Even though L&D professionals do their due diligence to create quality content and courses, most of them would agree that their work doesn’t get the attention it deserves. That's because traditional corporate learning is broken. But why? And how can we fix it? That’s the question that’s haunting L&D teams this Halloween. So, how can learning departments develop their workforces skills so that they can align with business needs? To answer that question, we have to take a look at the L&D problems that persist today. Here are three bone-chilling challenges learning, training and enablement teams face today and how to bury them for good.

1. Low Employee Engagement Across Learning Initiatives

The average LMS course takes upwards of an hour to complete, pulling employees away from their work, and in turn, creating a loss in productivity. To put this problem into context, let’s say your 100 employees are participating in four one-hour learning courses a month. That’s 4,000 hours that employees are pulled away from their work. That is not to say that training should be abandoned; it just needs to be worthwhile for everyone involved. Unfortunately, that is not the case for many organizations today, where employees consider learning programs another to-do item that interrupts their flow of work. As a result, many L&D teams have to constantly remind employees to complete training before the deadline, further perpetuating learning as something that is required and not something that is interesting and worth their time.

So, how can L&D teams get employees excited about learning again? First things first: consider the employee learning  experience.

On top of the time it takes to complete training, employees are wasting time toggling between multiple systems. According to HR Executive, the average organization now deploys over 16 HR solutions. That’s nearly double the amount utilized in 2019. Moving across systems and managing a list of logins and passwords interrupts employees' flow of work and this frustrating process leads to disengagement before learning even happens. 

L&D professionals must streamline the learning process and meet employees in their flow of work. Consider consolidating your HR tech stack or taking advantage of the powerful integration capabilities that Qstream Connect offers. I will go into more detail on this exciting new solution in the next section.

The time you’ve spent designing and curating learner content is half the battle; how you deliver that content is arguably the most important piece. Make sure that it’s engaging and valuable so you can reach employees and gain their attention. Incorporating microlearning into your learning ecosystem is an easy way to do just that. Qstream, for example, reinforces key concepts learned in longer training sessions to boost proficiency and knowledge retention over time. There are two key elements to microlearning that makes it highly engaging for an extended period of time. First, gamification adds a layer of friendly competition among colleagues. The second, scenario-based learning, mimics real world situations to make content more relevant and impactful. Qstream’s professional services team even works with you to create compelling content and offers best practices for engagement by helping you design compelling questions, answers and explanations that encourage participation and measure workforce proficiency. Plus, Qstream’s responsive design means employees can answer questions on their preferred devices in a matter of seconds. It’s quick, easy and offers that instant gratification of knowing whether or not you got the question right or wrong.

After receiving immediate feedback on a response, the learner is presented with an explanation to reinforce the important information that is addressed in the question. It’s important for the learner to take time to read the explanation or it will come back to haunt them when they again answer the question incorrectly the next time it’s asked. Qstream uses spaced learning and repetition algorithms to ensure information is understood and retained over time.

2. Siloed Learning Systems That Create More Manual Work For Multiple Teams

Learning data is stuck in siloed HR systems, creating barriers for L&D teams and forcing them to manually enter information across all systems. Manual entry of enrollments and user attributes is inherently error prone and time consuming when done across multiple tools. As an L&D professional, you were brought on board to contribute to employees’ development, not to complete administrative tasks.

IT is another team that is burdened by siloed solutions that require ongoing, complex, custom integration work. And as a result, the relationship between L&D is often strained.

Qstream Connect offers pre-built integrations for your learning management systems (LMS), human capital management, work management and communication and collaboration platforms to extend workplace learning capabilities and automate business processes across the employee technology stack. Plus, microlearning is delivered to the apps employees use everyday. With Qstream Connect in place, L&D teams get to spend time in more valuable areas like building content and courses to meet their learners’ needs and IT teams aren’t bogged down by challenging integration builds and maintenance. It’s common that IT teams have never implemented a learning technology before, let alone integrating a tool with other systems. 

3. No Real Way To Measure The Effectiveness Of Learning Programs 

Your LMS does not offer the robust analytics needed to measure learner proficiency and can’t identify skills gaps that need to be improved. Many learning solutions merely show completion rates and we all know that courses can easily be taken in the background while completing other tasks. When this is the case, learning is not valuable for employees or the business, and all the thoughtful content you’ve produced goes in one ear and out the other.

Qstream offers comprehensive analytics that not only show completion metrics but engagement, proficiency and performance across individuals, teams, regions and the organization as whole.

From these real-time analytics, coaching opportunities can be identified and data-driven decisions on the business and future L&D initiatives can be made. These analytics are especially helpful in compliance-driven industries to ensure that certain information, policies and procedures are fully understood by those on the frontline. 

Microlearning Integrations are the (Skeleton) Key to L&D Success

As you can see, these powerful integrations can solve three of the biggest problems L&D teams face today. And while change can be scary, there’s nothing scary about the value that Qstream Connect offers: a more engaging learning experience for your employees, less manual work for you and your IT team, and real-time access to analytics to help you build and deploy powerful learning programs.

Not evolving to meet the needs of employees and the business will surely come back to haunt L&D teams, so what are you waiting for? Schedule your demo with Qstream today to see how our powerful integrations can reinvigorate your organization’s learning ecosystem.