The benefits of an engaging learning program in your workplace extend beyond enhancing the skills of your current employees. By using a flexible learning management system (LMS) to offer a robust development program, your organization can support its talent attraction and retention efforts to increase employee engagement.

Ongoing training is also essential to adapting to today's increasingly technical workplaces. This blog post will explore how companies can apply the latest trends in training and development to promote a culture of continuous learning.

1. Provide More User-Friendly Training With Microlearning

New research shows that the average person loses focus on the task at hand after 14 minutes. For the 40 percent of people who believe that they have short attention spans, concentrating is even more challenging. Microlearning provides an opportunity for busy professionals to sharpen their skills in a way that fits their schedules.

Programs that utilize microlearning offer modules as a series of short lessons. By breaking up training content into smaller pieces, organizations can help employees fit learning into short periods of downtime between projects. Microlearning empowers participants to work at their own pace and take control of their development goals.

Consider how you can rework your current curriculum into sets of 10-minute lessons. With more activities in each module, it becomes even more important to keep users informed of their progress. New predictive learning analytics features for LMS platforms can provide employees with real-time feedback to track their development.

2. Encourage Employees to Take Ownership of Their Development

To close the skills and readiness gaps, employers need to think beyond the traditional ways to deliver training and development content. Employees are looking for new, more flexible options to develop their career paths. According to Deloitte's most recent Global Human Capital Trends report, workers at all levels want more self-directed learning opportunities so they can train in the way that works best for them.

Since everyone has their unique learning style and motivations, it makes sense to create customized development programs. Employees are more engaged when given the autonomy to pursue their own development goals.

By implementing a data-driven LMS, your organization can provide its employees with the tools they need to succeed in self-driven programs. For instance, incorporating learning analytics into your platform allows learners to use the built-in reports and dashboards to guide their decision-making process.

3. Create a Collaborative Learning Culture With Social Tools

While technology facilitates more opportunities to learn independently, crowdsourcing and social learning tools are also creating new ways for learners to collaborate. Organizations benefit from collaborative learning because it supports collective knowledge and encourages team building. Employees who share key knowledge and discuss training content with their colleagues develop a better understanding of how to apply new concepts and skills to their work.

For example, training platforms like Totara Learn are offering new tools to integrate social learning and crowdsourcing into organizations' existing training and development programs.

In summary, by using microlearning to deliver the courses, encouraging learners to take ownership in the learning programs, and creating a collaborative culture, these methods will help foster the culture of continuous learning through engaging training programs.