Need for adaptive learning at work

It is a fact that since COVID-19 hit the world, there has been a lot of unlearning and re-learning for all us. Remember the times when you had to decide on a plan for a new solution to go live with, whether a new age LMS or a new HR tech solution? A shift of this magnitude would have involved forming teams of project managers, user groups, multiple stakeholder meetings, decks, testing on a massive scale and so much else. 

Does this sound familiar? If you’ve gone through this process, how easy or hard was it to train all your employees to adopt the new process or platform as you got on with your HR technology transformation? If you were to measure the adoption of the new platform, where would you point the needle? Somewhere around the 60% mark? 

To be fair, in a post-Covid world, anything less than 95% adoption is going to be problematic. But to achieve that level of adoption is going to be that much harder. And that’s where the idea of “adaptive learning” comes in. Adaptive learning takes into account the evolving learning needs of the employees, especially remote employees, learning maturity curve and efficiency.  Adaptive learning truly revolutionizes the way people consume content by helping them learn in the flow of their work.

Adaptive learning recognizes the fact that each employee’s learning needs are unique and there are various possibilities to learn and engage users. It helps you organize your data well, according to each user’s learning journey. The eventual goal is to ensure that employees' time to productivity is reduced via reduced amounts of training time and better quality of learning.

But that’s not all. During the course of HR tech transformation, it is becoming increasingly important for C-level executives to understand the ROI and effectiveness of learning processes. Adaptive learning offers a readymade route to that, helping executives understand how employees are learning and how much that learning is improving their performance.

Amidst a new model of remote workforce management, with workers spread across different time zones and with little possibility of getting all together at one time, HR heads are now facing the massive challenge of aligning employees’ learning needs with, HR technology adoption and business goals. 

With adaptive learning technologies, your team actually understands the real needs/asks of the user groups/stakeholders and are in a better position to cater to the needs real time. 

Let me help you with an example here. 

You would like to help a user group to follow a set of steps/processes on a new HCM platform like Workday. Now the new user groups are onboarded with a set of tasks/do list when they use any system for the first time. It may feel overwhelming for many when they start using something for the first time, lost into too many tabs/navigations, profile details etc. 

Adaptive learning would be a great fit here providing a seamless integration of clear guidance on how to execute any task and self-serve any ad-hoc query. The guidance and support content can be personalized to specific user groups’ interests, proficiency levels and even roles. And all of it is automated at scale. 

The usual challenges of manual training and intervention, time zone differences, physical contact are effectively eliminated with adaptive learning. 

To summarize for HR technology transformation leaders, adaptive learning provides the following 

• Speed:  Educating your talent on solutions and technology platforms sounds to be a time consuming effort. With adaptive learning techniques, you can educate your employees in real-time at the moment of their need. 
• Personalization and relevance: Adaptive learning helps you deliver the right training to the right employee at the right time focusing on relevance and personalization. 
• Real-time: When the learner is in need of support, they need not navigate to multiple platforms and reach out for help to come on their way. Adaptive learning helps guide the learner in real time without any dependency on other teams. 
• Learner experience: Overcoming the blockers in the process to adopt a technology, adaptive learning ensures learners don’t need to spend a lot of time in learning, improving the overall experience.
• User Analytics: Through an adaptive learning experience, you understand what is being constantly asked for or looked by your learner groups. This helps you to focus and prioritize what is really needed rather than sharing all that may become overwhelming. 

Traditional approaches like HR calendars and standard catalogue program approaches are now outdated. Gone are the days when employees were plucked out of their production hours and made to undergo long training sessions without a clue about the true impact. In a remote work environment, it is only the learner who can decide what he/she wants to learn, how he/she wants to learn and when. 

It is a time when we focus on the “New Now”. The best way to do this is develop your talent in giving their A-game in the job they currently do and what they consider as their areas to learn and develop for the next career movement.

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