From the smallest micro-business to the largest multi-national corporations, there is no escaping learning technology. Whether ensuring regulatory compliance or empowering employees to reach their potential, learning technology appears as ubiquitous as it is confusing.
So, are learning technologies as essential as most vendors would proclaim they are? Or are some technologies more of a nice-to-have for your learners? Or maybe, as some might say, it’s just a black hole that consumes your limited learning budget.
To answer these questions, it’s important to provide some clarity in the definition of “learning technology.” Learning technology means different things different people and, because of this, some vendors you speak to may use this to their advantage to hype their product … only to lock you into a multi-year agreement that underdelivers and frustrates both you and your learners.
What Is Learning Technology, Actually?
Learning technology can be defined as any technology that exists to create, curate, deliver, deploy, manage or track learning. And a great many tools, technology and services exist in within these categories.
That’s it. That’s learning technology.
Is Learning Technology Essential?
The critical factor to determine whether a learning technology is “essential” is the problem you’re trying to solve. Consider these three common learning and development (L&D) problems that most organizations, large and small, must solve for.
Problem 1: Regulatory and compliance training
For regulatory and compliance training, in most cases, the business’s obligation is to provide specific training and to record and reinforce it.
This can be made easier if you have a learning content library, and a learning management system (LMS) or learning experience platform (LXP) with which to deliver it to your employees. But you can achieve the same outcome by hosting a virtual meeting/learning session while recording completion using a spreadsheet or similar method.
This means, for deploying, tracking and recording compliance learning, learning technology can be useful but it’s not essential.
Problem 2: Nurturing a strong learning culture
There are a wide range of factors in nurturing a strong culture of learning and career development in any organization. Learning technology can be an empowering influence. Here’s why.
With the advent of a highly connected workforce and the proliferation of enterprise human resources information system (HRIS) suites with integrated talent and learning technologies, it’s never been a better time to leverage technology to empower your people’s professional development. You can connect skills and competencies to learning programs, individual content, “gig” roles, mentors and coaches. All in a single interface. Wherever they are in the world. Whatever their role is.
But it’s not easy. While learning technology can help nurture a strong learning culture, it takes a lot of time, energy and money to get it right. And there are many more ways it can go wrong, usually in the realm of cost, governance and more directly, the learner experience.
Which brings us to the next “problem” you may be solving for.
Problem 3: The learning experience
The learning experience specifically relates to the experience your employees have from the moment they have a need to learn, through to the way the apply and benefit from the learning.
Thousands of small and micro-organizations deliver effective learning experiences free of any learning technology. Similarly, there are many areas within mid- and large-sized organizations that do something similar.
They achieve this because they know their employees deeply and are delivering an experience to meet the specific needs of their people.
Conversely, many organizations invest heavily in leading-edge learning technology only to deliver flawed learner experiences. This can happen because they don’t know their people, don’t understand their learning experience challenges, or a bit of both. This can lead to an expensive platform being populated with thousands of digital learning content items from a generic catalogue with learners channeled through multiple screens to learn something they could learn easier with a brief chat with a subject matter expert (SME).
There are also many cases of organizations creating a digital ecosystem where learners rapidly and effortlessly access learning the helps them improve their skills and capabilities every day.
Again, learning technology can help deliver a world-class learner experience, but it’s not essential.
Making the Most of Learning Technologies
To make the most of your learning technologies, and avoid them becoming a budgetary black hole, there are three areas you should consider when trying to solve for things like compliance, learning culture and learning experience:
1. Single versus multiple technologies
Major HRIS and learning suites can bring many benefits, but they’re expensive, especially for small-and mid-sized businesses. They can seamlessly connect people data, learning data and performance data all in one place. Unfortunately, the scale of a “single” solution often requires a complete overhaul of your internal information technology (IT) ecosystem making it prohibitive.
If you’re looking for a standalone tool to host learning content, there are lots of options available and most often than not the range of features is similar across all vendors.
The pitfall of this kind of single technology investment is that you may be disconnected from things like people and performance data, resulting in a lot of manual effort to implement, integrate and manage a single platform solution.
You may opt for multiple technologies from different vendors. Today, most learning technologies have out-of-the-box integration tools that allow easy connectivity and data management across platforms which can reduce the risk of going all-in with a single provider. The trade-off here is the “experience.” That is, because the tools you use are not naturally connected users may find themselves having to click multiple times, navigate multiple screens and access multiple tools just to complete some simple learning.
Finding a sweet spot with learning technology is about balancing your employee needs, learning strategy and budget constraints to build an ecosystem that delivers what people need, when they need it.
2. Content creation versus curation
Once you have your core platforms the next challenge is populating your technology with content.
Today, there are thousands of organizations offering content catalogs which can be easily imported into most learning platforms. Unfortunately, this can often result in your ecosystem being overpopulated, leading to “choice overload.” From an experience perspective, this can result in your employees avoiding it entirely because it’s too difficult to use.
Solving this challenge may mean leveraging learning design/development, or using SMEs to create bespoke learning programs. While this can ensure all your content is highly relevant, it often takes longer and costs more.
This means populating your learning catalogue often requires a combination of off-the-shelf learning content from a vendor, and internal expertise to curate and/or build meaningful learning experiences.
The scale of your organization may then present you with governance challenges to ensure your learning technology delivers value, nurtures a strong learning culture and can host relevant learning experiences.
3. Centralized versus decentralized governance
A centralized team managing and maintain your core learning technologies brings the benefit of consistent and aligned strategy, administration and maintenance. This ensures the same people are making decisions, applying upgrades and maintaining policies.
In this arrangement, your learning technology owners can work in an agile way, delivering continuous improvement and ensuring the desired experience is provided across technologies.
A single team managing learning creation and curation for everyone can become unwieldy, expensive and somewhat of a bottleneck for content development, especially in large organizations.
Conversely, if your organization only has a few hundred employees, a decentralized model for content management could effectively mean that every person in the organization has a hand in content creation, which can become unmanageable.
For this reason, there’s a lot to be gained from having a hybrid approach to content management. That is, like the governance of your learning technology, a central team defining rules and standards for content creation and curation can provide consistency in approach. It can also ensure that only quality content is available.
Supported by a team of content creators and curators from across the business can ensure your learning technology is full of content that is high quality, aligned to the needs of your business and people, and managed by people close enough to the end user they understand their specific wants and needs, all while ensuring they’re working within the governance framework of the “central” team.
Conclusion
So, is learning technology essential, useful or simply a budgetary black hole?
Categorically, learning technology isn’t essential in all cases. Though it is, when implemented effectively, useful in nurturing a strong and effective learning culture, providing seamless learning experiences, and enhancing people’s skills and capabilities.
Implementing any learning technology can quickly become a budgetary black hole if it’s not a carefully considered, well managed and governed implementation.
Leveraging learning technology in the most impactful way for your organization rests on a few key areas, though this isn’t a guarantee of success, it simply maximizes your ability to get the most from your learning technology:
- Understanding your learning challenges and working to solve them in a focused way.
- Understanding the learning needs and preferences of your people and your organization.
- Choosing tools, technology and services with the sole purpose of solving your problems, for your people, and putting people in control of this who have the right knowledge, skills and experience.
