One of the biggest challenges of training your employees is the lack of learner engagement. Even when the content and the medium of the training are good enough, there is a possibility that the engagement might start diminishing at any point.
While high-quality training can help the employees and your business grow significantly, training that fails to engage the learners might just turn out to be a waste of time and resources for the company.
Are you facing similar challenges with your employee training programs? Well, this might indicate the fact that it’s time your make some changes to your programs.
Employee training makes sure that the employees learn new skills, understand their company values and policies better, and work in better compliance with the regulations and rules of the industry and your company. That’s why the learners’ engagement in such training programs is absolutely essential.
Here’s how you can upgrade your employee training program to boost engagement:
Incorporate microlearning
Microlearning is one of the best ways to boost your learner engagement. Microlearning makes use of bite-sized modules of course material that are easy and quick to comprehend. This gives the learners a sense of achievement every time they finish a lesson and helps them focus better. This further leads to a positive mindset about learning which keeps them going. As a result, the engagement of your employees in your training program increases significantly.
Microlearning also fits better in your employees’ schedules and doesn’t disturb their workflow. This characteristic of microlearning helps the training program to be more flexible and accommodating for the employees.
Engaging content
Content is at the core of your training program. If you have good quality content as course material, your employees will surely take the training more seriously. However, even the best content becomes unbearable if the format is not right. By distributing lengthy, text-based content, you may pave way for your employees’ disinterest in the learning process. Thus, to boost engagement, make sure that your content is engaging enough. Utilize different elements like tables, charts, images, videos, etc in the content and make it more interesting.
Remind your employees regularly
One of the easiest ways to boost engagement is to regularly remind your employees about the training programs and their benefits. Since most employees have tight schedules and lots of daily job responsibilities, they may forget about their training courses, especially if you are working with a self-paced model of learning. This becomes one of the most common reasons for lower engagement and can be easily tackled with regular training reminders through notifications, promo videos, and emails.
Personalized topics
Not all the topics that are in a standardized employee training program are relevant to everyone. Studying topics that are only relevant to employees from a specific department can be a waste of time for others, leading to learner disengagement.
To eradicate this issue the best thing you can do is to personalize your training material according to the employees’ job responsibilities so that it is more relevant.
Encouraging real-life applications
Another way of increasing learner engagement is by making your employees realize that what they are learning is not just for the sake of it but is actually applicable to real-life situations.
This will help them relate more to the training content and be more engaged with the training. Encourage your learners to think from an application perspective. Include real or hypothetical case studies in the material.
You may also take the help of AR or VR technologies to create situations where the topics that your employees are learning can be applied directly to simulated situations.
Testing knowledge retention
If your employees are only attending your training programs and aren’t retaining anything from the taught material, the chances are that they won’t be able to apply their knowledge when a situation arises. Thus, it is very important to test their knowledge retention. However, testing the knowledge retention rates of your employees can also encourage them to be more mindful of what is being taught, and thus the engagement rates may become higher naturally. The testing can be done easily through quizzes and tests. Gamification of these tests and integrating rewards and certifications into such testing can be even more effective.
Incorporating blended learning practices
Creating a unique blended learning strategy for your company’s employee training program can be a good way to boost employee engagement. Unlike traditional ways of employee training where there is only one medium of delivering the training to employees, blended learning environments allow for a combination of different mediums such as instructor-led classrooms, downloadable material, microlearning archives, and much more. Such combined strategies make the learning experience richer, more accommodating, and more accessible to your employees. Such experiences lead to naturally enhanced engagement rates.
Peer learning and friendly competitions
Peer learning can be one of the strongest tools when it comes to training your employees; especially the newly hired ones. Many employees sometimes find their colleagues more approachable and relatable than an instructor. Thus, by mixing your newly hired employees with the best-performing ones, you can make sure that the engagement always stays at its peak. You can also encourage your employees to share their learning with their colleagues through a space within your learning management system experience that may function similarly to social media platforms.
With peer learning, you can also introduce a little bit of healthy and friendly competition by organizing quizzes and having a leaderboard for the scores.
Better accessibility
Another very important step towards increasing engagement in your training programs is to make the material accessible to the employees. In fact, it is actually advisable to make the material accessible 24/7. This degree of accessibility will give your employees the freedom to learn whenever they want. Even when they face a very specific problem during their workday, they will be able to refer to the material. This is also a good way to make the learning process truly ‘continuous’ and develop a learning culture at your organization.
Conclusion
Achieving the perfect rate of learner engagement might look like a daunting task at first but in reality, there are certain very easy changes that you can make to upgrade your employee training.
Just by making sure that your content quality is high and the way it is being delivered to the employees is accessible, comprehensible, and fits well into their schedules, you can easily increase learners’ engagement with your employee training programs.
