A U.S. corporation recently revealed how it inspired its people to learn using blended methodologies and in the flow of their work — despite their packed-out diaries and complex daily workflows. Its learning and development (L&D) team successfully awakened colleagues’ curiosity over learning possibilities and drove deeper engagement with relevant programs through targeted content campaigns. The team cleverly promoted programs’ “quick wins,” gaining company leaders’ backing for transformative learning programs. Crucially, the L&D department showed executives how they were moving the return on investment (ROI) dial across different hybrid learning programs. The secret sauce in these recipes for change? Harnessing metrics for insightful storytelling.

Today’s L&D: Beyond Digital and Blended Learning

Virtual and on-demand learning modalities has become a common and convenient mode for distributing training content for L&D departments. However, L&D professionals still need strategies that achieve a blend of learning and development journeys to best fit their workforce’s needs and the different audiences within it. They need fresh ideas, whether designing new pathways to help their people self-direct their personal development or intelligent plans to extract more value from existing learning assets.

Companies need reliable ways to track program uptake and demonstrate the value of their new learning offerings to stakeholders. So, how can companies address the widely differing needs of organization-led or self-directed, individualized learning? Take hybrid learning: It might include in-person elements, but the way they are delivered has changed considerably in just a couple of years.

Let’s take a look at how companies can prioritize just-in-time, on-demand learning, social learning and outcome-focused learning journeys in L&D.

Better Metrics, Better Hybrid Learning Journeys

In today’s workplaces, gaining data insights is tougher than ever, especially when leaders have limited day-to-day visibility of remote teams’ activities and, crucially, people’s motivation levels. Many leaders responded pragmatically to hybrid work arrangements, deemphasizing traditional “classroom” environments in favor of more agile and hybrid learning journeys. But many companies, in their haste to show vital momentum for L&D amid repeated workplace upheavals, implemented programs that pushed standard learning content across regions and functions without adapting its delivery to changing expectations.

Marketing, critical mass and ROI

Meanwhile, other organizations recognized that smart internal marketing campaigns and user data could mobilize content and provide hard evidence for action-based engagement and further enticement of learners. This shift was key to learners understanding the advantages that learning programs could bring to their own upskilling and wider career development.

Forward-looking companies co-opted marketers into their L&D teams, organizing campaigns that became part of daily workflows. Actively promoting learning content in the flow of work and highlighting its relevance to a range of on-the-job scenarios, has not only increased learners’ participation in programs and knowledge retention levels but also increased learning outcomes and ROI.

Adaptable, data-driven methodologies

To meet learning requirements amid uncertainty over which route to take, L&D providers have helped organizations better identify their individualized L&D outcomes. This is achieved by building metrics-driven but adaptable learning methodologies that:

• Define key learning outcomes.
• Deliver the best L&D journey design.
• Ensure exciting and beneficial learning experiences.

Data to assess and benchmark learners’ needs are wider in scope and impact than many might realize: They include net promoter scores, employee satisfaction with development opportunities, time to proficiency, productivity and employee well-being.

Unlocking these data sets from existing business, human resources (HR) and L&D processes is the game changer: L&D providers can now intentionally harvest all these pointers from collaboration platforms and learning management systems (LMSs) to customize their metrics-driven methodologies for enterprises’ needs. Key stakeholders and L&D leaders will get a picture of what new hybrid learning journeys can look like, what they achieve and the benefits they bring.

Data storytelling: macro- and micro-level insights

Building learning momentum and measuring training’s impact needs buy-in, which these new learning approaches’ data storytelling capabilities ensures. Instead of reports based on limited metrics like attendance of classroom sessions, L&D teams can tune into a wealth of micro and tactical level data trends — for example, which content is topping learning playlists or individual learners’ weekly engagement with quizzes or video clips — to forecast, monitor and report on their L&D programs uptake and outcomes.

In contrast to companies’ traditional reliance on learner feedback, The Kirkpatrick Model or putting off evaluation altogether, data-led models can show the C-Suite what works, what can be adapted or make the case for new learning innovations. Practitioners can set expectations for learning programs and associated budgets based organizational strategies. Data is tied to improvements and actions.

Metrics-driven learning can also enable hard-pressed firms to re-think strategies and build more consistency into learning programs that were previously seen as hard to do or impossible to evaluate. With learning spent at the mercy of the chief financial officer’s pen, data-informed models can help L&D teams avoid defaulting to low-cost but overly centralized approaches while keeping the focus squarely on measurable outcomes.

Striking the balance

Data-centric learning models provide further crucial advantages for L&D professionals:

• The ability to reconcile organization-led or self-directed learning needs by using different flexible learning platforms and striking a balance between the different learning journeys created.
• Weaving together different user-driven activity, expert-led sessions, coaching and action learning, to build greater program consistency and align learning in the flow of work with desired L&D goals.
• Measuring inputs and outcomes from flexible learning with reusable digital assets more effectively than in static classroom training.
• Organize intentional social learning but monitor its success across the workforce.
• Take the best of existing training assets to create enticing and more adaptable learning programs — for example, learning in the flow of work might be delivered within people’s digital workflows or incorporate some face-to-face elements.

Consider this real-world example of a client we have worked with:

A global company has set up a virtual learning hub and replaced its in-person classroom learning sessions with virtual instructor-led learning across its different operating units. This move has provided different learning strategies while respecting the different cultures across the business. It has also accommodated company employees’ individual approaches to learning more effectively and delivered more consistent learning journeys, building critical mass and longer-term momentum for learning across the workforce. Increasing numbers of employees are now leveraging the hub’s curated content, sharing assets with colleagues and starting conversations that are the basis for new learning communities.

L&D Success In An Uncertain World

New learning methodologies that prioritize outcome-design-experience models are essential when adopting face-to-face L&D modalities or dealing with learning budgets being cut. Data-driven L&D models can give learning professionals evidence to rethink and build flexible learning strategies that better meet the needs of diverse workforces or respect localized learning cultures in organizations and business units.

These approaches enable learning teams to drive engagement and show the momentum needed to secure new L&D investments. Crucially, these models not only allow L&D teams to report successes or reveal learning outcomes for teams previously hidden from view, but they also allow learning professionals to highlight boards where content or campaigns need to be adjusted or revised. Learning professionals can demonstrate that corporate learning cultures are successfully being embedded because they can set, track and achieve learning outcomes better than ever before.