Dueling Models: Teach, Study, Test or Find, Learn, Do. Which Is Best for You?

Your learning, development, and training content is really only effective if employees use it and find value in it. And if they can’t get to it, or there are substantial barriers to accessing it, your effectiveness takes a big hit. 

So what is the best way to distribute digital employee training content so employees actually use it? 

Shift From Corporate to Operational Learning

While LMS employee training is great for organizational or corporate learning, it fails to serve employees while they’re on the job. Operational learning needs to happen in the flow of work, so employees can solve problems as they happen. While employees typically rely on corporate learning material during their initial weeks on the job, they should ideally be able to quickly get answers to questions months, or even years, down the road. 

This shift from the corporate learning model of teach, study, test to how employees actually operate in their role with a find, learn, do learning model increases the effectiveness of your training content since 70% of learning happens on the job.

Adoption rates of traditional LMS are often about 30-40%, but when you add an operational information and knowledge solution, adoption rates can be as high as 93% with tens of millions of page views every month.

Make Corporate and Operational Learning Work Together 

So where does operational learning leave an LMS? The best strategy for LMS content integration is to make corporate learning content as a prescribed learning activity. 

Make sure that both corporate and operational training content is available directly to employees on mobile devices. Then, think of learning activities in your LMS as a springboard that gets employees up to speed quickly. Operational learning is what helps employees operate at peak efficiency. 

You’ll be able to deliver digital employee training the way your employees want: 58% prefer to learn at their own pace, and 49% want to learn in the flow of work.

By prioritizing content availability, you’ll not only focus students on the right material but also help them retain critical knowledge—studies have shown that repeated access to content and self-assessments is critical to ensuring long-term retention. That’s one more reason to get interactive content directly into the hands of your employees, whenever they need it.

Traditional learning management systems are powerful and useful but often can’t meet the unique needs of decentralized, frontline workers.  To discover what solution might be the best fit for your needs try our interactive solutions guide!