Sara L. stares at the ceiling. She is sitting with a dozen colleagues in her new employer’s onboarding seminar, trying to follow the subject matter expert’s explanations. The topic is procurement rules—an endless sequence of slides, each packed with information. She feels just like she did in high school math class. And she doesn’t seem to be the only one whose brain is rebelling against the flood of facts. All around her are blank stares. This is off to a great start.
Change of scene. Jakob M. types the ideas his colleagues call out to him into his laptop. He is fully engaged. He and his teammates have 23 minutes left to prepare the presentation they will soon give in the onboarding simulation. Jakob has only been with his new employer for a week. His curiosity is immense; he looks forward to what awaits him every morning. Even though the first few days were exhausting, he feels he has never learned so much in such a short time. He grins to himself. He made the right choice.
Why is Sara so frustrated and Jakob in such a good mood?
It’s simple: Jakob and his colleagues benefit from LXD, the new miracle cure for increasing learning transfer in Corporate Learning. Not familiar with LXD yet? Don’t worry, it’s not a new party drug from the Berlin club scene. LXD is legally available, safe for your health, and stands for Learning Experience Design.
So, how can the impressive effect of LXD be explained?
Learning Experience Design for corporate learning has a lot in common with User Experience Design in product development: the learner or user is at the center of all considerations. Take, for example, an app that we particularly like because it is easy to use and visually appealing. This positive user experience is no accident; it was designed by app developers based on user analysis, prototyping, user surveys, and countless adjustments.
The approach in Learning Experience Design is very similar. There, too, methods from agile product development are used during development, prototyping, and testing. It’s not just about developing a single learning format, such as a training session or a learning video. Instead, different learning formats are combined to create an optimal learner journey for the learner, at the end of which the defined learning objective is achieved.
Thanks to a high dose of LXD, Jakob is fully engaged and enthusiastic. His experiences in the first 100 days at the company—even in the 30 days before his first day of work—were meticulously planned by Learning Experience Designers. Even if not all events and reactions are predictable, the probability is quite high that Jakob will be repeatedly confirmed in his decision to join the right company within these first 100 days. In a relatively short time, he learns to optimally fulfill his new role at the new employer and thus achieve his personal career goals as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, things look bleaker for Sara. Her new employer still believes that teacher-centered instruction, modeled after schools or universities, delivers optimal results. A subject matter expert without additional didactic or pedagogical training dumps their expertise on her and her colleagues using PowerPoint. This knowledge is then expected not only to be understood immediately but also to be transformed into permanent habits. Learning based on the principle of faith and hope!
For companies competing nationally and internationally for the best talent, this is not a promising option.
If you are now wondering whether your company already follows a professional Learning Experience Design approach, this article has achieved its goal.
How to benefit from LXD as quickly as possible:
- Ask your HR development department if there are already Learning Experience Designers in your company.
- Request a list of all learning formats used in the company.
- Have your continuing education, training, and development programs comprehensively evaluated, not just with the usual feedback forms. Find out how satisfied your users are with the offerings, and don’t just ask about the programs for executives, as these usually have high budgets that allow for good implementation. Instead, determine how satisfied your users are with, for example, technical training on topics such as procurement guidelines, data protection, or the use of new software.
- Don’t forget to check your onboarding programs as well. Remember Sara and Jakob!
If the results of your research are positive, the people responsible for HR and learning development deserve a big compliment from you. In that case, your company belongs to a small elite that has already fully integrated user-centricity into the topic of learning.
If the results are rather negative, you now have a clear instruction: make learning a top priority—and turn your company into a learning organization with motivated self-learners at the center of all efforts.
At the link below, you will find a list of 100 different learning formats as well as instructions on how to develop effective learner journeys.
[mc4wp_form id=”10811″]
