As a learning technology company at the forefront of innovation, we take pride in pushing ourselves further, developing our products and really making waves in our industry. We take a lot of inspiration from Steve Jobs - the late Apple CEO - was well known for his revolutionary outlook. Here we’ve selected some of our favourite Steve Jobs quotes that we live and work by that will get you thinking, improving, and creating great products and services: "I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next." Bask too long in the glory of your success and you’ll find yourself overshadowed by the competition. Things move so quickly, particularly in technology, that it’s vital to continue innovating. Yes, celebrate your successes, but don’t let them derail you! We’ve been riding the high of our Learning Management System - the Academy LMS - being crowned the world’s #1 LMS since January this year, but that doesn’t mean we’ve become stagnant. Far from it, in fact! We’ve since developed the Performance Centre, a comprehensive suite of performance management tools that aid organisations in upskilling their employees and give the employees a clear route to success. You can check it out here! "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower." Our new authoring tool, Genie, is probably unlike any authoring tool you’ve seen. Why? Because our dedicated development team didn’t look at other authoring tools during the development process. They haven’t followed the preconceived notions of what an eLearning content tool should look like, how it should perform or what it should produce. Instead, through working with eLearning creators, discovering their needs and desires, we created a game-based authoring tool that is totally unique. Now that’s true innovation. "When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through." Amen to that, Steve! Everything we create - from the Academy LMS to Genie - is beautiful throughout. It’s not only a pleasant experience for the learners, but Academy Admins and Managers, as well as eLearning creators, enjoy a well-designed user experience too. After all, why should learners get all the fun and enjoyment? "A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them." This is what we’ve found time and again, particularly when it comes to gamification. People say that they don’t need a gamified Learning Management System because they never have in the past. Well, that’s exactly why they need one now - they’re talking to us because their employees aren’t engaged with their training. Gamification is the ideal solution because it engages and motivates learners. And as soon as we show people what gamification on Learning Management Systems looks like, they embrace it wholeheartedly! You can find out more about gamification in online learning here. "I’m as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things." When creating technology solutions, it can sometimes be hard to say, ‘No.’ If everyone around you is doing one particular thing, it’s easy to get drawn into doing it too. But in order to stand out from the crowd, you have to do just that - say ‘No’ and stand your ground. So when we’re asked whether the Academy LMS has Feature #523 and we say ‘No,’ we don’t offer up apologies or make promises to bring that feature into production. Instead, we explain why we’re different, what features we have that render #523 unnecessary, and show how that feature really isn’t as important as the buyer has been led to believe. Unless, of course, there is a feature that we see and think, WOW! In this case, it’ll get added to our development roadmap, but we won’t copy - whatever we do, we do our own way. Want to find out more about the Academy LMS and how we’re different? Pop your details into our contact form by clicking the button below and we will get in touch to give you a guided tour!    The post 5 Steve Jobs Quotes That We Live and Work By appeared first on Growth Engineering.

From setting your TV to record shows when you’re half way across the country and video conferencing to listening to your unborn child’s heartbeat and automatically monitoring ongoing changes in your fitness level, we use our mobile phones and tablets for so much - we’re almost inseparable now. We carry around so much power in our pockets and bags these days. They say our mobile phones are now more powerful than the computers used to put man on the moon, so it stands to reason that we’ll want to use them for almost everything we do. This upsurge in mobile phone and tablet use has, not surprisingly, pervaded the eLearning industry too. More and more learners are demanding eLearning units that can be taken on their mobiles and Learning Management Systems that function as well on tablets as on desktop PCs and laptops. Making Learning Management Systems responsive isn’t enough. It may suit tablet use, but mobile phones will require a specialised app that is designed solely for the device to make eLearning more accessible and easy to use. No one likes to scroll sideways in order to see all of the screen, yet equally, having to scroll down through miles of rearranged text isn’t fun. Putting the learner experience at the heart of everything we create is something that we’re proud of here at Growth Engineering. That’s why we’ve made the Academy LMS completely responsive on tablets, and why we’re rolling out a mobile app to our current clients. It allows learners to access their training whenever and wherever they are, whether they’re at work, on the move, having a lazy day on the sofa or squeezing in an eLearning unit in the dentist’s waiting room. The mobile app even allows learners to access their training when they have no internet connection. They just need to download the eLearning materials while they are within range, then can travel wherever they please - or turn off data to save money - to take the training. When they reconnect, everything they’ve been done will be automatically pushed through to update their account. That’s not to say that learners only want to learn on mobiles or tablets. The desktop PC and laptop still have their place in eLearning. There are somethings which are simply much more efficient on computers, like writing assessments or entering text within eLearning units. But the option is there for learners to take their learning via any means they see fit - and this is something they really value. Learn more about the Academy LMS: click the button below, fill out the form and we’ll get in touch to arrange a demo tour!    The post The Importance of Mobile in Online Learning appeared first on Growth Engineering.

There are a few theories out there about informal learning at work - the 70:20:10 split, Jay Cross’s 80%/20% model and Dan Pontefract’s 3:33 model, to name three. One thing they have in common is that they are just guidelines. It’s not suggested that companies should break their backs trying to achieve these splits or ratios. But it’s important to emphasise the role that informal and social learning plays in training. On that note, here are five ways to boost informal learning at work: 1. Buddy up Encouraging everyone - not just managers - to take part in coaching and mentoring can help to improve training and get everyone learning. Buddying up new starters with old hands is a great option, as is setting up an informal mentoring scheme. 2. Encourage sharing Once people get into the habit of sharing their knowledge, social learning will flourish. An intranet, internal forum or even a Learning Management System like our social Academy LMS which gives employees a platform on which to collaborate will boost learning in this way. 3. Showcase experts Make sure learners know to whom they can turn in order to discover information and learn more about certain things. If they know they can approach Clive in Marketing for help with branding, or Deirdre in Sales for advice on closing sales, they’ll be more likely to approach them - and learn from them. 4. Reward social learning If you see your learners are communicating and collaborating on projects, don’t ignore it - make sure they know how much you appreciate what they’re doing! On the Academy LMS we reward learners with badges and accolades such as ‘Top Contributor’. Making the social learning process fun with gamification is one way to boost informal learning even more. It also ensures that learners don’t ‘hoard’ information and helpful links, but share their knowledge with everyone. 5. Make informal learning required Functionality on the Academy LMS allows Academy Admins to set certain tasks that are required to be completed before a learner can ‘level up’ and move on to the next set of learning materials. One of these, which will encourage informal learning, is the ‘Know it All’ achievement, assigned to learners when they have shared their knowledge 10 times. Only after achieving this award can they level up, making collaboration and social learning essential parts of their learning journey. Want to find out more about social learning? We wrote a whole white paper on it! Get your copy for free by clicking the button below:    The post 5 Ways to Boost Informal Learning at Work appeared first on Growth Engineering.

There is much evidence to show that passive learning - sitting back and listening to a lecturer - provides only the lowest level of knowledge retention and cognition (Deslauriers et al., 2011). Active learning methods, on the other hand, help to develop problem solving and critical thinking skills and provide a much higher level of cognitive functioning. This leads to a greater degree of understanding and information retention. One active learning method which will achieve these feats of learning awesomeness is team-based learning, whereby learners are encouraged to prepare before a classroom-based event and then work in teams while in the classroom. It’s a classic example of the ‘flipped classroom’ that you may have heard of - getting learners to go through eLearning units in their own time, before they attend a classroom event, to free up time during the session for collaborative learning and discussion-based work. It ensures that learning is cemented much more thoroughly in the learners’ minds and also transforms the role of the tutor from content delivery to guide. There are four principles that contribute to successfully implementing team-based learning in the classroom: Carefully formed teams To get the most out of team-based learning, you can’t chuck learners together willy-nilly. Teams should be carefully formed and managed to ensure good team diversity and communication. There’s no point teaming the group’s most talkative learner with the least outgoing - the talkative learner will continue their role of over-contributing and the least talkative will stay silent. Instead, separating them might encourage the silent learner to come out of their shell and the louder learner might be more likely to listen to the views of others. It’s also important that a good diversity is present within teams. For instance a variety of education, experience and cultural backgrounds will be beneficial - you never know who might come up with an interesting idea! Accountability Being accountable to your peers is pretty critical to building a successful team. This doesn’t just mean contributing on the day, but also being accountable for pre-class preparation work. There’s nothing worse than arriving at class to find none of your team has done their homework! Feedback Individuals and teams need frequent and timely feedback to know how well they’re doing (or not). It’s important to pick up on misunderstandings and erroneous ideas early on, before they’re discussed and stick in the learners’ minds. Getting teams back on the straight and narrow will keep the topics focused, accurate and relevant to the desired learning outcomes. Applying knowledge It’s always easier to see whether we’ve learnt something when we can apply it, so encourage team application exercises that promote learning and team development. One way to achieve this is to ask teams to use their collective knowledge, skills and values to choose a specific solution to a problem and then defend their choice to the hills. You’ll soon see who knows their stuff and who is falling behind! These 4 tips will make sure that team-based learning exercises in the classroom are effective and engaging for learners. But team-based learning isn’t the only way to engage learners in the classroom - there are many more tips in our white paper all about how to make classroom learning more fun. Download it for free below!    The post Team-Based Learning: Make Learning Active! appeared first on Growth Engineering.

The role of a Learning and Development professional is fraught with difficulty. It’s such an important job - essentially, the success of the organisation lies in L&D’s hands! If gaps in knowledge are not spotted and rectified with training, problems can crop up throughout the company, from management to the bottom line. So it’s understandable that the L&D function might be feeling the strain. Research from KnowledgePool has shown that just 23% of L&D leaders are confident that the training they roll out has an impact on the bottom line, and under half are confident that they can demonstrate how training meets business needs and fills skills shortages. For such an essential function, it’s worrying that the L&D department doesn’t seem to have faith in itself and its actions: just a quarter are ‘very confident’ that training is innovative enough to deliver value, and only 24% feel ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ confident that they are able to harness technology to aid training. However, even though L&D doubt the alignment of training to business goals, 42% of senior management believe training is in fact ‘broadly’ aligned with business strategy, and a further quarter are ‘extremely’ aligned (CIPD). Plus over half (52%) of board members believe training meets business goals and 54% are confident that training will impact the bottom line - compared to L&D, the rest of the organisation is much more confident that training programmes are proving beneficial! So why the disparity? Why might Learning and Development professionals be lacking confidence in their choices? Perhaps part of it stems from the transformations that are occurring in Learning and Development at the moment. The move from classroom- and workshop-based training events to online learning, ‘flipped’ classroom and blended learning programmes can create a new and uncertain terrain for L&D to traverse. It’s a big change to move away from ‘traditional’ training to embrace online learning in organisations. Committing to change is often challenging, particularly if current processes seem to be ticking along nicely. Why fix what isn’t broken, after all? Yet clearly L&D do recognise that ‘something’ is broken - their confidence in training programmes would be significantly higher if they believe they are making the best choices. It may be that senior management and board members have more confidence in L&D decisions than L&D does itself because they don’t see the internal conflict that arises from making difficult choices - they just see the impact that training is having on employees. We put together the following white paper to show just why training should be brought online. If you’re struggling with confidence in your L&D plans and aren’t sure you’ll secure return on your investment, check it out for free below!    The post Don’t Panic, Learning and Development Professionals! appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Find out what makes the world’s #1 Learning Management System tick! We’re inviting some lucky readers to join us on a guided tour of the Academy LMS, recently ranked the #1 LMS in the world by Craig Weiss, eLearning expert extraordinaire. Last month we attended two incredible tradeshows - AITD in Sydney, followed by ATD in Orlando. There was so much interest in the Academy LMS - particularly its gamification and social features - that we’ve decided to host a few LMS webinar tours to give you an in-depth look at just what our award-winning LMS has to offer! Places are strictly limited to 25 per slot and are already filling up, so be sure to secure your place ASAP.   Tuesday 2nd June 2015 at 10am CT (4pm BST) hosted by Dan Blackburn, Head of US Sales SOLD OUT Wednesday 3rd June 2015 at 3pm CT (9pm BST) hosted by Dan Blackburn, Head of US Sales. SOLD OUT Tuesday 9th June 2015 at 2pm AEST (11pm BST) hosted by Jane Wilding, Vice President of Asia Pacific Commercial Operations. CLICK HERE TO RSVP! If the timings of these webinars aren’t convenient for you, keep your eyes peeled for another LMS webinar slot at a more suitable time in the near future - unless you fancy joining us from the comfort of your bed while sipping hot cocoa, which is fine too. It’s a webinar; no one will know you’re in your PJs! Here’s some of what you can expect to see on the webinar tour: Gamification: see how points, badges, ‘levels’ and leaderboards contribute to learner engagement and motivate learners to work harder for longer Social features: check out the ‘What’s happening?’ feed, see how easy it is to chat to anyone on your Academy via instant message, see how the Insights Groups operate Library: see how easy it is to find training and development materials Performance Centre: check out our new centre for performance management - set and track KPIs and objectives, evaluate values and principles, manage reviews and monitor roles and competencies and much, much more! To RSVP to Dan’s Academy LMS Webinar Tour, click the button below: To join Jane on her Academy LMS Webinar Tour, click this one: We also have a couple of upcoming webinar slots to show off Genie, our game-based authoring tool. Click here to find out more about the Genie Webinar Tours.  The post RSVP to the Academy LMS Webinar Tour! appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Discover how the Genie Game-Based Authoring Tool makes learning fun! We’re inviting some lucky readers to join us on a guided tour of Genie, our new Game-Based Authoring Tool! There was so much interest in Genie last month at the AITD show in Sydney and ATD in Orlando that we’ve decided to host a few Genie Webinar Tours to show you exactly what our gamified content tool can do for your organisation! Anyone who signs up will also get exclusive demo access to Genie, allowing you to try it before anyone else! Places are strictly limited to 25 per slot and are already filling up, so be sure to secure your place ASAP. The Genie Webinar Tours will be hosted by Juliette Denny, Managing Director of Growth Engineering, so you’ll really be getting the star treatment! Choose from the two options below and prepare to be blown away by Genie’s magic: Wednesday 17th June 2015 at 10am CT (4pm BST) Thursday 18th June 2015 at 10am CT (4pm BST) Click the button below to RSVP: Here’s what you can expect to see on the Genie Webinar Tour: Game templates: check out Genie’s pre-loaded game templates - now you can create game-based eLearning to delight learners Gamification: see how points, badges and leaderboards motivate and engage content creators Social features: check out the Activity Stream to see who is doing what and see how the Genieous Forums work Project management: find out how Genie keeps eLearning development on track and enables content creators to stick to (or smash!) deadlines and much, much more! We also have a couple of upcoming webinar slots to show off the Academy LMS, our gamified social Learning Management System, which was recently ranked the #1 LMS in the world. Click here to find out more.  The post RSVP to the Genie Webinar Tour! appeared first on Growth Engineering.

It’s quite well known that eLearning offers several pretty great advantages over regular classroom-based learning at work. For instance, it’s flexible - both in terms of time and place - and encourages learners to take an active role in their training. It’s also a massive advantage for workplaces where lifelong learning at work is important, such as industries where laws and regulations change regularly, or where the employee always needs to keep on top form and up to date, e.g. the medical professions. eLearning is also a great option for when employees are all at different skill levels and need to progress at different rates. Rather than all employees needing to sit through the same lectures and workshops, they can access whatever content on their LMS is relevant to them at that particular time. This means the employees who have the most passion and drive will progress fastest, and those who need a little more time to get their heads around the topics can take the time to do so. There’s no worry of the class progressing too fast and leaving anyone behind! It’s all well and good knowing that these benefits are associated with eLearning, but they don’t necessarily mean employees will embrace online learning with open arms. To truly establish eLearning as ‘the way we do things here’, the initial introduction of online learning at work needs to be very well structured and thought out. All stakeholders need to have a positive attitude towards the new training, which can be achieved by making sure learners are satisfied and progressing well. Once stakeholders and senior management see the positive effect eLearning is having, they’ll be more accepting of it. Therefore it’s essential that employees are given access to a good Learning Management System that works well and does what it says on the tin - i.e. rolls out learning content to employees and gets them engaged in their training. Securing learner engagement is pretty much the most important thing when it comes to Learning Management Systems. Without engagement, employees simply won’t be able to muster up the motivation to undertake their training, improve their skills and push the company forward from success to success. Wondering how to secure engagement? It’s quite simple when you know how! There are two buzz words that come together in securing engagement on Learning Management Systems: ‘gamification’ and ‘social’ learning. Find out more about these two essential parts of online learning at work by downloading the free white paper below!    The post Creating a Positive Attitude Towards Learning at Work appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Does eLearning ‘not work’ in your industry? Maybe eLearning is a ‘poor substitute’ for face-to-face training? Are you worried your employees ‘won’t like’ online learning? These are all fallacious arguments and have no real basis in what eLearning is really about. eLearning has a pretty bad reputation for being boring, buggy and ineffective. But, as most of us know, reputations are often based on opinions, not facts. The truth of online learning is simple: done right, it motivates, engages and upskills learners. Myth: eLearning doesn’t work in my industry Truth: eLearning works in every industry. No matter what kind of job you do, eLearning will work to train employees. Do you drive a forklift? eLearning can be used for health and safety training. Work in a shop? Retail eLearning is very important to improve sales and customer experience. Do you manage a call centre? Management training, such as from the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management (ISMM), will be incredibly useful to improve your managerial skills. Myth: eLearning is a poor substitute for face-to-face training. Truth: eLearning works both as stand-alone training and as part of a blended training programme, depending on your specific needs. That doesn’t necessarily mean that every aspect of training can be done online; in some instances that’s just not feasible. You wouldn’t expect to teach or learn about correct suturing procedures online - you’d watch someone doing it in real life and then practise it yourself. But you can certainly learn about the theory behind suturing via eLearning - why certain techniques are favoured, healing time, types of suture, and so on. Myth: My employees won’t enjoy eLearning Truth: While it may be the case that your employees, or even your, have had bad experiences of eLearning in the past, that’s absolutely no reason to avoid it in future. You just need to ensure that the eLearning you roll out is engaging and effective! We do this (and win lots of awards for it!) by making learning fun with gamification and social features. Click the button below to read more! Myth: eLearning is not cost-effective. Truth: Really? Really?? Once you sit down and do the calculations you’ll find that eLearning is incredibly cost-effective - more so than classroom-based learning, at any rate, and particularly so when you have a lot (500+) employees to upskill. Consider the costs involved in classroom training: travel expenses, hiring the conference room, paying a tutor, food and drink, a day or few days of lost sales… It all adds up. On the other hand, with online learning you’ll only need to pay a one-off fee for the set-up the LMS, an LMS licence fee, and licensing for eLearning (unless you create your own - see how that’s possible here). When you’re talking about training hundreds or thousands of employees, eLearning is certainly the most cost-effective and pain-free option. Find out more about why eLearning is a great choice for organisations by clicking the button below. Alternatively click here to download our free research paper which tackles all the most common objections to online learning!    The post What’s Holding You Back From eLearning? appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Picture this: you manage a team of salespeople. You have a few top performers, a couple of average-performers and one lazy so-and-so who never seems to do much work, yet somehow manages to hit on the big accounts and keep their metrics up. You give all your salespeople some training, and they all improve - even the top performers! "Great!" you think. "Everyone’s performance is soaring!" Until suddenly… BAM. You notice that for the past two months, you’ve seen no improvements. The top performers are still the best, but overall performance has tapered off. "But… but the training… I thought it worked!" you wail. One of the problems here is that once training is given, improvements may only be temporary. Employees may take on board the training for a short while and implement the new ideas in their work, but eventually they fall out of these new habits, forget the best techniques and wind up back where they began. Ericsson (2007) explains this as a problem of habituation. Well-performing employees become habituated to executing routine work proficiently, but without further improvement - it’s only through a sustained, deliberate effort to improve that these employees will see an increase in performance. It’s frustrating for trainers and Learning and Development professionals, of course, but it’s also demotivating for employees. They put all this effort into training yet find their managers back on their case only a few short weeks or months later - it’s like they just can’t win. This cycle of train > increased performance > plateaued performance > train can be difficult to break, not to mention costly. Isn’t it better to train once, and continue to reap the rewards months or years afterwards? Of course! The solution lies in the kind of training your employees have. Research by McEdwards found that one of the main contributors to continued performance increases was ‘deliberate practice’ after the initial training (which can be delivered via online learning mechanisms). It’s a form of training that includes coached, intensive exercises conducted over a period of time, ‘aimed at perfecting skills and pushing learners beyond their level of ability’. Deliberate practice involves (over and above the actual training) mentoring, immediate feedback and on-the-job learning, rather than time-consuming and costly seminar approaches. When McEdwards’ participants were encouraged to deliberately practise their new skills in their work environment, performance increased by 6.7 points - compared to a seminar group, who weren’t encouraged in the same way, which improved by an average of 2.9 points. Clearly, deliberate practice is a huge benefit to employees and their managers. So how can organisations encourage this deliberate practice? Gram (2013) suggests it should be embedded in the job, with experiences ‘designed to include practice and reflection, build tactic knowledge and design rich feedback’. Deliberate practice is actually well suited to adult learners and goes hand in hand with the integrated use of technology in training. It can be a valuable tool when managers recognise that passive forms of training aren’t working - i.e. if sitting in a classroom or workshop isn’t resulting in the sustained performance improvements that employers need to see. Of course, the first step in the chain will always be indentifying a training deficit and choosing an initial training programme to close the gap. Research shows that online learning is an incredibly effective way of delivering training and development solutions, and some Learning Management Systems, like our gamified social LMS, are set up with deliberate practice in mind. Check out the free download below to see what we mean!    The post End the Agony of Stagnating Performance with Deliberate Practice appeared first on Growth Engineering.