Employees Switch Off When Content Doesn’t Engage – Has Boring Training Content Had its Day?

We are beyond the age of expecting our people to spend hours of their time on unnecessary, sometimes irrelevant training when they could be at work achieving great things, or working towards learning goals in a meaningful way.

The importance of eLearning

Investing in effective eLearning solutions can be transformative for your business. It has multiple benefits, with customers using learning tools and software benefitting from a 50% reduction in mandatory training hours and many other advantages. Digital learning makes learning significantly more accessible and gives businesses a chance to provide their people with a more diverse and engaging range of content.

eLearning offers great value to any business because of the following opportunities:

• Expanding and diversifying the range of learning available: companies can select eLearning programmes that are either standardised or unique to their business, allowing their employees to find a suitable pathway in line with their career goals.
• Easy roll-out of training across large organisations, spanning different areas and multiple locations, allowing for consistency in training across different offices or locations
• The provision of on-demand learning at the learner’s pace and to suit their schedule, allowing them to take control and manage their own learning experience
• The opportunity to instantly support business processes, when skills gaps are uncovered, companies can respond quickly with an appropriate eLearning module, course, or similar. Learners can complete the programme and instantly apply the learning to the workplace.
• The ability to align learning with your people’s’ preferences. Digital learning allows employees to select relevant training which they still find interesting. Interactive digital media is more appealing, especially when elements such as gamification are incorporated, and it leads to a more enjoyable and engaging learning experience.
• Budget-saving measures are also possible as even if you invest in a high-quality learning management system or eLearning materials, the return on investment will be significant in the skills developed and you’ll not have the additional costs that come with in-person training, venue hire, and away days.

The challenges of creating great learning content

Great learning content does not necessarily come easily and the producers of high-quality learning content are often highly experienced and experts in their field. Some of the key challenges to consider in this area include:

1. Lack of clarity in learning objectives

Clear learning objectives must be the starting point of any eLearning content development process. These objectives provide direction for the programme and allow for the creation of relevant and engaging modules and assessments. Unclear learning objectives make it difficult to track the course’s effectiveness and learners may not gain what they should from the training course.

2. Time limitations

Your people don’t have endless amounts of time to focus on their training and development. Many people find to set aside any dedicated time for training, despite a real desire to improve their skills. eLearning can be a great time-saving opportunity, if used correctly. The range of content you offer should be suitable for learners with different schedules, availability, and learning styles. If an employee needs to quick boost their knowledge on-the-go at work then microlearning modules may be most appropriate. Another may be better suited to interactive video content they can access at their leisure. Content delivery via cloud networks and logins is also recommended so your people can choose to learn from home if they choose.

3. Too much information

If you have large amounts of quality content you want to share with your people, that’s great, but it probably isn’t all suitable to be delivered in a single training course or programme. Choosing the right topics to focus on is a key part of developing an effective and engaging learning programme. This once again will link back to the learning objectives you have already identified for your organisation. Overloading eLearning courses with every scrap of information you can find on a topic won’t keep learners engaged and they’ll likely lose interest. Microlearning is a powerful remedy to this, as it can help deliver useful chunks of high-quality information in a small, manageable size.

5 ways to produce engaging learning content

Creating high-quality and engaging learning content ensures your people have access to learning opportunities they can both enjoy and put into practice. Here are just some ways you can make your training materials more engaging and suited to your learners:

1. Treat facts as your starting point

It may be informative if your training material is packed out with facts and figures, but is it engaging? Learners get easily bored and find it hard to engage with huge blocks of text or screen after screen of factual information. Avoid this by making the most of your creativity and trying something a little more experimental. Of course the facts matter, but delivering them in a relatable way using stories can be really successful for building on those facts. Most of us learned a lot of the basics of our own education via storytelling in school, and storytelling adds context and interest to your material, rather than just bare facts.

2. Utilise different formats

People learn in different ways and offering different training formats can help ensure all learners have the chance to engage and develop as much as possible. Difficult and dull subjects need to be livened up and this could be through visual elements, videos or weaving in case studies to add a real life and relatable side to the training activity.

3. Skip the jargon and unnecessary complex language

Specialised technical language and jargon is extremely off putting for learners who may be new to a topic. Learners need to be engaged on a level they can understand and if you can’t do this without using unnecessarily technical language, you may need to rethink your approach. The language used should be relatable and chosen to suit the group of learners the material is designed for.

4. Prioritise usefulness

Learning content has to serve a purpose. You can’t add every last piece of information you would like into the content or it’ll simply be too long and drawn out. Everything you add to every course or module should serve a specific purpose. Every image, video, and written word should contribute something to the content so they add value for the learner.

5. Personalise

We live in the age of personalisation and it’s easier than you might think to offer your people a unique and personalised learning experience, tailored to their needs. For your people to engage with their learning it has to interest them. While not all workplace learning can be personalised, your people should have the opportunity to explore their work-related interests and goals and follow a training plan which satisfies these.

Efficiency and engagement with high-quality training content

No employee should feel they’re forced to spend hours on training courses that simply aren’t necessary. With the right tools and approach you can give your people an engaging and suitable learning experience, making training something they enjoy, not something to dread. Furthermore, the business benefits of high-quality digital learning content are plentiful with time saving and better results and attainment key successes.