Five learning trends to watch out for in 2018

With the world changing around us every second, the way we learn, live and work is constantly transforming. Over the last decade, new economic policies and technological innovations have brought about a disruption across multiple industries, creating many new business opportunities.

In fact, companies feel that the traditional work environment/ culture was a more controlling environment and in order to make it more inclusive, they feel that the need of the hour is to change the approach of learning and development methods.

In the current market scenario, five key trends and best practices that companies need to incorporate in order to create a more robust framework of learning are:

INCREASED FOCUS ON ‘MOBILE-WAY’

Needless to say, mobile phone has reconstructed the way we interact and collaborate. Today multiple brands operating in the market have made mobile phones a more affordable product.

In this approach, organizations need to carefully analyze their requirements and select the right technology partners which can help them improve their learning functions through the use of mobile phones.

USE SOCIAL MEDIA

Companies need to rapidly embrace social media tools and invest in social collaboration tools which will assist them to engage employees better and foster a collaborative learning culture. Though social media is an interim part of our lives today, few organizations still struggle with the knowledge and insight on how to use these platforms for learning and development.

ADAPTIVE LEARNING

Adaptive learning allows employees to learn at their own pace. It has gained popularity with educational institutions where it is referred to as “adaptive teaching”.

In this method a teacher will gather information on individual students in order to understand what students need to learn, their pace of learning and what they need to do in order to improve their learning. Employees can be monitored individually and in real time to determine what learning approach will best suit their needs. The method has multiple advantages:

Scope for more flexible interactions n

Effective in improving efficiency n

Higher employee engagement n and retention Instilling confidence in employees n

ALIGN METHOD WITH BUSINESS OBJECTIVES

In the past, learning methods were executed in silos where learning professionals had little interaction or inputs from other areas of the business. The learning of the future must be closely aligned to the overall corporate strategies in order for companies to achieve better results.

MEASUREMENT OF EFFECTIVENESS

To determine the success of learning strategies, organizations must continuously measure the effectiveness of the methods on a real time basis.

It is significant that the strategies should help in driving business outcomes of the company. Organization should determine both business metrics and learning/HR metrics in advance.

Traditional models of learning are unable to bridge the gap between the employer and employees and are also not very effective in improving engagement and performance.

The future of learning is three ‘justs’: just enough, just-in-time, and just-for-me. In this approach, training will have to be as agile as the workforce where speed, flexibility and innovation will be the key and the training models will have to be platform agnostic.