How to Get the Most Out of Your Learning Tech

Training is a great way to improve employee performance and increase job satisfaction. But in today’s workforce, training isn’t just about teaching employees how to do their jobs well. More employees want training opportunities that teach them new skills, help them advance, and support lifelong learning and development. Additionally, your employees want training that is accessible, engaging, and easy to understand.

If your company is like  79% of organizations throughout the U.S., your team is using a learning management system (LMS) for employee training and development. Using an LMS to deliver employee training comes with several benefits, including centralized access to training content, greater accessibility, and cost efficiency. 

Still, you may be missing opportunities to get the most out of your LMS. Here are a few strategies for maximizing your learning technology to enhance employee training, boost engagement, and achieve measurable ROI. 

1. Utilize gamification and badging.  

Gamification is a good strategy for motivating your employees to learn. To gamify your training program, add challenges, rewards, and other game-design elements to the course. You can use digital badges to reward your employees for completing the requirements. 

Make it easy for your employees to share the badges they’ve earned with their networks. Through Canvas Credentials, for example, employees can conveniently access their badges and get a link to share them via social media, emails, and websites. This allows your employees to demonstrate continuous skills development and boost their professional brands. 

Making it simple for your employees to share badges also benefits the company. When employees share the badges they’ve earned, it helps others see your organization as an attractive employer that invests in employee development. Establishing a reputation for embracing the future of continuing education can help your company attract more high-quality talent, which improves ROI.  

Take advantage of cohort-based learning.  

As the nature of how—and where—employees work continues to evolve, cohort-based learning will continue to become a go-to option for employee training. Cohort-based courses typically have set schedules, recurring deadlines, and regular peer interactions, allowing your teams to learn together across different locations or time zones. 

Canvas allows each of your employees to complete courses or trainings at the same pace as their cohort, fostering collaboration, accountability, and community. Cohort-based learning within Canvas also makes it easy to create and manage groups, which is helpful for joint projects and discussions. Employees who learn within a group are more likely to retain the training material, meaning your employees can perform better and produce more positive results for the company. 

Optimize learning using integrations. 

Integrations allow you to connect different tools and systems for a seamless learning experience. For example, Canvas partners with more than 500 technology companies, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft. Using an LMS that allows these types of integrations means you can provide a more robust learning experience for your employees and improve operational efficiency, which helps reduce costs and maximize revenue. 

Incorporate personalized learning paths.  

Everyone learns differently, so your learning technology should support personalized learning paths. Personalized learning is a way to tailor your employee’s training to their unique needs and roles. This may include giving employees multiple ways to demonstrate what they’ve learned instead of having everyone take the same assessment. You can also implement personalized learning by designing lessons around the learner’s experiences or incorporating self-reflection activities. 

In Canvas, you can create and maintain customized learning paths, use adaptive learning capabilities to tailor learning content, and leverage analytics to assess student progress. This approach can help your employees learn new skills faster and save time and money on more extensive training in the future, increasing efficiency.

Generate reports.  

Reports can provide useful data about what’s working and what needs improvement. Canvas reports provide information such as learner activity, assignment completion, and engagement. Use this data to inform business decisions and evaluate the effectiveness of your training programs. You can also use this data to demonstrate the value of training to business leaders and stakeholders, leading to continued investment in the company.  

Make learning more accessible and convenient.  

Technology makes it possible to learn anywhere, which is useful for employees with busy schedules. Increase your employees’ participation and engagement by ensuring they have mobile-friendly access to training tools and resources. Enabling your employees to access training materials when and where they need them helps drive productivity, retention, and business performance. 

Moving Forward. 

You can enhance employee training, boost engagement, and achieve measurable ROI by continuously improving your organization’s learning technology strategy. First, you must regularly evaluate your current systems and consider new solutions for your company. 

As more companies adopt new learning technologies, Canvas has proven to be a scalable solution that makes training simple for learners and administrators. You can request a demo to learn more about Canvas tools and features and explore ways other companies use Canvas to increase engagement.