We have seen in our research and our conversations with Learning and Development professionals that training programs and building content are drastically changing. You can’t just build a program and expect to automatically attract your learners – like creating a beautiful baseball field where all the best players come to play in the movie Field of Dreams. Developing great learning programs are not one-dimensional. Not only do you have to create great content, but it needs to emotionally and mentally match the needs of the learner. 
The modern learner is tech-savvy and digitally connected to many devices, all the time. Today it is all about customization and personalization. The concept makes great sense – who doesn’t want to have personal treatment? How elated do you feel when you go to your neighborhood restaurant and the staff welcomes you by your first name and immediately takes care of you? It is certainly nice when the principal at your children’s school quickly responds to your email. The same principles apply in learning. Today’s employees expect — or demand — that their organizations understand them, value them and respond to their development needs in the same way a restaurant, school, or any other organization outside the workplace would respond to their needs.
In our latest HCMx Radio episode, Sam Herring, CEO of Intrepid Learning, joined Brandon Hall Group to share his views on how organizations are meeting the needs of the modern corporate learner in ways that lead to a real impact on the company’s bottom line. Sam was the member of the founding team of Intrepid Learning Solutions in 1999 and became CEO in 2012. Sam has led Intrepid to develop its first SaaS learning technology products — the Learning Hub and Corporate MOOC.
In Brandon Hall Group’s Learning Technology 2016 study, respondents reported that only 4% were very satisfied with their learner-generated content and, yet experiential learning and personalization to the individual is seen as critical to the business. Two out of three companies say that it is essential to the organization to be able to deliver a learning experience that is tailored to the learner – and it is necessary to offer a variety of methods to be able to support the learner. However, there are a lot of assumptions still out there about modern learners and online learning – that you can’t have both engagement and scale at the same time, for instance.
Download the podcast anytime at the HCMx Radio site and gain insights on how we can all do better in delivering learning that has impact for the business.
–Rachel Cooke, Chief Operating Officer, Brandon Hall Group
@RachelCCooke
