NEWS: The benefits of combining technology, games and face-to-face training to enhance business simulations will be explored at the Learning Technologies 2016 Summer Forum.Multi-award winning learning provider, Sponge UK will be presenting a free seminar at the exhibition based on its work with pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).The session will offer ideas for giving ‘traditional’ business simulations a new twist by using a blended approach that reinforces learning and helps employees develop their skills in a realistic environment.Seminar host, Kate Nicholls, Head of Innovation at Sponge UK, said:"Simulations can be particularly effective in boosting learning retention because they allow people to practice in a safe environment, but they must deliver an authentic experience that rings true with your employees. This seminar will look at ways to exploit immersive environments by combining tech, game mechanics and the best of face-to-face. Plus, we’ll reveal how GSK is achieving success with a simulation that helps its employees understand the bigger picture of running a global business."During the seminar, exhibition attendees will learn about:The value of simulationsWhen simulations can be effectiveHow to create an authentic scenarioHow to build in game elementsHow to facilitate technology-enabled simulationsTips for project successFeedback from the GSK exampleLearning Technologies Summer Forum takes place at Olympia, London on Tuesday, June 14. The session, called Realism without risk: Using business simulations to boost performance, takes place in Theatre 2 from 12.45-13.15pm. The Summer Forum is free to attend by registration for L&D professionals in a current L&D role and involved in any aspect of organisational learning and learning technology.Sponge UK is a gold winner of Elearning Development Company of the Year and Outstanding Learning Organisation of the Year at The Elearning Awards, now known as The Learning Technologies Awards. The company is exhibiting at the Summer Forum at Stand 11.The post New twist on business simulations at LT Summer Forum appeared first on Sponge UK.

What should you do when employees want to develop their skills but they can’t find the training they need?61% of L&D leaders do not have a clear communications policy, according to a Towards Maturity report on consumer learners. It’s no surprise that 40% of learners say they can’t find training that’s relevant to them.If you’ve spent time developing and curating content that is perfect for your learners, you need a plan to make sure they can find it.We’re going to explore some key tactics that will get your training noticed.Plan a campaignA campaign is a series of coordinated actions through different channels that promote your training. Taking your time to plan your approach is crucial to getting the best result.We’re going to offer some general tips on creating an effective campaign and finish by giving you an Elearning Communications Plan Template so you can develop your own plan.Download the Elearning Communications Plan TemplateA communications plan gives you the blueprint for all the marketing actions you’re going to take. Using our template you can identify the best way to get your digital training course out to the people who need it.When you’re filling in your own plan read about some of the other companies who have used the campaign approach successfully to market their online training.Identify your audienceThe audience for your campaign isn’t just the learner who will be taking the training. In many cases you will want to target the line managers of the learners as one of the key stakeholders."81% of all staff say that manager support is essential/very useful for learning what they need for their job" - Towards MaturityThe more compelling you can make the message, the more chance there is of it being passed on.Think about how the training is going to benefit the person you’re targeting.Store managers at a frozen food business were able to identify talented staff who were likely to want to pursue a long term career by analysing their performance in an induction course.  Providing managers with the information they need to better develop their team is a benefit which isn’t obvious unless it’s highlighted by L&D.By explaining the benefits for the line managers, as well as the learners who they interact with, you increase the impact of your message.With different audiences you need to take different approaches, so it’s important to set out your messages and channels for each audience.Make it consistentYour business probably has a brand style guide, a document that tells your marketing and design teams how to portray your brand to your audience.What you might not have is a training style guide, explaining how the brands values should be communicated to your own learners.The two documents may be closely related visually, but the tone of voice and language used when training internal staff will be different to content aimed at potential clients or customers.Creating a style guide for your learning and the campaign around it will help keep your message consistent. Making sure the same style is carried through your training content and your communications around it means learners are familiar with the course before they take it.When Mothercare wanted to introduce a new range of compliance modules they incorporated the illustrative style of the content into print posters. The posters were placed where employees would see them and acted as an introduction to the theme and style of the courses.Create a micro siteAnything you can do to make it easier for a learner to access the training will help. Put yourself in their shoes and think about the user experience they go through when finding and taking a course.Is there anything you can do to improve this process for your learners?Micro sites offer a great way to drive people to your content without bogging them down in a wider Learning Management System (LMS).The Tesco Learning Leap micro site helped drive 4000 learners to complete compliance training in 6 weeks.Whenever you need learners to complete a specific piece of training consider a micro site. When built into a wider campaign to ensure learners can find and access the site, it’s a valuable tool for L&D teams.Use a variety of channelsThe best marketing campaigns include user-generated content to inform and add value to the original message.Getting your learners involved with the campaign could be as simple as making it easy for them to share their own results or opinion on the training with colleagues.You could include a forum or social space inside your own LMS and encourage learners to take part in a discussion about the training there. The Launch&Learn LMS has a forum add-on that can act as a social hub for your employees.Alternatively, L&D can use existing social platforms like YouTube or LinkedIn to help complement the training and drive more learners to it.If you get in front of your employees on the channels they are already using you can present them with a shortcut to the course content.If you can identify influential colleagues who already use these platforms, you can include them in the design of the campaign to make sure it’s appealing to learners on that channel.Make it easy for everyoneSome people are going to miss your campaign, however much you try.  Remote working, annual leave, sabbaticals, they can all mean that employees miss your promotional efforts.There are also learners who will want to take the training in their own time, at their own pace. On demand has become a part of consuming content be it television, movies, music or training.Whatever methods you use to promote your digital training make sure it’s available when the learner wants to take it, wherever they are.Using a multi-device approach helps, but ensuring it can be found on your learning platform is just as important. Some systems allow you to add metadata to your course or highlight it to learners within the platform in other ways.Investigate the options available in your LMS for making the training stand out for people who haven’t been exposed to your campaign.Always remember that everyone is different and one approach will never work perfectly for everyone. Finding the best compromise of appealing to a wide audience and a personalised approach is one of the hardest aspects of marketing your elearning.Your six tips for marketing your elearning project are:Plan a campaignIdentify your audienceMake it consistentCreate a micro siteUse a variety of channelsMake it easy for everyonePut the theory into practice with our downloadable communications plan, an easy to use tool for planning how to market your digital training.Download the Elearning Communications Plan TemplateThe post Reach more learners - 6 ideas for marketing your training appeared first on Sponge UK.

A new report is giving fresh insight into workplace learning in the retail sector. You may find it challenges your assumptions about training in retail. We’ve picked out some key facts that shed light on what’s working for retailers and what’s not. Towards Maturity’s Sector Benchmark Report, Embracing Change in Retail Businesses looks at the learning practices of 40 retail organisations. More than half are multi-nationals. The study examines their tactics and approaches to Learning and Development (L&D). The report reveals how retailers are doing compared to the average performance in other sectors. Retailers are also benchmarked against the organisations achieving the best results. They are the Top Deck. No retail business makes it into this upper 10% of consistently high-performers. Why is that? We’ll be looking at what’s holding retail back and where the sector is making encouraging strides in performance. Investment in skills When was the last time your training budget went up? Financial pressure is a way of life for most learning professionals. Some of you won’t have seen resources increase for several years. But the Towards Maturity report shows a different story in the retail sector. Forty-seven percent of retail businesses have increased their budget in the last two years. The same number plan to make a further increase in the next two years. This compares with just 38% across all sectors. Almost 80% of businesses are using budgets to increase technology-enabled learning. Learning teams are also growing more rapidly in retail than in any other sector.Retailers are expanding their learning teams twice as fast as the top performing organisations. This is mainly in content development and instructional design. Retailers offer a wide and impressive range of skills training. The sector is on a par with the Top Deck in offering induction and leadership training.Retailers lead the board in providing customer handling and Health and Safety training. The level of commitment and investment in training by retailers is encouraging. It bodes well for the future of the sector. But the report warns that retailers need to use their resources innovatively to achieve the benefits they seek. Developing Millennials Millennials are important to retailers, not just as customers but as employees. A study by PayScale shows that the most common job for Millennials in the USA is retail work. This group (aged between 19 and 30) is five times more likely to be working in retail than any other. The report reveals that retailers want to focus on Millennials in their learning strategy. Sixty-five percent of retail businesses said ‘strengthening training appeal for Millennials’ is a key driver of their L&D strategy. This compares to an average of 56% across sectors. Most retailers recognise the importance of mobile for Millennials. So it’s no surprise that 87% want to allow their learners to use their own devices for learning. Only 31% of retailers are achieving this goal but that’s still above average. Retail is moving in the right direction in trying to change strategy to meet the needs of a target audience. MOBILE MILLENNIALS:Find out how sports clothing retailer, Sports Direct is using mobile in its induction programme. Bottom line impact In a competitive sector like retail, delivering value and bottom line impact is fundamental. The Towards Maturity report offers some encouraging data in this area. "Technology-enabled learning is making a significant contribution to the business bottom line where measures can be attributed to specific learning interventions." Retail is performing above average in some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The sector stands out compared to others in the following: Improvement in ability to change procedures and projectsStaff satisfaction and engagementTime to competenceBut there are also some areas of concern. Only 9% of retailers are achieving business cost reductions from learning activities. Just 2% are seeing a drop in staff turnover. Completion rates Many organisations are now using technology in compliance. Did you know that retailers are leading the way in moving Health and Safety training online? The sector exceeds any other, with 71% offering e-enabled Health and Safety skills. Most retailers are also offering industry-specific mandatory training online. But retailers are reporting lower than average completion rates. The gap is more than 10% compared to other sectors. Employees in retail either see little value in improving their skills or lack the motivation and encouragement to do so, says the report. COMPLIANCE CAMPAIGN:Find out how Tesco used a campaign approach to help 4,000 learners complete compliance training in just four weeks. Learner choice Retailers are offering a wide choice of training topics but poor flexibility. Learners can get support on a wide range of skills - more so than any other industry. But the options on how, when and where staff can access training are limited. Retailers need to do more to make learning convenient for workers. They are lagging behind in giving learners clear information about opportunities. Employees in other sectors are twice as likely to have an appraisal discussion about their development. Incredibly, no L&D professionals in retail think their learners have the skills to manage their own learning. Are retail businesses out of touch with their learners? Social learning It’s a mixed picture for retail when it comes to social learning. There’s clearly thought and investment going into supporting social and informal learning. Over 50% are using in-house social media platforms to support learning. Forty percent are using externals sites like YouTube and Twitter. Thirty-two percent of L&D managers in retail said they influence their organisation’s social media policy - that outperforms the Top Deck. But is there resistance to social learning in some retail organisations? Only 4% of senior managers are encouraging it, according to the report. Just 15% of retailers understand how learners are using social media to share ideas outside of L&D. SOCIAL AGE: Find out more about social learning in the modern workplace in this podcast with award-winning social learning expert, Julian Stodd. In summary, we’ve highlighting six findings in the Toward Maturity report. They all reveal some interesting data on the state of workplace learning in the retail sector: Investment in skillsDeveloping MillennialsBottom line impactCompletion ratesLearner choiceSocial learning There’s plenty more in the study to help shed light on the learning challenges in the retail sector.Visit www.towardsmaturity.org to download the full report. To review, compare and improve your own learning strategy, join the Towards Maturity Benchmark Study, which is free until July 15, 2016. The post What are retailers getting right (and wrong) in workplace learning? appeared first on Sponge UK.

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