4 Factors That Influence an Employee’s Learning Experience

How and what an employee learns is influenced by more than just the subject matter: previous knowledge, environment, and attitude all impact an employee’s learning experience.

An effective training program is one that adapts to the needs of your employees.

4 Major Influences on an Employee’s Learning Experience:

1. Current level of on-the-job experience and knowledge

Practical, on-the-job experience should affect how staff training is presented.

Unfortunately, most corporate learning delivery methods simply ignore prior experience, and force learners to sit through lessons they’ve already mastered. Ignoring a learner’s prior experience is the only way for traditional e-learning to teach at scale. But one-size-fits-all learning doesn’t work. A new retail employee will be overwhelmed by too much information, while an experienced retail employee will be frustrated about having to take an introductory course again (even if there is new information they should pay attention to).

Adaptive Learning takes learner experience into account, using an algorithm to personalize training to every learner by measuring the learner’s knowledge and skill. This ensures every employee learns exactly what they need to know.

2. The classroom environment

How a person learns and how they react to new information is very individualized. For teaching important concepts, such as compliance, every single training program needs to offer personalized information delivery. This is a weakness of classroom learning, because an instructor can only spend so much time on each learner.

But the strengths of a classroom don’t have to be lost: Adaptive Learning can incorporate classroom learning into its e-learning model to create a blended learning environment.

3. The online work environment

The attractiveness of classroom learning is that it provides focused time free from work distractions. Online learners can’t always control their environment and might be interrupted by co-workers, emails, or telephones. This can be especially troubling for employees who aren’t very tech savvy or who struggle with the learning content. But Area9’s Adaptive Learning system adjusts to different users needs no matter how long their learning takes or how many times they’re interrupted. Plus with the blended learning option, employees can benefit from online and classroom learning.

4. The employee’s attitude and motivation

An employee’s mental and emotional state plays a strong role in the effectiveness of a learning experience. Maybe a learner is interested in and engaged with what they’re learning. Or maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re frustrated with their manager or a client or are simply having a bad day.

Area9’s Adaptive Learning system remembers how a learner answered questions previously: their confidence level or the time it took for them to get the answer. If a learner’s emotional state is affecting how they answer questions, the software adjusts to that person’s responses in real time; thus, training time is never wasted and a distracted learner becomes an engaged learner.

Adaptive Learning offers a better learning experience than any face-to-face or e-learning training you have seen before.

Download this infographic to understand why.