The Danger of Under-Prioritizing Your Training Content

Training content is a topic that most training managers or extended enterprises see as a forward-looking activity focused on new processes and new products. You’ve checked that box. You created the content, and it is being used for training — you’re done! Move on to the next new thing, Right? 

Not quite.

In many cases, with fast-paced and ever-evolving industries, training content gets relegated to the backseat amidst a wave of other priorities. The truth is that you miss out on creating a significant impact on your organization when you don’t keep your training content fresh, updated, and interactive for your learners. 

If you don’t keep it fresh, your training content becomes stale and outdated, lacking in interactive modalities and aesthetics. Your initial training launch may have been a great success, but several years later, the content is no longer relevant, and your audience is beginning to notice.

If the content isn’t fresh and useful, you’re going to lose traction and engagement with your learners. You must be dedicated to keeping your content relevant to your audience.  

Training Content Is More than Just a Formality

When you are focused on the daily operations of your organization, it can be easy to view training content curation and upkeep as a secondary priority, or worse. You get your learners set up in your LMS (learning management system), enroll them in the training courses that have gone past their prime, monitor the metrics from those courses, and move them along to on-the-job training where they are more productive. 

Unfortunately, what you’re missing with this process is the opportunity to keep your learners engaged in your content. If you view it as a secondary priority, they likely will, too, and they will be less apt to be fully engaged in the content to retain the information learned from it. 

With fresh, updated, and relevant content, your learners will be more engaged and eager to learn more. So be sure to dust off your training content and give it the facelift it deserves to keep your audience engaged and invested in your organization. 

One-Size-Fits-All Training Content Isn’t Adequate 

While you have to convey the same material to all of your learners, they won’t all learn in the same way. Most training programs consist of hours of courses and SOPs that are built into an LMS, with assessments to gauge performance. While that may be a mode of learning that is compatible with some, it won’t be the best approach for many. 

Your learners come from different backgrounds and require content to be tailored to their learning needs to maximize their learning potential. By offering your training content in different modalities, you will have more of your audience engaged in your content. 

If you deliver a specific type of content as a simple document to be read, consider putting it into a presentation with an audio aspect to cater to auditory learners. If you have a course that’s 45 minutes long, consider breaking it into microlearning courses that are between 5 and 10 minutes long, possibly in video format. This allows learners to take bite-sized chunks of learning over the course of a busy day. 

Lean on algorithms in your LMS to provide training content to your learners based on their performance or identified skill gaps. When the training content is catered to the specific needs of the learner, they will feel more empowered to fill their own knowledge gaps and retain the information in your content. 

Why Is Your Training Content on the Back Burner?

If training content isn’t simply a formality — and a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t the best option — why do we under-utilize our training content?

It can be difficult to set aside time to develop training content when you have competing priorities that come up in the hustle and bustle of everyday operations. Training content is often viewed as a lower priority compared to more immediate concerns like KPIs (key performance indicators) or customer needs. 

Cost may also play a role in the under-utilization of training content. Training content is expensive and can make up to 80% of the cost of a training program. It takes time to develop, and it takes resources to implement — both of which cost the organization money. Many organizations may not understand the full return on investment of a quality training program and are steered away due to expenditures. 

One of the more common reasons that training content doesn’t get the attention it deserves is simply due to a lack of understanding. The executives and managers who have the ultimate authority on where training money is spent don’t fully grasp the potential of high-quality training content and further deprioritize it.

The Business Benefits of Prioritized Content

Prioritizing your training content can have a profound impact on your organization’s performance. There are several ways to give your content a little boost to maximize its impact:

• Ensure that your training content is tailored to meet the specific needs of your network members and the extended enterprise. This will save both time and money by ensuring that every minute spent on training is productive and relevant to their roles within your organization. 
• When your training content is engaging, you will captivate your learners. When your learners are engaged in your content, they stay motivated and eager to learn more about their role and how they can progress within the organization. Mechanisms that help your learners understand where they are in their training journey are also beneficial to engagement. By keeping them updated on how far they have come and how far they have to go will allow them to actively see their progress.
• Make your training content available to your audience wherever they may be! By utilizing a mobile-friendly LMS, your learners can consume your training content on the go. Additionally, by creating different modalities of training content, you can encompass the needs of different types of learners. With small microlearning doses, your learners can squeeze their training in during a busy day.
• Find ways that your training content can be tracked and measured in the performance of your network members. This can include assessments within the LMS or even ways that your training content impacts the KPIs of the extended enterprise. 

Once your training content is optimized for engagement, you will begin to reap the benefits of a high-quality training program. There are many ways that optimized training content will save your organization time and money:

• When your network members are engaged and trained adequately, you will experience less turnover. Turnover is expensive. Hiring, interviewing, and training personnel is a time-consuming process, and once that individual is onboarded, the training process starts all over again. Save time and money by retaining your network members with fresh and relevant training content that keeps them excited about their role within your organization. 
• When technicians have received all of the training necessary to perform their duties, they are more likely to do their repairs correctly the first time. This has a major impact on the organization. The higher the FFT (fixed first-time) rates, the better the technicians are performing and the happier your customers are. 
• Measuring KPIs is a feature that can be integrated directly into your LMS to track the performance of your network members and the impact they have on your organization’s business goals. By integrating the results of customer satisfaction surveys or FFT rates into the LMS, you have a direct link between the level of training and the performance in the organization. 

LatitudeLearning Can Boost Your Training Content’s Impact

LatitudeLearning can help you optimize your training content! With the multitude of learning modalities for different learners and self-study options that link to ancillary resources, you can ensure that all of your learners will have the resources they need at their fingertips to excel in their roles. 

Monitoring your training program is also a major part of keeping your content engaging. With assessments and learner feedback, you can know how best to adapt your program to the needs and learning styles of your learners. 

LatitudeLearning understands that content is expensive to create and time-consuming to keep relevant. That’s why we have partnered with BizLibrary. Our partnership with BizLibrary provides a library of ready-made content and removes the maintenance of updates. Training content is constantly updated to ensure you have the most current content, as well as a variety of ideal options for your industry needs. 

At LatitudeLearning, our objective is to bring the solution of relevant content coupled with the functionality and capabilities of our LMS to create a streamlined experience for enterprise training managers everywhere. 

Are you ready to optimize your content? Take a look at what LatitudeLearning can offer your training program today!