E-learning and LMS blog articles

By now, you're probably au fait with the many benefits associated with delivering effective L&D initiatives. From retaining top talent to creating an agile workforce, the long-term advantages it provides to both employees and employers are well known. However, the learning and development process isn’t always smooth sailing, so finding ways to overcome challenges and obstacles is key to success. Read on to discover how a learning experience platform (LXP) can provide your learners with sources of support for learning and development and help L&D teams overcome a myriad of challenges along the way.

What is an LXP?

An LXP is a variation of an LMS that puts greater focus on informal learning. LXPs rely on social and collaborative tools to engage learners.

Find out everything you need to know about LXPs by reading our ultimate guide.

What challenges do learners face?

To begin exploring how an LXP can provide your users and L&D teams with sources of support for learning and development, let’s first take a look at some of the key challenges facing learners and L&D admins during the learning process. For this, we’ll use the example of a new starter in a pharmaceutical sales team.

The new starter is working remotely and joining the sales team with ten years of experience working in sales but has no previous experience working with pharmaceuticals. During the onboarding process and throughout the long-term development process, they face various challenges because the company isn’t equipped with the right e-learning tools and technology. These challenges include:

Accessing relevant courses

When engaging with learning and development initiatives, learners only benefit from content that’s relevant to their learning requirements.

Our new starter has been placed on a generic sales induction course which covers basic sales skills but doesn’t address specific knowledge gaps about pharmaceuticals. As a result, these generic training courses aren’t engaging and fail to close the new starter’s skills and knowledge gaps. This will negatively impact their job performance further down the line.

Lack of support

Whether training is delivered remotely or in-person, employees are at risk of feeling unsupported if L&D teams fail to create opportunities for open dialogue.

As a new starter joining the sales team remotely, our example employee has experienced a lack of support throughout their onboarding experience. With few opportunities to formally ask their managers and colleagues questions, and a lack of additional resources beyond core training content, the training process is ineffective without additional support avenues.

Content doesn’t match learning preferences

If generic training content doesn’t cater to the learning styles and preferences of each user, employees are unlikely to get the most out of their training courses.

Faced with an onboarding programme made up of text-based training content, our new sales starter struggles to take in and retain information. Their preferred learning style is visual and audio-based content – such as instructional videos.

Balancing L&D with work

When L&D opportunities are inflexible, employees find it difficult to balance their regular workloads with essential learning and development courses.

With lengthy online text-based training courses that can’t be broken up into smaller microlessons, our new starter needs to find time to fit multiple hours of training content into their already busy work schedule. By using an outdated and inflexible training tool to complete onboarding courses, progress won’t be saved until reaching the end of the course – making the training process stressful and ineffective.

How can an LXP help?

The beauty of an LXP is that it boasts a range of user-centric e-learning tools designed to increase user engagement. With these tools, employees and L&D professionals can tap into unlimited sources of support for learning and development.

Think of the learning paths and tailored content associated with an LMS but elevated with additional personalisation technology. Curated content libraries and playlists enable learners to design their own learning experience by collating existing content and producing their own.

This content helps employees map out their own tailored learning experiences based on individual needs and preferences rather than irrelevant and unengaging generic training content. What’s more, when curating their content learners are better positioned to learn in the flow of work and build L&D into their daily lives – helping them overcome challenges around balancing L&D with their workload.

To overcome challenges around lack of support during the learning process, admins can create playlists for specific teams or departments. Within these playlists, employees with common ground can share relevant content along with their insights and ideas and ask questions – creating a sense of community for employees in the same team or department. Think back to our new sales starter who was presented with little to no opportunities to ask for help or talk to colleagues. By being assigned to an LXP playlist, new starters are instantly connected with the right people and the right sources of support for learning and development.

But playlists aren’t the only avenue for employees to connect with their colleagues in a virtual learning environment. An LXP is the ultimate platform for creating a communal digital space and encouraging social interaction and group learning. With features such as workspaces, discussion threads, forums and live chats, users can interact directly with one another to engage in informal learning. The informal learning capabilities of an LXP perfectly complement the structured learning process facilitated by a platform such as an LMS. This duality reflects the way we consume online content today, through a combination of informal social media-based consumption and the more conscious formal content delivered directly through media outlets.

Indeed, an LXP replicates the way we consume online content today better than any other e-learning platform, and one of the ways it achieves this is with an intelligent recommendation engine. An LXP can serve as an aggregator of L&D content in the same way a website will display content based on your previous search history. Using analytics based on individual user activity, an LXP such as Totara Engage displays content recommendations such as resources or courses that share similarities with content you have viewed previously. By suggesting related content, an LXP can help create a culture of continuous learning and development, improving employee output and increasing the ROI of e-learning investments as a result.

Which LXP will offer unlimited sources of support for learning and development in your organisation?

To best support your learners and L&D teams with the collaborative and informal learning functionality of an LXP, you’ll need a feature-rich and powerful system such as our Totara Engage platform. Discover everything you need to know about this leading LXP by visiting our product page today or getting in touch with one of our LXP experts to find out more.