Ceaseless effort goes into content creation, not just in learning and development (L&D) but across the business. Organisations are constantly producing masses of information on everything from wellbeing, HR, and inclusivity to legal guidance – leading to an overwhelming amount of endless resources.

Large organisations are struggling with clarity and need to examine how to pool their resources and invest in training that achieves their business learning goals. So, how can we facilitate employees to access relevant, engaging and meaningful content?

Here are some approaches to help you cut through the chaos and bring clarity to your learning content.

1. Define your outcomes and impact from the start

You need to build from the ground up. To create compelling content, learning design must start by defining a clear user journey, from awareness to anticipation to follow-up engagement. There needs to be an uncluttered path through the chaos. Essentially, this means designing holistically for the full learning experience and into performance. 

Learning is the journey that facilitates your employee’s change in actions and behaviours

2. Think of learning as a campaign to drive actions and behaviours

Design your journey from awareness to action. Learning is the journey that facilitates your employee’s change in actions and behaviours. Course completion should be a minor metric in how you assess the success of your course. You need to consider how you can measure the impact of your learning content on behavioural change. Rather than learning outcomes, set your behavioural outcomes. This will give you a wider, long-term view of your learner journey.

3. Curate your content

Take stock of what you already have. How does it all piece together? Can it be curated into the journey? Content Intelligence tools support this step: they help you to locate your best content quickly without a lengthy manual search.

We’ve found that this allows us to focus the learning designer’s time where it really adds value: creating the contextual wrapper; making it easy for people to see the relevance in their workplace and creating those key pieces of content that are distinct to your business and your people.

Relevance can be built into digital learning through role filters, pre-testing and options to select personal priorities

4. Make it easy to find your content

Think about the employee experience of accessing the content in your organisation. How do they get to it? How do they tune out the noise and focus only on relevance? From the outset, you should let your learners know:

• How much of their time will be needed?
• Is it based on their real needs?
• Is it worthwhile and valuable?

You can communicate this information through productivity platforms such as MS Teams, Workplace or Yammer. We've supported clients by creating bite-sized assets and prompts that can be used in this way. Our developers also automate the scheduling and release of these assets by building tools into the Microsoft Power Platform.

5. Make it relevant and personal

Whether training is mandatory or self-directed, its effectiveness hinges on the perceived value to the learner and those around them. This needs to be reinforced before, during and after the training.

Relevance can be built into digital learning through role filters, pre-testing and options to select personal priorities. Personalisation goes hand in hand with relevance: engaging audiences requires focusing on what matters. Ultimately, an understanding of the learner is paramount: knowing where they are in terms of experience, confidence and motivation.

Purposeful storytelling, multi-media production, and thoughtful design – can all create an emotional resonance for learning

6. Use human-centred design

Once you have the building blocks of relevance and effectiveness, you can begin to craft content that connects. Evoking an emotional connection can be difficult if you have not fully understood your learner. Purposeful storytelling, multi-media production, and thoughtful design – can all create an emotional resonance for learning.

Try not to look at this just within the confines of the course itself: think about how you can level up the value of an asset through the accompanying communication. The way you package your content will play a critical role in determining how your learners perceive and engage with your curriculum, as well as how they derive value and impact from it. Remember:

• Declutter the learner experience
• Focus on impact
• Create clarity and value
• Build engagement

To find out more about taking your content from chaos to clarity, get in touch with Caroline via [email protected]. To find out about Content Intelligence technology to help you take control of content chaos, visit filtered.com.

Interested in this topic? Read Learning strategy: Why cramming in content is counterproductive.