“With eLearning, we’re just clicking through screens.”

That’s a snooze-fest, isn’t it?

Setting up learners to just click through training is like telling your dinner guests you’re the only one allowed to talk. People like to participate; it engages them. Let’s begin by examining what’s not engaging. Buckle up.  

 

The Cartoon

Those cartoon characters that come with your eLearning software and talk in bubbles? The person creating the training believes it’s better than nothing. But it is … in fact … nothing. There shouldn’t be anything on the screen that isn’t related to the content of the course, but the course creator doesn’t want to just make a bulleted list. Which leads to my next point.  

 

The List

A bulleted list on the screen isn’t training, it’s a handout.

“But … we use bullets to emphasize our points.”

The last bulleted list you consumed – name anything on it. Anything.

Keep in mind there are options beyond instructor-led training or eLearning.  

A Case Study

One of the most effective ways to prevent sepsis – a life-threatening organ disfunction brought on by infection – is for hospital staff to properly wash their hands at every opportunity, over and over.

One hospital wanted to increase their staff’s hand-sanitization. They knew a one-and-done reminder training wasn’t going to change anything. They needed to keep it top of mind; change habits.

They decided to run a clever, internal ad campaign along with an engaging poster which was placed on the inside of every bathroom stall. How’d it go? The messaging was highly effective. Proper and frequent hand sanitizing increased exponentially. It became the norm again.

Sometimes, it really is just a handout or a sticker or well-placed instructions. It doesn’t always have to be a formal training.  

 

Arbitrary Photos

Those photos of generically attractive employees smiling – that’s what we call ‘filler’. You’re filling up screen real estate to accompany the bullets that no one will remember.

Ah, the illusion of content.  

 

Gamification

A Jeopardy-style game within eLearning. This type of content is called ‘gamification’. It’s interactive, learners can score points, earn virtual badges, compete against each other. It’s a whole thing. I remember slightly wincing at the idea. They pushed back, “They compete and can see where they are in the rankings. They like it!”

Do they?

There’s a new(ish) branch of the training industry that wants you to buy into that. Put your wallet away. Picture employees standing around the lunchroom chatting about their virtual badges and individual rankings. Are you picturing it? Can you hear the conversation.  

 

The Dream

Adult professionals don’t care about games in their training. They gave up long-ago on interesting training, but they secretly dream of valuable, actionable info that makes them smarter; makes them better at their jobs.

“You’ve just described our training content. What are we supposed to do?”

I’ve got some excellent news for you:

1.  Any advances you make will be met with a hero’s welcome.
2. You’ve got an extremely low bar to clear.

You can reimagine your training program and its effectiveness. There isn’t any magic to it, you will have to embrace a new, modern approach. You’ll need to restructure your program to support it and train your people to practice it. This isn’t an overnight thing. Practice, critique, reset, and keep working at it. You can absolutely create effective and engaging training, but it will take some time to get good at it.

“But our leadership wants us to churn out content. We don’t have time to ramp up on a whole new way of doing things.”

I get that. We need to educate our leadership on what effective training looks like and how we develop it. And we also need to remind everyone that training budgets are not for creating training.

You heard me.

Training budgets are for solving problems like, a hit to the company’s reputation, product quality, schedule creep, slowed revenue, employee satisfaction, regulatory concerns.  

 

The Problem

When creating training, most start with, “Here’s the topic, these are the sub-topics we’re going to teach, and this is what we want them to know by the end.” Pretty standard, but this approach is what leads to bulleted lists and a sea of text on the screen. It’s a “here’s the info” approach.

Instead, ask, “What’s the problem we’re trying to solve?” You feel the difference? Rather than gathering info to push out to learners, approaching it from working through the problem creates an entirely different dynamic. Create training in order to solve a problem.  

 

The Story

Those bulleted lists and paragraphs of facts aren’t memorable because there’s nothing to hang our cognitive hat on. Training should have a story to tell, and I don’t mean Jamal and Jill went up the hill. Let’s say employees are entering information into the database incorrectly. Start the training with the problem.

“See the total number of parts on this report? The fulfillment center uses that to re-order, but we still end up short on parts which delays the next phase of the project by three to six weeks. This costs us $X and our reputation takes a hit.

It turns out that the number of parts on the report is wrong because we’re entering Y incorrectly when we fill out our work form. Let’s walk through it.”

The story of the problem is much more engaging and memorable than a ‘do this’ step-by-step. The key to solving the targeted problem is for those working it to understand it and care about it. When we explain what’s happening, we include them as partners and stakeholders in our company.

 

Visuals

Great training includes engaging, relevant visuals. Relevant visuals make it easier and quicker for the learner to understand the concepts. It takes more time to design on the front end, but it’s much more effective and takes significantly less time to consume.  

A Case Study

I created training for a worldwide audience of 40,000 software developers. I was told the training would take an hour. But I created a highly visual, story-based training that took 15 minutes, effectively saving 45 minutes of each developer’s time. Let’s do some math.

40,000           Developers

x 45 min         Time savings per dev

1,800,000 min   Total minutes saved

÷ 60 min

30,000 hrs      Total hours saved

÷    8 hrs         Work hours in a day

3,750 days       Reclaimed workdays

x    $400         Dev’s time per day @ $109k/yr

$1,500,000      $ Reclaimed

Stunning, isn’t it?

“But our audiences are a fraction of that. More like 1,000 for a class.”

Okay.

1,000              Learners

x 45 min         Time savings per learner

45,000 min     Total minutes reclaimed

÷ 60 min

750 hrs          Total hours reclaimed

÷    8 hrs        Work hours in a day

93.75 days      Reclaimed workdays

x    $250        Per day @ $65,000/yr

$23,437          $ Reclaimed

That $23,437 savings is for one class. Do you know how many hours of classes your employees take each year?

If you’re interested in saving that kind of money while solving problems for your company, it’s time to embrace a different method of designing training. Time to modern-up by designing for the problem, telling a story, and nailing the visuals.

In 2022, corporate America’s spend on training exceeded $1 billion. That’s $1,000,000,000. IN. TWELVE. MONTHS. They’re chasing something. With a modern approach to training design, you can catch it.

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~gail sexton is the author of this article and owner of Engaage, LLC. Scroll down to sign up for emails, where she’ll share more concepts and practical steps for creating engaging and effective training.