From Content Consumption to Capability Building: Rethinking Corporate Learning

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Why​‍​‌‍​‍‌​‍​‌‍​‍‌ Organizations Today Need to Move from Giving Information to Enabling Performance

For many years, companies’ learning strategies almost entirely revolved around distributing content. They spent huge amounts on creating thorough course, video, webinar, and other digital asset libraries, with a belief that simply making information more accessible would lead to enhanced job performance. Yet, the modern business environment has revealed a major shortcoming of this method: just consuming content doesn’t mean developing capabilities.

The reality is that companies today are surrounded by constant technological changes, shifting employee demands, and highly complicated skill requirements. So, they are changing the way they view training and implementing capability-building ecosystems that aim at achieving tangible business results rather than focusing on content completion rates. This shift is a great factor in generation the interest in **custom eLearning solutions** that matches the learning with the company goals and the workforce needs.

The Drawbacks of Learning Focused on Content

Many business training initiatives still consider successful only the ones where the person completed the course and sometimes measure with the help of the completion percentages or time spent on courses. Even though these figures do offer some insights into people’s willingness to participate, they hardly shed any light on genuine knowledge gaining or how well they can use it at work.

It is a known fact that workers enroll into a lot of mandatory trainings but in the end, they still come across as the ones who lack the ability to connect the dots between training events and tangible job contexts. The reasons behind this gap are that memorizing facts and making changes in one’s behavior are two quite different things. For a start, learning traction is enhanced by repetition, making things familiar, and opportunities for applying the learned skills practically.

In the coming years, organizations will continue to realize and admit that just giving the employees access to the content hardly makes any difference. At present, they are more geared towards customizing eLearning materials that can serve as personalized and targeted learning experiences aimed at building competence and ensuring not only short-term but also long-term performance improvement.

Capability Building as a Strategic Imperative

Knowledge and skills are certainly part of capability building, but the latter concept is much wider. It is about shaping individuals with the right competencies, behaviors, and decision-making skills that will help them/their teams to reach the business targets.

In a capabilities-based learning approach, the focus is on aspects like:

• Developing skills instead of ticking the box of content finishing
• Making learning a habit by offering learning on demand instead of training at certain points in time only
• Making learning relevant to real life through the use of role play and practicing sessions
• Giving learning paths that are tailored to the individual
• Giving learners the support they need so that they don’t have to constantly stop their workflows

Such a fundamental change helps the organizations to develop more flexible and adaptable people who can deal with the changes, contribute to solving problems alongside others, and be the driving force of coming up with fresh ideas and solutions. This is why custom eLearning is considered to be a very effective method of developing talents and it has already become one of the primary sources for sustainable competitive advantages.

The Role of Personalization in Modern Learning

Perhaps the greatest change in corporate learning in recent years has been the rise of highly personalized learning experiences. Each employee comes with different level of knowledge and skills, different ways of learning, and also different career paths. And, a one size fits all approach to training will most definitely not be able to effectively meet all those diverse requirements.

Today, personalized learning is done with the help of high tech tools one of which is artificial intelligence and another one is learning analytics. Through these, it is now possible to create custom training that is based on the learner’s individual needs, the learner’s level of understanding, or the learner’s preferred method of learning. This comes down to providing highly relevant learning experiences that not only engage but also have the power to get the learners to level up their skills more quickly.

Besides making learners happier, customized learning also gives a big boost to the overall level of organizational agility as one can be sure that the workforce has exactly the right competencies that enable the accomplishment of business goals.

Integrating Learning into the Flow of Work

Often, the trainings that are conducted the traditional way make the learners leave their work for some time so that they can be trained. But, these days, more and more companies realize that the most useful learning will happen when it becomes a natural part of the work that one does today.

Learning and capability building do not have to be completely separated from work time and work environment. Such approaches include but are not limited to offering learning nuggets, performance support resources, just-in-time assistance, and scenario-based exercises. With these, it is possible for the learners to get access to knowledge not before or after but exactly at the time when knowledge is being used the most. This leads to better retention and faster application.

Therefore, if an organization invests into custom eLearning that is supportive of continuous learning and helps employees to perform, then knowledge and understanding being turned into results is no longer a gap but rather a bridge.

Measuring Learning Through Business Outcomes

Since the learning departments are becoming more and more aligned with the overall business strategy, the executives expect to see the proof of their investments going into training and development. New age learning has to show the link with the corporate goals rather than only providing the numbers to prove that training have actually been done.

Organizations practice learning too as they incorporate it into their culture and transform it into a core business function. These and a few more, such as:

• Increase in productivity
• Sales performance improvements
• A shorter time span to gain competency
• A boost in employees staying with the company
• Higher levels of customer satisfaction
• Readiness to lead

When one is able to demonstrate the impact of learning through these metrics, he/she offers a whole new aspect and a much more comprehensive understanding of the value that the learning brings to the organization. Due to this reason, there is a trend and an uptake of customized eLearning solutions that come with a set of powerful analytics and performance measurement capabilities.

The Future of Corporate Learning

We are going to witness a corporate learning industry that is ever changing and adapting, personalized to individual needs, and focused on making an impact that can be measured. Learning ecosystems will feature increased integration of AI, skill intelligence platforms, immersive technologies, and predictive analytics to enable the continuous development of employees.

Infopro Learning, one of the industry leaders, has understood that capability building and not content consumption is the future direction of the enterprise learning. By making this transition, companies will be in a better position to deal with disruptions, fill critical skill gaps, and achieve sustained business success.

To sum up: corporate learning is aimed at making the learners not the better consumers of information but the more confident and capable professionals who know how to make knowledge work for them, how to come up with solutions to business problems, and how to have a significant impact on the growth of the organization. This is why it is worth turning to custom eLearning solutions that have been thoughtfully planned and that are a major vehicle for capability development and performance ​‍​‌‍​‍‌​‍​‌‍​‍‌excellence.”