Learning Dropoff is what's Arresting your Talent Development Strategies.

Regulating your Dropoffs is key to the success of your L&D program in 2021.

For all of the good that has come of the rise of remote learning, there are still significant issues holding the professional learning back, chief among them being the abysmal completion rates that tend to plague L&D strategies of varying kinds. A recent study puts the average completion rates of MOOC programs below 15%.

The challenge in solving this problem is that most efforts being put into increase completion rates is pivot around nebulous definitions of ‘engagement’, which is hardly ever quantified or designed around resulting in your learners dropping off at various checkpoints. Either way, the reason your workforce does not engage or make it through these learning programs can be summarized as a lack of sufficient motivation to do so. While employees may also complain that they do not find enough time or simply aren’t persuaded that these exercises are worthwhile, the problem more often than not stems from the learning strategy in itself; they can find it boring, irrelevant, and lacking of any incentives.

Conviction – The Achilles Heel of Engagement

It is more than a safe assumption when we say that most people go through a traditional brick-and-mortar system – a system that signifies an affirmative choice that they are ready to learn. That said, in a school one could not walk away if they felt unmotivated or distracted, fortunately. When it comes to professional learning, flexibility often is a double-edge sword that can often put one in a mindset that takes it less seriously. Have previous learning programs had a positive impact on their career growth? If not, one would feel less compelled to invest more time in learning anymore. Are there specific learning objectives? When your workforce cannot see a clear path of growth, it dampens their attitude to work and other work-related activities like training. Learning becomes taxing – an additional chore they have to get through in their workday; or worse, after. Another dampener in this regard is goals.

If learners have an ambiguous understanding of the purpose of the learning programs, they won’t stick around. Clarity is key here. With this in mind, designing your learning interventions with adequate technical and moral support is key. The idea is not to just to get an array of learning content across, but to ensure that the learner is guided through modules, or programs, while knowing what to do, and why it is key for them to do so in the prescribed manner. For much of this to be a reality it is more than a need of the hour for learners to connect have easy access to L&D reps who should be mentoring them through the challenges the learner might face.

Learner Engagement recorded by TECHADEMY when varying combination of interventions are introduced [2020-2021]

Transform Errors into Opportunities for Growth

Given these two crucial factors, it becomes key to create a learning ecosystem, that connects with the learners, whilst create positive learning conditions that encourage them to make mistakes and grow out of it; an ecosystem that is personalised, yet enables one to focus on assimilating information in a way that can translate into real-world experiences.
To engage fully with learning, it must be presented in a way that lets individuals see its relevance and applicability to their own interests and goals. Instead of having broad goals, it makes sense, therefore, to associate learning directly to job roles, and the business outcomes that will result from improving their performance in that role. If a learner can see that a piece of training is necessary to perform a particular task, he or she can more readily understand its value.

As learning moves into this mindset, L&D needs to follow. L&D changes from being a director of learning to being a facilitator. Instead of creating and rolling out courses, L&D managers curate resources and offer opportunities to learners to create their own pathways.

With this system, comes personalized learning, and L&D becomes less about managing learners and ticking boxes and more about enabling learners to develop their potential. Rather than taking the responsibility for training out their hands, the learner-centric focus of personalization gives L&D managers a new, empowered role to deliver training that has a real impact on performance. It moves L&D closer to the action, part of everyday working life and organisational culture and not something to be called on only at need, but a function with real potential to play a strategically vital role in the life and health of the organisation.

This would have been a mammoth task about even a year ago. Incremental advancements to how an LXPs have been functioning can make these a cakewalk. Iterations to LXPs can allow L&D managers to see much better what works and what doesn’t and to make interventions to fill performance and learning gaps and arrest said learning dropoffs. The collaborative and knowledge-sharing features of an LXP have further implications for L&D. Learning and instruction can be devolved, and learners can have an active say in what they learn and how they learn it. The role of L&D then becomes less prescriptive and more about facilitating the sharing of knowledge using the various channels the LXP provides. It should move L&D closer to the action; a part of everyday working life and organisational culture and not just something to be called on only at need; a function with real potential to play a strategically vital role in the life and health of the organisation. As much as these changes can seem very daunting and scary, the growth returned, in this case, look well worth the candle.