You want to hire great employees. But even more, you want to keep developing those employees through ongoing learning programs and initiatives.
Of course, even the best employees don't just become avid learners on their own. They need help in the form of a targeted learning experience that caters to their learning needs and creates an ecosystem of development.
You need an enterprise learning strategy.
Sounds easy? Think again. Deloitte estimates that the average employee spends less than 1% of their workday on enterprise-level upskilling or other types of learning experiences.
Docebo’s research also has shown that 70% of the learning undertaken at organizations occurs outside work hours.
Without opportunities to learn in the workplace, 67% of employees are more likely to switch to a new employer.
That's probably why, according to PwC's latest CEO Survey, 80% of business leaders cite an organizational need for new and improved skills as their biggest business challenge.
Also, enterprises are expanding, looking beyond internal training. Docebo’s internal data shows that enterprises are growing in use cases.
While onboarding and talent development remain priorities, external use cases like customer education and partner enablement have nearly doubled.
Docebo’s data shows that companies’ external use cases have significantly grown in the past decade.
We know that building a true learning culture is powerful.
So, let's discuss how you can achieve this by building an enterprise learning strategy that drives employee engagement at every level of your organization and fosters a dynamic learning culture for customers and partners alike.
1. Define the desired outcome of your enterprise learning strategy
First, and perhaps most importantly, you have to define exactly what you want to get out of your enterprise learning strategy.
That might even start at the very beginning by defining what the strategy actually is: a clear outline of how your company will carry out internal and/or external learning initiatives.
Will you educate your employee stakeholders, from onboarding and teaching new skills all the way to retention and closing skill gaps?
Will you extend your learning initiatives to include customer education and partner enablement?
Your learning strategy might hit on a wide range of topics, including:
- The current training needs of your employees, focusing primarily on the current gaps that a training strategy might be able to close
- Whether the focus should be more closely tied to new employees, existing employees, or both (probably both)
- The learning preferences of your employees, including definitions of whether learning opportunities should occur online, in-person, or elsewhere
- The current needs of your customers
- The resources and materials your partners need
- Specific learning and training materials to enable your sales staff to succeed
- The learning solutions you might look to implement to achieve your learning objectives, typically in the form of a learning management system (LMS), microlearning platform or an AI-powered learning platform
Once you understand the broader components of your learning strategy, goals become easier to define. For example, you might want to focus on developing specific new skills or a broader culture of continuous learning.
Define them early so that your entire strategy can derive from them. Better yet, an early outline of your goals also ensures you have plenty of time to align them with your business goals.
Then you can more deeply engrain your professional development efforts into your everyday and strategic operations.
2. Assess your current learning gaps
Next, it's time to outline precisely the gaps your organization has that an enterprise learning strategy can solve.
That means you have to get your teams involved. Identifying learning gaps requires performing a comprehensive skills assessment and comparing the results to the skills your teams should have to be successful.
Think about it as a more comprehensive version of a basic needs assessment. In addition to asking your company leadership and department heads about the skills they want their team members to have, you also learn exactly what skills currently exist within your various functional areas.
Naturally, the areas where the gaps are the most significant are where your skills development efforts can begin to hone in.
If you already have an AI-powered learning platform, you may already have ideas of what skills are available in your organization.
3. Identify employee preferences for potential training programs and formats
Of course, an enterprise learning strategy is never just about the what. The how matters just as much as you look to optimize your employee development efforts.
In other words, how exactly do your teams want to learn? Do they prefer an e-learning platform for online engagement or more in-depth webinars?
Or are they still most comfortable with in-person training content? What about social learning—or simply getting through some instructional modules on their own time?
Sure, you can follow general trends in enterprise learning, which will generally lead you in the right direction. But the real key to unlocking learner engagement is to customize training for your employees.
This is impossible without their input.
Ask them how and where they want to consume training materials. You can even ask them what that learning content should look like.
As you begin to get answers, you can learn more about your employees and how to build a training program and format to which they'll respond positively.
Getting feedback about learning can also be done easily through an AI-powered learning platform that also includes advanced analytics so you can easily assess the impact of your learning strategy.
4. Create clear lines of ownership for employee training
To be truly successful, any enterprise learning strategy has to be embraced and prioritized by the entire organization.
From senior leadership down, every supervisor should be able to encourage and empower their teams to participate and leverage the learning resources at their disposal.
But it goes beyond generalized buy-in for the strategy as a whole. Your strategy should identify several key learning and development (L&D) leaders who will be responsible and accountable for its implementation and success.
These leaders may be part of the formal org chart hierarchy. However, especially in less vertical organizations, they might also be informal leaders who just want to embrace a comprehensive learning culture and strategy.
No matter the scenario in your organization, the key is that these leaders are empowered to drive the organization and culture toward the desired learning outcomes.
From choosing the learning technology to helping to build the training and all the way to promoting learning opportunities to your team, these leaders will be the driving force behind a successful implementation.
5. Choose the right LMS or learning platform for your learning environment
No enterprise learning management can succeed without a powerful platform specifically designed to help with the implementation.
You're probably already familiar with remote training software, but similar platforms are just as crucial for in-person learning opportunities.
That's because their benefits are immeasurable. They help you track participation and engagement according to clear metrics.
They come equipped with templates and some AI-powered learning platforms also come with AI authoring capabilities that make building individual learning modules easier.
And, of course, they can make learning more fun through gamification and social learning experiences that amplify communities within the workplace to share tacit knowledge and strengthen organizational knowledge.
To get there, though, you have to find the right option. Choose an LMS or learning platform that specifically matches your needs.
Keep your learning gaps, employee preferences, and overall strategy in mind.
Spend plenty of time to vet all of your options to ensure that, by the time you make your choice, you can be confident that the platform will help your employee training strategy succeed.
6. Design learning journeys aligned with employee and corporate learning needs
With the right platform in place, it's time to get to the implementation. That means building the modules, certifications, microlearning opportunities, and overall learning journeys you have identified as vital in the above steps.
At the enterprise level, extended enterprise learning becomes a crucial concept to follow. It wraps in all of your internal and external stakeholders for a comprehensive training program that everyone can benefit from, including external audiences like customers and partners.
It's not just about expanding your audience, of course. More importantly, it's about designing those overarching learning journeys. This can drive new employees through the onboarding process and existing employees through continuous learning opportunities.
Ideally, each learning journey is modular but still unique to its target audience. Individual modules might be relevant to multiple journey types but are arranged and grouped differently according to those unique needs.
That keeps the content relevant, maximizes engagement, and drives better learning outcomes.
7. Build an assessment strategy to assess employee learning against your KPIs
Finally, any strategy worth its salt needs an assessment component.
Once you have built assessments and evaluations, which you can easily do with a learning platform, you can check back on your implementation periodically to ensure everything is working and succeeding as intended or make adjustments where necessary.
At its core, this assessment strategy must define exactly what key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics you want to track. It should also include a connection between these metrics, your overarching business goals, and a time frame within which you will check back and report on its success.
Typical enterprise learning KPIs might be:
- Training attendance and engagement
- Average time spent on the platform or in a given module
- Course completion rates
- Job performance benchmarked before and after the training
They can then connect back to your business goals of better employee engagement, retention, and productivity.
The assessment strategy should also be adjustable. If you find any KPIs difficult to quantify or irrelevant to those larger goals, consider going back and making adjustments to increase that relevance level.
Case study: Implementing an enterprise learning strategy with KCF Technologies
KCF Technologies, based in the US, specializes in advanced industrial machine monitoring solutions like SMARTdiagnostics.
To maximize the benefits of KCF's product and its valuable data, customers need training and continued collaboration with KCF’s team.
Initially, they considered traditional training, but logistical challenges and limited trainers made it unfeasible.
YouTube was another option, yet it lacked the ability to track, validate, and certify learning, essential for compliance that their customers needed.
This led KCF to adopt a comprehensive learning platform, which enabled them to deliver training to customers effectively while tracking progress.
The company also realized that this new learning platform not only allowed them to achieve the original goal of educating customers, but also could extend to training employees, vendors, and potential investors.
With a central Repository, KCF can easily store and replicate course content within the learning platform, allowing them to create tailored training learning journeys for both customers and employees.
With great potential for customization, KCF now leverages their new learning platform to build distinct learning paths and environments for different user groups.
Additionally, they’ve also utilized localization tools and extensive language capabilities to support international users by providing training in their native languages, enhancing accessibility and engagement.
The outcome? Over $1.5 million saved in training costs and 12,000+ hours of engaged learning for over 4,300 customers. Employees have also greatly benefited, having completed over 23,000 courses.
The company has seen that their most successful customers are the ones who stay actively engaged within the learning platform. They learn to use their product more effectively, make smarter decisions about plant operations and machine maintenance, and as a result, see improved performance and increased profitability.
Develop an extended enterprise learning strategy to drive retention and engagement
It's time to take your training efforts to the next level. With the right enterprise learning strategy, you can build a comprehensive culture of learning, just like KCF Technologies did, that will proliferate across your teams and positively impact your company's performance.
But of course, it all starts with the right learning partners, and the right learning platform and that's exactly where Docebo comes in.
With scalable, personalized learning powered by AI and deep automation, we've built a powerful learning platform for enterprise applications.
Take a tour to see the platform in action, and see why Docebo is trusted by over 3,800 companies like KCF Technologies, and by 30,000,000 learners worldwide.