How do you build engaging learning?
How should you deploy learning in your LMS for maximum impact?

These are hard questions. But fortunately, we have some tips and best practices for getting the most out of your L&D programs.

Using personas helps L&D teams ensure that the learning they’re delivering is relevant and optimized for their audience. And persona-mapped learning can get 50% more engagement than a generic alternative.

There are many variables to consider, including:

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How tech-savvy is the audience?
This will impact how you deliver the learning. For example, if you have critical learning that needs to be delivered quickly to an old school, non-tech-savvy audience, keep things as simple as possible, even at the cost of some engagement and interactivity.

How is the audience’s day structured? What’s their availability like?
This is a variable that’s often overlooked. Let’s compare a sales and a development team:

Sales teams’ days are often broken into many small slices—a meeting, a call, a short drive, etc. And when they aren’t moving between these activities, they’re probably living in a CRM platform like Salesforce. For an audience like this, it makes sense to prioritize bitesized microlearning content, as well as learning in the flow of work. Integrating learning directly into tools like Salesforce would be a powerful way to increase engagement and minimize the cost of context switching.

A dev team, however, has less fractured calendars. They may have several hour+ blocks of uninterrupted time each day. This means that learning can be delivered in larger chunks. And because devs are used to interacting with social tools like StackOverflow, social learning functionality would be a natural fit.

This may seem counter-intuitive. You might think that salespeople are often more social and extroverted than devs that a social platform would serve them better—but that might might not be the case! You need to know your audience.

1. Know your learners

Using personas helps L&D teams ensure that the learning they’re delivering is relevant and optimized for their audience. And persona-mapped learning can get 50% more engagement than a generic alternative.

There are many variables to consider, including:

1. Know your learners

There’s a reason astronauts train in gigantic swimming pools and on dizzying-altitude flights: So they can experience the sensation of weightlessness before they leave Earth. Of course, they could just read about weightlessness, or watch videos about it. But to truly understand something, you need to experience it.
In a similar way, if you want to improve the skills of your sales team, use a tool like Gong, which records real sales calls. This makes abstract concepts like ‘building rapport’ or ‘emphasizing product benefits’ concrete and real. 

2. Tailor learning to the context it will be used in

The finding? Complex language is hard to understand. This result is extremely robust and it applies in ways you might not expect:

Simplicity is great, but it isn’t always what’s best for retention. In fact, research shows that colorful, stylized infographic imagery was much more memorable than ‘clearer’ and more direct visualizations like bar charts ^[18]. So don’t be afraid to add some creativity to your learning materials. Rather than obscure the information, you’ll actually be making it more memorable.

On the written side, there’s a study that gives away its findings in the title:
Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly ^[19].

3. Balance beauty, creativity, and simplicity

• Even experts who are well-versed in a field’s jargon strongly prefer simple, jargon-free language.

• A speaker or instructor who uses complex language is rated as less intelligent than one who speaks simply—by both laypeople and experts.
  

So if you want to design engaging learning, pick up a thesaurus and simplify the jargon, argot, terminology, lingo, and vernacular.

Admins and learners want the same thing: a simple, intuitive system that makes learning easy. When organizing your learning programs, try to create hierarchies of organization. For example, differentiate courses based on which are mandatory and which are supplementary.
This is where an LMS can help, serving as a central repository and single source of truth. With the right LMS, you can easily manage translation, personalization, version control, and more.

📣 If you want to make your learning as engaging as possible, you should use the world’s most powerful learning platform.

4. Keep learning organized and integrate it with other business tools

LMS best practices for learner engagement