How is your learning and development team navigating through the current realities in your organization? Given the many challenges and changes in the way we do work, the shift to a total remote or hybrid workplace, and the diversion of workforce priorities to total wellbeing, Learning and Development teams together with Human Resources remain to be the driving force that ensures that employees are equipped with the right resources and skills to navigate through any change happening at work.
Rapid upskilling and reskilling was the main priority for L&D in 2021 but what’s ahead of us in the next few years remains to be a continuous discussion among us practitioners. However, what we do know is that to move forward at an accelerated pace, our learning and development and employee engagement strategies must keep on finding ways to constantly innovate and most importantly, disrupt the old ways of creating learning programs and strategies.
Some of you right now might want to take your L&D strategy to the next level or might still be wondering what types of resources are needed to meet the learning, engagement, and upskilling needs of your employees. But before deciding on which trending learning platforms or learning technologies would work best for your organization, it’s important to discuss within your team and your management on how this can positively affect your organization in the long run.
With that, here are 3 ways on how you can decide on which learning platform would be best for your organization and employees:
3 things to consider when deciding on learning platforms
Purpose
The pressure seems to be high for you as a learning and development practitioner when it comes to shifting learning digitally and it is no surprise that you might be expected to execute this in the fastest way possible. So, to help you and your team get started, before you take a quick search on the internet on the best learning platforms, ask yourselves the following:
- What is the main purpose of getting a learning platform and how is this aligned with my team’s overall purpose in the organization?
Asking yourselves why your organization needs to shift to digital learning and why digital learning platforms can help your employees reach their goals is a good way to evaluate if learning technology platforms would be the ultimate solution to your workplace learning needs or if there is a need to re-align your team’s purpose to your organization’s purpose.
People
Once you’ve found your purpose, it’s also a good idea to take into consideration the people within your organization. For this, you can evaluate based on three segments:
- Learning and development team: At the end of the day, regardless of which platform you’ll arrive at, your team will be the one to take the driver’s seat in executing and coming up with a sound strategy. When it comes to choosing on a platform, take into account the ability and capacity of your team to handle digital learning platforms. Do they need to learn new skills? Are they confident enough to take on more roles? Are they provided with the right support and resources to get the job done?
- Management: As mentioned previously, investing in learning platforms should bring long term positive effects to your organization. With that, it is also important to align with management on what their overall goals are for your employees and if you will choose to invest in a learning platform, it might be good to ask if they will provide you with the right support needed to plan out your overall strategy and learning roadmap in the long run.
- Employees: Lastly, the most important to take note of are the users who will be benefiting from the technology. It would be good to get feedback on: what their learning goals are and what are their preferences when it comes to learning platforms.
Performance
After aligning with your team, management and employees, the last thing to note is the desired outcome you want to achieve when you already have a platform in place. As you discuss the purpose with your team, it would also be good to align on the following:
- What goals do we want to address once we have a platform in place?
- What results do you expect from the users?
- How can we measure success?
Following these 3 steps can help your team get a clear idea on what types of learning platforms to look out for. Once you’ve taken into account your purpose, people and performance, you’re now ready to explore the different options out there that can help elevate your L&D strategy!
