thirteen months. It’s even faster in certain disciplines like medicine or computing. As machine learning continues to advance, that number will decrease and keeping up with new developments will become harder.
How can people, with our limited time and attention span, keep up with these monumental changes?
How can managers keep their teams competitive while preventing learning fatigue?
How are business owners going to prioritize knowledge acquisition for themselves and their teams?
It’s a crucial question. One that we have to answer in order to create a system that works. And it’s our systems, our knowledge flow processes that are going to determine who remains competitive and who gets left behind.
So, let’s take a look at some actions you can take today to build a learning resource that combats content fatigue and increases your competitive edge.
Have a clearly defined starting point
A clear beginning eliminates a lot of the stress and overwhelm that comes part and parcel with learning.
With so much knowledge available to us at all times, it’s hard knowing where to start. Which article do you read first? What’s the best book? When everyone is a content creator, who do you trust?
Remove the obstacle by providing a clear starting point.
A lot of the successful youtubers make a specific video for people that visit their home page. The best ones explain who they are, what they do, why it helps and what to do next.
Apply that technique to your own learning resource by creating a clear starting point, outline the goals of the resource and point the reader at what to do next.
Minimize initial choice
Choice is great. Too much choice can be overwhelming, just ask anyone who’s ever faced a wall of tomato sauce at the store. Which one is the best? Does it need mushrooms? Classic or hot? What about the brand?
Don’t turn your learning resource into a grocery store. Minimize initial choice by gating additional and advanced content.
Language program Duolingo does this really well. You start off at the top and as you work your way through the content more options open up. You earn in-program currency for every module you complete and can use that to purchase interesting, but not exactly relevant, content like idioms.
This type of content gating keeps the learners on the right track and actually increases enjoyment.
Another way you can do this is by prioritizing which content the user sees first. At Skore we designed a specific layout that makes it easy to number and arrange content so that the important information gets consumed at the start.
Minimize time down the rabbit hole
A curious person can get dragged down the rabbit hole of link following and reading other interesting articles really easily.
Learning is awesome. We are the last people in the world who would diss anyone for it.
But, there is a time and a place. And, a large part of content fatigue is this desire to keep following the knowledge and the sources ad infinitum.
There’s an annoying, but vital, truth. You can’t read everything. Some of your high functioning team members will find that idea incredibly frustrating.
To battle that, classify resources based on importance.
While in an ideal world we’d all have an infinite amount of time to read every piece of content that sparks our innate curiosity, that’s now how our real world works.
No matter how hard we try to work around it, there are only 24 hours in a day.
Our productive time is a fraction of that. The time your team members can spend free learning and reading is an even smaller fraction.
Use your expertise, and the experience of your team members, to prioritize content. You can gate or even completely hide the advanced content until the basics have been marked as complete.
This will keep everyone in your team on the same page, minimize distraction and ensure that the crucial material is consumed before information overload can dig its claws in.
Require action after each period of learning
For true learning to take place, there has to be an element of practice. It has to be applied in real world situations.
There’s a few different ways you can approach this.
1. Use quizzes
Have a quiz at the end of each section that covers the major concepts. A lot of e-courses use multiple choice questions to make sure the learner is absorbing all the main points.
It’s basic, but effective.
2. Include a reported call to action
Ask the learner to take direct action and share the results with one of their more experienced team members.
This adds an additional check in place and strengthens team cohesion. The experienced team member works as a mentor, making sure the learner is on track and understands all the key concepts while offering support in a relaxed environment.
3. Have a final project at the end of the course
Final projects aren’t just for high school science fairs.
They are a great opportunity to encourage your team members to apply what they learned to a real world scenario.
This ties into the 70/20/10 learning and development model. According to this theory, we learn more effectively when 70% of learning happens actively on the job, 20% by paying attention to other team members and 10% from more formalized training.
A final project acts as a combination of the three, taking the learning into the real world.
Set an overall theme for the project that fits with your brand and goals and encourages a creative approach.
If one of your top goals is to increase production by 10% and the learning resource dealt with production increase, build a project around it. Encourage team members to take an afternoon and apply their learning to an aspect of production growth.
EYP, an architecture and consulting firm takes it a step further. They fund in-house research projects that solve customer problems in a more effective way.
This helps your team internalize knowledge and it serves as a creative outlet to promote innovation and creative thinking in your company. It’s a win-win.
Don’t let your learning resource stagnate
Keep your content fresh and relevant. Delete old pieces that are no longer applicable, add new insights and comments and make sure the statistics and models used are still true.
Because knowledge is going to keep on evolving. And to keep your team engaged and competitive your learning resource has to evolve right alongside!
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