What does the modern-day employee expect from L&D activities in the workplace? Once upon a time, the answer may have been annual training days or generic development activities that cover a broad range of skills and competencies. Today, however, those outdated learning practices simply don’t cut it.
Today’s employees want meaningful L&D opportunities, tailored to their unique career aspirations and skill sets. More importantly, these learning opportunities need to be more than just an isolated training session but instead an ongoing practice of lifelong learning. To achieve this, organisations need to build a culture of continuous learning. Keep reading to find out how.
What is a culture of continuous learning?
L&D activities such as induction training programmes and mandatory compliance training exercises are standard practice for any organisation. Some organisations may approach these as simple tick-box exercises that happen once a year or every few months. However, to thrive in the modern working world, organisations need to create an environment in which L&D is embedded into the everyday, making it a core element of workplace culture.
A culture of continuous learning means employees are encouraged to learn new skills, improve their knowledge and grow every day or as often as they can. It’s more than just offering regular training opportunities; it’s about ensuring that L&D is a core value within the organisation.
Why is it important to have a culture of continuous learning?
There are many advantages to building a culture of continuous learning, some of which include:
- Continuous learning helps close growing skills gaps, ensuring a company stay agile and competitive in the rapidly changing working environment
- Improve job satisfaction
- Attract and top talent looking for meaningful, lifelong L&D opportunities
- Boost productivity with higher employee skill levels and stronger knowledge bases
- A strong learning culture encourages innovation within the workplace
How to build a culture of continuous learning with an e-learning platform
Quality learning opportunities
It will come as no surprise that to successfully create a culture of continuous learning, you need to provide your employees with quality learning opportunities. These opportunities need to be diverse and thorough, covering a variety of subject matters, catering to various job roles, and catering to a multitude of learner preferences. Sounds overwhelming, right? It doesn’t need to be if you have the right tools. This is where an e-learning platform comes in.
With an e-learning platform such as our Totara Learn LMS, you can create a vast virtual library packed with high-quality L&D content that ticks all the boxes and caters to all your employees’ learning requirements. What’s more, using an LMS means employees can access learning at any time, ensuring that they can easily build learning activities into their working day.
Make continuous learning a core company objective
To ensure that L&D is a top priority for all key stakeholders in the organisation, creating a culture of continuous learning needs to be made a core company objective. By doing this, managers and employees can work together to outline goals that align with this core objective.
For example, a continuous learning goal may be to complete a learning exercise every day. This may ring alarm bells for busy employees with packed schedules, however, by using an e-learning platform, L&D teams can create or deploy microlessons that take less than fifteen minutes to complete. Microlessons can easily be built into busy work schedules, ensuring employees stay on track with core learning without falling behind on daily tasks.
What is microlearning? Read our ultimate guide here.
Driving self-directed learning
The key to building a culture of continuous learning is to encourage employees to take ownership of their learning, cultivating an environment in which they’re motivated enough to complete learning without a need for ongoing input from managers.
With an LMS, employees can create their own learning paths, meaning they take responsibility for their learning activities and choose the L&D content that best serves their needs and goals.
To help encourage employees to complete learning, L&D teams can use their LMS to create motivators such as leaderboards, certifications and badges to celebrate the achievements of individuals and instil a sense of competition to serve as a driving force for learning completion.
Finally, when it comes to encouraging self-directed learning, employers need to ensure learning opportunities are easily accessible. Here, the best solution is to deploy an LMS with mobile learning functionality, meaning employees can learn in their own time, on the go, and on a familiar device they use daily.
Measure learner engagement
Once you’ve taken the necessary steps towards building a learning culture, it’s important to analyse its impact and effectiveness. Using an LMS, you can create automated reports that provide essential insights on areas such as course completions, assessment results and platform sign-on rates. All of which indicate how engaged employees are with learning activities.
Armed with data gathered from LMS reports, L&D teams can deploy new tactics and strategies that ultimately improve the learning culture at an organisational level, departmental level or by targeting individual employees who demonstrate poor engagement.
Creating a culture of continuous learning with the right LMS
Does your current e-learning platform offer the features and functionality outlined above? Creating a culture of continuous learning is no mean feat so to help you succeed, you need an LMS that offers flexibility, advanced functionality, and can be configured to best suit the needs of your organisation. Our Totara and Moodle LMSs can do just that. Find out more by visiting our platform pages or get in touch with one of our LMS experts to see what our solutions can do for your organisation.

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