The Importance of Getting to Know your Learners

How well do you understand and empathise with your learners? Do you know them, really know them? As a Learning and Development or training professional, you have a lot on your shoulders. You need to plan, organise, and implement training, and in this whirlwind, you may place the end-user on the back burner. One of the greatest misconceptions is that you need to spend more time and resources on content creation because this is what ensures better learning results.

Of course, content creation is vital, but if you don’t spend time creating a learning engagement strategy, your learners will feel like numbers on a spreadsheet.

You need to understand your learners, get to know them – and here are 3 reasons why:

Make Training More Effective

Going through assessment scores and reports only tell you a fraction of the learners training experience. You need to understand the effectiveness of the training, or its ineffectiveness. And to understand this, you should always turn to your learners – they have the answers!

Turning to web analytics is great, but it won’t give you the complete picture. Let your learners provide feedback about their learning experience. Your analytical spreadsheets will tell you what aspect of your training is successful – and your learners will tell you WHY.

Communicate Meaning

“Epic Meaning” is a buzz word in Learning and Development circles – and for good reason. This refers to showing your employees just how important their specific role is, and how it plays a role in reaching the company’s mission. This will make them realise just how important their skills are, and why they need to continually expand on them.

The first hurdle in training is to get your employees interested in it. No one wants to take part in corporate training if they think it will be boring and bland. You want to give your learners a reason to log in to their learning platforms. By inspiring your learners, and showing them that they are an important part of your business, by communicating their “epic meaning,” they will want to be a part of your training and learning programmes.

In order to communicate effectively with your learners, you need to know who you are talking to. Get to know your learners, how they communicate, how they think, and what is important to them. You need to speak their language – and use this language when creating their training content. This is how you strike inspiration in your learner – and make your training programmes even more effective.

Personalise Training

You can’t expect your learners to appreciate a “one size fits all” training program. Your learners are all different, and all have different styles of learning and communicating. Some employees will learn faster than others while other learners need more time. If you are not creating a personalised experience, your training may be a waste of time and resources.

The way to achieve this is through adaptive learning. This kind of learning solution keeps track of everything your learner is doing. This system has the ability to analyse their actions and adapt training to suit the individual, giving them access to material that is more relevant to them. Adaptive learning can be provided by your Learner Management System.

In Conclusion:

Getting to know your learners may seem like a big task, but it will help make your training courses that much more effective. When you have created a sense of community on your learning platform, your job will definitely become more interesting and rewarding.
Don’t look at your learners as a faceless crowd, learn about them, who they are, what they like, and how you can use this information to enhance your training.