Are you hardy enough to navigate the murky waters of online learning and uncover the buried treasure? At this year’s World of Learning Conference and Exhibition, taking place on 30th September and 1st October, your friends at Growth Engineering are launching The Great Academy Treasure Hunt. While most Learning Technologies companies are content with offering exhibition visitors a boring, dull meander around their Learning Management Systems, Growth Engineering are not. We think it’s just not good enough! No, in order to truly get a taste of what a great Learning Management System can offer, it’s vital to make the tour itself enjoyable. That’s why we’re inviting WOLCE visitors to hunt for buried treasure on our gamified Academy LMS! All you need to do is head over to our section of the Test Drive Area, grab your Platform Pass and use the treasure map clues to uncover the secret code that will unlock the treasure chest, located on our stand (E80), and claim your prize! But don’t try to trick our friendly GE staff into telling you the super-secret codeword… they’ve been sworn to secrecy, on penalty of walking the plank. The only way to unlock the treasure chest and claim your reward is to test drive the Academy Platform LMS. We won’t go into too much detail about the prizes up for grabs, but let’s just say that Captain Jack would be very happy… *hic* Don’t forget, you can pre-book an appointment to meet with us at the event. Just click here to book a meeting with Growth Engineering. P.s. did you know, Growth Engineering just won three Brandon Hall Excellence Awards? Yep! We won a Silver award for Best Sales Training Program for Extended Enterprise, which reflects the huge improvements in sales figures that we and Azlan (the Enterprise Specialist Distribution division of Tech Data, wholesale distributor of technology products) generated through Tech Data Academy. One awesome individual who received sales training delivered a massive increase of 678% in sales across six different customer accounts - a truly remarkable feat - and proactive users on the Academy outperformed inactive users by 75% in terms of sales growth. Wahoo, go Azlan!! But that’s not all! We won two Bronze awards, too. The first was for Best in Learning Technology Implementations in association with Brakes for the Brakes Change Academy, which increased employee knowledge of systems change by 90%. The second Bronze was in the Best Results of a Learning Program category, awarded to us in association with Bensons for Beds, Britain’s largest bed retailer with over 270 stores and 1,800 employees, for Bensons Academy. The Academy boosted employee engagement, reduced attrition rates from 50% to 23% - saving the company £1,350,000 a year - and reduced training costs by £500,000. You may be able to tell that we are pretty excited about these awards! If you’re interested in getting the same results for your organisation, check out our free white paper on how to secure fantastic return on investment on your training programme:  

This week’s Learning Hero is Cathy Moore, a fellow enemy of boring training! When your house is on fire, you call the fire brigade. When barbarians are attacking your city, you alert the local garrison. When you need help creating more engaging eLearning, you call Cathy Moore. Cathy is a speaker and writer who has been helping companies with instructional design and eLearning for over 16 years. We’re not talking about lemonade stands or Granny Annie’s Knitting Workshop here - we’re talking about Microsoft, Pfizer and even the US Army. Large organisations can suffer from the same L&D issues as smaller ones but costs of poor training are significantly higher. Regardless of the scale, dull eLearning and ineffective training programmes have an effect on the bottom line. To get around this problem, you need training content that engages the learner. Since few business leaders have buckets of free time, they need to hire an instructional designer - a training expert who can translate the learning objectives into something that speaks to the learner. But, like those learners, the instructional designers never stop learning. Cathy Moore’s blog is aimed at instructional designers. Her posts deal with the challenges faced by eLearning professionals and offer lots of advice for surmounting them. As an example, this post deals with eLearning scenario questions and how to improve them. We’ve all seen poorly-considered multiple choice questions. Sometimes the incorrect answers are so ridiculous that the learner can too easily eliminate them and find the correct answer. At the other end of the scale, the question might be too vague and open to interpretation. Now, to Johnny Average, problems like these might seem a bit trivial but these are the kinds of things that keep instructional designers awake at night. Thanks to people like Cathy Moore, these lonely souls can sleep easy. If you want to know more about what Cathy does to make the world a better place, check out her website. It’s a great place for instructional designers to find guidance and it’s full of useful articles to inspire anyone with an interest in the nuts and bolts of training and development. Here at Growth Engineering, we are ‘waging war against dull online learning’ - a mission statement that is spookily similar to Cathy Moore’s. Our Gamified Social Learning Management System, the Academy Platform LMS, is built from the ground up with engagement in mind. To find out how to pump a little more awesome into your online learning, sign up to tour the Academy by clicking the button below.  

Craig Weiss, eLearning expert, speaker, creator and author of elearninfo.org and all-round nice guy, wrote an article in the latest e.learning age magazine (check out September’s issue here - Craig’s article is on p6, and we have a great double page spread on pages 14-15 all about curing the ‘zombie learner’ virus!). Since he is coming to the UK to speak at World of Learning Conference and Exhibition and meet fellow eLearning aficionados, he wanted to set the Learning Technologies industry straight on a few things; namely, the top 5 Learning Management Systems in the United Kingdom. So, as soon as September’s issue of e.learning age hit the web, we rushed to check out Craig’s rankings… And were overjoyed to discover that we are still #1 in his books! You may recall that Craig has previously rated us very highly. Click here for a list of his articles which have mentioned yours truly. Anyway, here’s what Craig had to say about Growth Engineering’s Learning Management System, the Gamified Social Academy Platform LMS: "I really love this Learning Management System, but it is not for everyone. Why? Because it is all wrapped around gamification. If gamification is not your thing, then this is not your system. "Other big wins include a very modern and hip user interface, a great learner experience (I had fun), and all the standard features you expect in other systems, monthly updates with features, forward-thinking approach, gamification, social and, well, sweet. "Mobile on/off synch is coming late Q3 with a self-contained app, but no e-commerce until Q4. A built-in authoring tool enabling you to create ‘game-like’ courses is expected in Q4. Overall, the number two LMS in the world." Aw, Craig, you do make us blush! It’s always a pleasure to have Craig rooting around in our Academy, trying out the features, being rewarded with badges galore and gaining achievements left, right and centre. As Craig said, our Learning Management System is designed to make learning fun - gamification and social learning encourage learners to log on more often, stay there for longer, work harder, remember more and change their behaviours in the long term. He says that our Academy may not be for everyone, but really, who wouldn’t want a Learning Management System with gamification features that will supercharge learner engagement!? If you’d like to find out more about what makes our Academy the best Learning Management System in the UK, 2nd best in the world, and the Best Gamified LMS, Best Retail LMS and Best Next Gen LMS in the world, click the button below: P.s. We recently interviewed Craig Weiss for an upcoming instalment of GE TV. We’ll soon be launching this new, exciting section of the GE website, so keep your eyes peeled!  

Have you ever been asked a question but just couldn’t get to an answer because you took things too literally? There’s a well-known psychological experiment, known as the ‘candle problem’ or ‘Duncker’s candle problem’, that demonstrates this perfectly. In this experiment, participants are given a candle, a box of matches and a box of thumbtacks, and asked to attach the candle to a wall (cork board) so that the wax won’t drip on the floor. Duncker’s problem confounds even top university students because of an issue of ‘functional fixedness’. This is a pretty posh term which basically means that we don’t arrive at the correct solution (promptly or ever!) because we are too set in our ways of what we think an item like a box of thumbtacks is for and should do. The solution, of course, is simple. You need to empty the thumbtacks out of the box, put the candle on the box (you can melt some wax to keep it secure if you really want top marks), then pin the box to the cork board. Then just light the candle with a match and watch as the wax settles on the box and saves the researcher’s carpet from certain doom. Voila! Easy when you know how, right? Our point here is that it’s so important to think outside of the box (although admittedly, in this case, it’s about thinking inside the box…). Approaching whatever it is you’re doing - working, travelling, learning - with a sense of curiosity and openness will allow you to be more creative in your endeavours and unlock potential that you never knew was possible. Don’t look at things just as they were designed to be used. We all already stand on chairs to reach the back of cupboards, and they certainly weren’t designed for that! So the next time you’re handed a few objects and told to create something or solve a problem (or the next time you’re enrolled in an eLearning module), go at it with a sense of wonder and let your creativity flow. You never know what you might uncover, what routes you’ll go down and what you’ll discover about yourself, the topic and what you’re capable of. Want to find out more about how creativity and uniqueness is important for learning to truly be exceptional? Read our free white paper by clicking the button below!  

Have you ever wondered what the meaning of life is? We have! Luckily for us, 6-year-olds know exactly what the answer to the universal riddle is… In this incredibly inspirational video, children explain the meaning of life, how to have a meaningful life, and why motivation is so so so important in achieving what we want and leading a life we can be proud of. As the video explains, when we look back on our lives, we don’t regret the things we did - only the things we didn’t do. The things we don’t think we have time for, or we think are too difficult or boring. But you know that? Those ‘boring’, ‘difficult’ things are what will make the most difference to our lives. They’re the things that will let us sit in our rocking chair at 90 years old and think, "Oh yeah. That was awesome!" In the same way, we really do encourage you not to sit around, waiting for the opportunity, but to go out and get it. And one of the ways to do this - to be proactive and assertive - is to get yourself trained up. Want to run a marathon? Gosh, don’t just wake up on the day and go for it! You need to practise, practise, practise and train in order to get where you want to go. You wouldn’t try to pass your driving test without having ever sat in the driver’s seat before, would you? So why would you expect to progress up the ranks in your organisation, get a promotion, get a payrise or get that coveted job in the new industry if you don’t put in the hours and train for it? As you saw in the video, even 6-year-olds understand this concept! As they say, a bamboo shoot requires 5 years of attention - water, sunlight, care and just the right conditions. Yet as soon as it breaks through the ground after those 5 years, it grows 90 feet in just 5 weeks. That’s what we’re talking about here. If you put in the hard work, the benefits will come. Maybe not right now. Perhaps not tomorrow, or the day after. Maybe not even this year - but if we put in the hours, focus on training and developing ourselves, learning new things and furthering our skills, it will pay off. And then we’ll become unstoppable. Those 6-year-olds are awesome. Want to join us and discover how you can stop putting off your self-development and just crack on right now? You’ll find your first piece of learning below:  

This Week’s Learning Hero is Charles Jennings, workplace performance expert and an advocate of the 70:20:10 principle. We like Charles because he gets right down to the nuts and bolts of learning and development. As an expert in the 70:20:10 principle, you can probably guess that he’s a major expert in implementing learning strategies that focus on the way people actually learn. We’ve covered this before but, as a quick refresher, the 70:20:10 principle states that we absorb 10% of what we learn from formal training, 20% from observing others and the remaining 70% from on-the-job experience. Charles uses his 70:20:10 expertise as a means to help businesses translate the theory of the 70:20:10 principle into a practical framework. In this, his work has been an invaluable resource for companies of all sizes worldwide. For over 30 years, Charles has been a consultant, helping multinational corporations and government agencies improve their performance. In this role, he has helped to bring global companies out of the dark ages of training and development and into the exciting new landscape of learning and performance. He is also one of the principal members of the Internet Time Alliance, a group founded to promote smarter working practices in organisations. He’s always keen to share his expertise with the world and regularly appears at international events and conferences, speaking about topics such as performance, productivity, development strategies and learning technologies. Of course, you don’t even need to wait for one of these events to pop up. You can get a taste of Charles’ knowledge for free over at his blog. Here, he challenges popular ideas about learning and development and offers his own unique twist, gained over years of expertise in the industry. At Growth Engineering, we also like to challenge the conventions of training and development. We believe that in order for learning to work, the learner has to be fully engaged. One of the best ways to engage someone (and keep them engaged) is to make sure that their learning journey is as much fun as possible. Aside from turning our Academy Platform LMS into an engagement engine, we try to implement as many effective learning technologies as we can, including the 70:20:10 principle, informal learning and social learning. If you want to find out how we work our magic, join us on the next Academy Tour by clicking the button below.  

Like any industry, retail businesses have their own set of needs. When they look for a training solution, a one-size-fits-all approach might help a little bit, but it won’t meet their specific training needs. Like so much in life, a little thought at the early stages of a training and development plan will improve your chances of success. Let’s see how a Learning Management System can help you get the most out of your retail business. Bear with us while we go all hypothetical… Diamond Discs is a popular chain of music stores with around 100 branches nationwide. They’ve seen a massive drop in profits as their customers have turned more towards digital downloads. With finances at crisis-point, they need to find ways to plug the gaps in their processes. After much analysis, they discover that they are spending a lot of money on a training programme that isn’t delivering the results they are looking for. Despite focussing their training on customer service, they find themselves close to the bottom of polls for customer satisfaction. On top of this, they are losing lots of money every year due to poor loss-prevention, stock management and administrative processes. What can they do? 1. Deliver training in a more efficient way. Diamond Discs’ current training programme has to date consisted of instructor-led training, instructional videos and outdated employee handbooks. Every few months, branch managers are required to attend training seminars at Diamond Discs’ head office. Transport costs and instructor fees add up, and the absence of managers in branches can have an effect on efficiency (when the cat’s away…). Although instructor-led training and classroom sessions have their place, it isn’t the most efficient way of delivering training. With the right LMS and some custom-made eLearning, Diamond Discs can move most of their training online, meaning that the learning content can be accessed at any time and from anywhere. 2. Use tests and assessments to identify learning needs. Right now, the management of Diamond Discs knows that there are some gaps in the employees’ knowledge but they can’t be more specific than that. Without proper analysis, they have no idea where best to invest their training spend. Sure they could take a gamble based on the figures they have but it’s that kind of thinking that has put them in their current position. Most LMSs will come equipped with testing and reporting functions but it’s up to the administrators and managers to use them effectively. Of course, it helps when these functions are as user-friendly as possible. The managers can design a test to assess specific training needs and send it out to all employees. The reporting function can then be used to: find out who has completed the test find out how they have performed identify the biggest weaknesses. Once this has been achieved, Diamond Discs can take their next steps from a much more secure position. 3. Create eLearning to address individual issues One of the most effective ways of training staff is to use eLearning. Diamond Discs can choose between rapid eLearning or bespoke eLearning. With rapid eLearning, the company’s own L&D department need to produce a storyboard document listing all of the learning goals and describing how they are dealt with. Bespoke or custom eLearning involves a bigger financial investment, but the task of creating the course is outsourced to instructional designers - learning professionals who can deliver the information in a more focussed way. Whichever path they choose to take, they will be developing a course that is individual to their business and something to which the learners can relate. The versatility of eLearning is another big advantage. This is a tool that can be applied to all aspects of the retail business. It can be used to teach anything including: Stock management processes (booking in, storage, etc.) Cash office procedures (cashing up, weekly & monthly procedures) Payroll Improving product knowledge Health and safety compliance By managing all of their learning materials on an online learning platform, Diamond Discs can also ensure that their curriculum is kept up to date at all times. With this solution in place, they won’t have to rely on employee handbooks and they can avoid the expense of reprinting updated versions every couple of years. 4. Enable and encourage informal learning Formal learning (instructional literature, classroom sessions, etc.) is an important part of any L&D programme but it only accounts for 10% of all work-based learning. The rest is achieved through on-the-job experience and interaction with colleagues. As this kind of learning is, by its nature, hard to plan, many managers choose to ignore it. However, by creating a culture of knowledge-sharing, Diamond Discs can reap the benefits of informal and social learning without having to do anything else. That’s the beauty of informal learning - it happens all by itself! What does this have to do with their LMS, though? Well, today, the Learning Management Systems that are proving to make a real difference to company culture are those that are designed to take full advantage of the missing 90%. As providers the world’s #1 retail LMS, we have seen retail companies flourish after employing the right tools. Training and development can sometimes be an easy thing to overlook. Sometimes you need to address the issue before you realise the positive impact a great training solution can have on your ROI. To find out more about how the Academy Platform LMS can help your retail business, get in touch with us now or click the button to sign up for our next webinar.  

A high-performing culture is something that every organisation aims to achieve. Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? You want your employees to work to the best of their abilities, achieve more, aim higher and be the incredible workers you know they were born to be. There are lots of ways to improve performance and achieve the goal of having a culture of high performance - which, by the way, means that over and above ‘individual’ employees performing at 100%, the workforce as a whole performs to a consistently high standard. So how can you create a culture of high performance? Well, the clever clogs at Gallup polled 3,477 managers and found that the following things help to create a high-performing culture: Setting clear expectations Defining employees’ roles Creating a trusting environment Encouraging employees’ growth and development Encouraging higher performance by raising the bar for themselves and others. But over and above these 5 things, it is buy-in from the organisation as a whole which will really help to create a culture of high performance. From analysing 30,000 employees, Gallup highlighted six crucial components of a high-performing culture: 1. An effective performance management process In order to understand how close employees are to the desired culture, proper evaluation processes need to be in place. You can’t tell how far a worker has come if you don’t know where they started, after all. 2. Empowerment and authority We’ve written before about how important it is to make employees accountable and empower them to take the initiative and control their own working lives. And now we can see that it’s also vital in establishing a culture of high performance. 3. Leadership capability at all levels From the CEO to the just-graduated new-starter, it’s important that all members of the company share the same vision, values and goals. Having a common mission and a shared purpose will ensure the belief runs throughout the organisation. So not only do managers need to ‘live’ the mission, but so do all the ‘higher-ups’ in the company - if employees see the values reflected in every facet of the organisation, they’ll be more likely to adopt it as part of their culture, too. 4. A customer-centric strategy It may seem obvious, but ensuring employees connect with customers is an important part of creating a high-performing culture. Employees that interact with the customer base will better understand the industry, what the organisation is trying to achieve and how to go about it. 5. Communication and collaboration Oooh boy! Now we’re getting to the juicy stuff. We’ve said many times how important it is that employees communicate and collaborate effectively. (Click here to read our research paper on how important it is that co-workers get on, and click here to find out more about collaboration in the workplace.) 6. Training and development How else will you ensure your employees perform to a high level than by giving them training and helping them to develop their skills? Organisational training is vital to create a culture of high performance. It’s important that employees reach a baseline level of experience and skills, which they can use a springboard - it ensures a certain level of competence is always met and enables the company to grow as a whole unit. Offering training and encouraging continual learning are great ways to boost the overall level of performance in the company. In other words, training and development is vital to the creation of a high-performing culture. Want to find out more? Download our research paper on how to secure a great return on investment on your training spend (by encouraging social learning and a culture of empowerment):  

No matter which industry you operate in, whether it’s retail, construction or hospitality, it’s up to you to ensure that your employees are trained in the laws, policies and conventions that apply to their daily work. This can encompass Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) laws, risk management and food hygiene but whatever your business, these standards are essential to avoid legal liability and ensure that your employees work in a safe environment. In the past, training in compliance, like most topics, involved face-to-face classroom sessions, instructional videos and the use of employee handbooks. While these methods can be effective, they have their limitations.   How can a Learning Management System help you deliver compliance training? Classroom sessions, seminars and other instructor-led training are not the most cost-effective way to educate your staff. For this kind of training, you need to factor in the cost of hiring an instructor, the cost of compensating employees’ travel expenses and in some cases the cost of booking a venue. Aside from these direct costs, your business may also incur losses through the absence of those staff members attending the courses. Take into account the amount of time spent organising and arranging these sessions and you can see how much of a drain on resources they can be. What can a Learning Management System do to help? When you switch to an online training solution, the learners are free to access the content whenever and wherever they happen to be. Not only does this save money, but it is a better use of your employees’ time. Classroom sessions still have their place, however. Besides helping you arrange the events themselves, you can improve their effectiveness by integrating LMS functions and enabling live tests and assessments. Find out more about Interactive Classrooms Instructional videos also have their cost implications although they tend to be more cost-efficient than instructor-led training. The main drawback with this kind of training is that it’s difficult to gauge its effectiveness. Many of the companies who use this kind of training tend to incorporate it into the induction process. Generally speaking, the new employee is left to watch the video after which they are asked to sign a statement saying that they have done so and that understand the contents. Cynical though it might be, managers cannot guarantee the honesty or accuracy of these signatures and although these statements can protect the company from any legal backlash, they cannot protect the employee from accidents. What can a Learning Management System do to help? As we’ve mentioned, instructional videos cost money to create. You can’t expect a worthwhile return on that investment if there isn’t a way to gauge their effectiveness. With a Learning Management System, you can deliver the same video content but you can also take advantage of the LMS’s assessment and reporting features. Doing this takes out all the guesswork, letting you discover which videos are working for you and which aren’t. Once a viable reporting solution has been put in place, you no longer need to wonder whether or not your employees have grasped their compliance training, giving you extra peace of mind. Find out more about our reporting features Employee handbooks suffer from the same difficulties. The effectiveness of the training is almost impossible to judge and it takes an act of faith from the managers to know whether the training has been understood and absorbed. Another problem with this kind of training is that it isn’t very engaging. The problems of tracking your employees’ understanding are only compounded when the training materials don’t hold their concentration. What can a Learning Management System do to help? Not all Learning Management Systems are created with engagement in mind, but if you choose the right one, you can implement a solution that is both effective in delivering compliance training and enjoyable for the learner. Most Learning and Development experts today agree that engagement is the key to delivering training that actually works. For evidence, you need only look at the Learning Management Systems that are succeeding and those that leave their owners disappointed. Growth Engineering’s Academy Platform LMS is a fully gamified online learning portal that embraces the power of social and informal learning to deliver a truly engaging experience. Our clients have used their Academies to deliver all kinds of staff training, including compliance training, and the powerful reporting suite has allowed them to track their learners’ progress and adapt accordingly. If you’d like to see it for yourself, sign up to the next Academy Tour by clicking the button below!  

We’ve just arrived back from the World of Learning Conference and Exhibition, and what a whirlwind event it was! From setting up on Monday to taking down the stand on Wednesday evening, we had a whale of a time. Though the visitors come in peaks and troughs, World of Learning is an event that lives up to its name. If you want to learn more about, well, learning, then WOLCE really is the place to be. A few of the delights included two very jolly human-sized flower pots strolling up and down the aisles in procession; bottles of rum for visitors who navigate the murky waters of online learning and discover the buried treasure at the end (if you’re wondering what we’re talking about, click here!) and of course a bright red double decker bus parked in the hall! The NEC is a great venue for the event, feeling both spacious yet intimate, and there was certainly a great variety of exhibitors for attendees to visit and learn about. And, of course, the food on offer wasn’t bad either… "Those pork sandwiches were something else!" - Paul, Grammar Hammer aka Marketing Content Writer For the rest of us, the highlight of the event was the seeing the delight on visitors’ faces when they successfully completed The Great Academy Treasure Hunt and made their way to our stand to claim their prize. At the end of the Treasure Hunt was a super-secret special code word which they had to remember and then say to us in order to open the treasure chest full of gifts and goodies… And let us tell you, after a day of wandering around World of Learning, those hardy seafarers were delighted to discover buried treasure in the form of gold coins (chocolate, of course) and bottles of rum fit for any pirate Captain! *hic* We came home from World of Learning with aching legs, sore throats and an empty treasure chest - but full of excitement, enjoyment and happiness that we met so many awesome people, started great conversations and made so many people’s day by handing out goodies. If you missed us at this year’s World of Learning Conference and Exhibition but want to find out more about us, you can either get in touch to request contact, read about what we do here or click the button below to jump on board a guided web tour of our world renowned Academy Platform Learning Management System, the #1 Gamified LMS in the world!