Who Wins?
Imagine you’re a hiring manager who needs to choose between two equally qualified candidates: one who regularly invests in learning new skills and knowledge, and another who only completes training when assigned. Who would you choose?
In today’s world, just posing that question seems a little absurd. How can two candidates have the same qualifications if one is actively learning while the other is passive? If you’ve ever met someone who achieved a certain level of skill but failed to keep progressing, you can easily imagine how other competing candidates might quickly catch up to and even overtake that passive learner’s advantage. These days, the old adage “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” refers, not to age, but to an unwillingness to learn “new tricks.”
Learning in the information age
On the face of it, learning has become incredibly easy, with no shortage of content from books, articles, podcasts and videos at our fingertips. It’s hard to get through a day without “running into” information; the availability of new information pervades almost every moment of our waking lives.
Given a climate in which constant learning and acquiring new information are always available and even inevitable, the question becomes not whether I need to learn, or why, but rather—how can I manage learning, for myself and my organization?
A Learning Management System (LMS) can help answer that question when it goes beyond tracking compliance activities, and focuses instead on enabling and encouraging the kind of learning that helps develop the new skills that are necessary for producing new results.
From information overload to designing for results
In a world where information is always and everywhere in abundance, improving results requires more than simply overwhelming the learner with even more information. Improving results requires, not more information, but designing for results. Reading something and passing a test almost never predicts real world application, much less real world success.
Designing for results starts with designing for behavior that is likely to produce those results. To find those behaviors, look to those within your organization who are already producing them in your culture and environment.
Then, imagine that you could quickly create and test courses that showcase and encourage the behavior of your top talent. By creating multiple versions and testing differences in completion, implementation and results, your organization would be able to learn faster, improve resilience, and better engage your team.
Learning management is designing for results—even for the non-designers among us
That sounds great and all, you might be thinking, but it also sounds really difficult—and possibly expensive. Designing for results is undoubtedly very effective—but not everyone can be a designer.
In the past, learning how to create courses and populate them into a legacy LMS had a huge and often frustrating learning curve. But what if it was easy to create courses? What if anyone could learn to create courses using a series of templates that guide them all the way through? That’s why our tools make it easy for anyone to create a course.
People want to learn and will pay to do so both with their money and their time. When you have an accessible, easy-to-use Learning Management System that guides people to learn how to help others learn, you can empower those people to transform the future readiness of your organization.
A given today—and a necessity tomorrow
Failing to invest in future readiness is not just a risk factor for tomorrow. It’s a reflection on now. And continuous learning is transitioning from being a “nice to have” to a form of bare minimum self-maintenance.
What goes for individuals goes for organizations too. If the team isn’t learning, improving and growing continuously, your organization is falling behind.
