Everything You Should Know About LXPs: The Guide For Modern Companies
What is a learning experience platform (LXP)?
Some things are just better understood when we’ve got a reference point.
🎥 You can only truly understand how bad a film sequel is when you’ve seen the original.
🌴 Why a certain destination is best to visit at THIS time of year.
👨🍳 Why your cake needs the dry ingredients before the wet ones.
Our LXP reference point is the Learning Management System (LMS).
The LMS was once the new kid on the block. A digital alternative to face-to-face training, allowing you to give people a login and send them off to complete a course – typically for compliance or some kind of certification – completely detached from where people work.
And it was very good at that. The problem is, the way we learn has moved on.
🔎 We Google search when problems pop up.
🎧 Spend more time with podcasts and YouTube videos than courses.
🧑🤝🧑 Leverage experts in our network over sages on stages.
🤝 And care far more about the context and application of learning than simply learning for learning’s sake.
The LMS just isn’t set up for that. The LXP on the other hand…
In general, LXPs allow you to create an evolving ecosystem, bringing together internal and external content into one central place. Typically, they integrate with the other tools you use, empowering users to learn where they work. And they enable your internal experts to create content, ensuring you capture it before it’s lost or results in lost productivity.
LXP vs LMS: 5 reasons learning experience platforms win every time
We’ve covered this in detail here, but it would be rude of us not to include the five reasons an LXP will always be the winner in your employees’ eyes.
And as we explain in that article, you can get a pretty quick understanding by looking at the words that make up these L&D acronyms:
Learning management system (LMS) – learning experience platform (LXP).
One makes life easier for top-down managers, the other is built around the learner and their experience.
LXPs allow people to learn from colleagues, not from the top down.
They curate content from the places people already use to learn.
LXPs meet them where they work so they don’t have to break habits.
They put the power of self-directed learning in people’s hands.
LXPs typically empower managers to personalise learning more effectively
(Bonus) An LXP does everything an LMS does anyway.
Why have LXPs overtaken the LMS in modern, forward-thinking, fast-growing companies?
Legacy tech is getting left behind by the rate of change
The world around us is changing faster than ever before! And we need tech that helps us keep up, because failing to learn at speed means we’ll miss out on new opportunities and watch others seize them with both hands.
Whether it’s the COVID pandemic, the shift to hybrid working, or economic downturn, the past few years have really taught us that we need to be adaptable, and so does the tech we use!
According to KPMG, 61% of business leaders still predict their technology will not be ‘fit for purpose’ and able to meet the demands of the business in 12 months, despite an additional $15 billion being spent on technology to enable remote working each week.
And being blunt, the LMS simply wasn’t set up to solve today’s problems.
It’s a common frustration across the board! Freshworks research revealed that 57% of employees feel outdated tech is holding them back in their role, something managers feel could drive them out the door if performance suffers as a result.
Hybrid work: Where and how we work has changed, and learning’s followed suit.
We’ve got more freedom and autonomy around how, where and when we work, and people want the same experience when it comes to learning.
The trouble is, an LMS is typically used to distribute content from the top down! A few people decide what everyone else needs to be learning and assign it when they deem it’s relevant.
This increases our dependence on others to learn when our independence for working is heading in the opposite direction – and that disconnect ultimately damages people’s ability to learn when learning can make a difference to performance.
We’re no longer in the office together at all times, working at the same hours or even on the same days, meaning this lack of autonomy will no longer do!
The on-demand economy: We’re influenced by our daily consumption habits
Flexible working is just half the story! We’re living in the on-demand era, where everything we do outside of work is driven by a culture of instant gratification, connection to what we need when we’re most motivated to get it, and a general shift in how we consume content.
🚕 Uber gets a taxi to us in minutes.
🥡 Deliveroo makes dining a doddle with all the local offerings in one app.
📺 Netflix not only offers us endless content scrolling it tries to reduce that by recommending what we might like.
Now, if we’re served by convenience everywhere outside of work, how on earth are we expecting people to arrive at work and learn in a way that’s completely counterintuitive to their everyday behaviours?
Giving your people what they want! The stats behind how people want to learn.
And the biggest telltale sign of them all? Learners are explicitly telling us they want to learn in these ways and have been for some time!
The below numbers come from a 2018 LinkedIn Learning report, before many of the reasons above really took hold, so a lot of this was and is long overdue.
Which companies benefit from using LXPs?
Almost every company will be affected by some of what we’ve discussed so far! So it’s not like you have to have X headcount or Y turnover to benefit from one. There’s no guarantee an LXP is what you need either!
People often make this mistake, coming to market and looking for product X or solution Y – like an LMS. Why?
Wouldn’t it be better to accurately define the problem or challenge you’re facing and then look for solutions to that – rather than a specific thing?
So, that should be your first port of call – better defining problems. But there are some useful questions you can ask that might indicate an LXP is a good fit.
Are our people engaged in learning? (If not, that’s your biggest problem).
Do we waste time searching for resources because they’re scattered in multiple places?
Are the consistent answers to the questions we’re asked all the time?
Can our people find the answers they need in their moments of need?
Do we lose valuable knowledge each time someone leaves because they’re the only person who knows that thing?
Is our industry changing too quickly for us to rely on a static library or course collection?
Is L&D becoming a bottleneck for the content people need?
Key features and benefits of learning experience platforms
Better user experiences and branding
People often say you eat with your eyes, and something similar happens when you log into a learning space – how it looks can have a huge impression on how willing we are to use it.
An old-school LMS is often as inspiring as the leftover quiche at the end of a buffet, whereas LXPs are a lot easier on the eye. Firstly, they look a lot more like the social media platforms and websites we use every day – whether it’s that news feed feel or like/comment features you can see in the example below.
This makes platforms like HowNow far easier to use out of the box! And with 68% of business leaders concerned that new technology has a high learning curve, you’re reducing that friction that prevents people finding value.
Many LXPs also allow you to add custom branding, creating a familiar and consistent feel across how people work and learn.
Integrations with the tools you already use
We already know people want to learn at their point of need and in the flow of work. So what’s the point in providing a learning space that takes them out of the context and situations where that information can be applied?
LXPs typically play well with other tools in your tech stack, allowing you to bring learning to the places people already work.
Harnessing social learning and learner-generated content
Experts don’t just sit at the top of the food chain, and LXPs are great at opening knowledge sharing and content creation to people throughout the business. This allows you to tap into subject matter experts and reduce the likelihood of L&D teams becoming a content bottleneck.
At the rate the world is changing, we also don’t have time to lose valuable knowledge every time someone leaves the company. And that’s why it’s important to build on our collective knowledge to create a company brain.
We use Nuggets at HowNow, frictionless ways for your internal experts to create content in a matter of clicks.
Blending content creation and curation
If content that answers a question or solves a problem already exists, we don’t need to create it all over again! Instead, we can curate it and add any additional context that helps our people apply it in moments of need.
LXPs like HowNow facilitate curation by bringing the web’s content to your learning space, think blogs, YouTube videos, articles, and so much more. This frees up time to create the business specific content that can’t be sourced externally.
And this also means a changing role for people and L&D teams, acting as the filter to ensure people aren’t faced with an overwhelming amount of content and are connected to the relevant pieces.
We’re living in an era of content abundance! Creation is no longer the biggest challenge, finding the relevant content is…
The ability to personalise learning pathways and experiences
Let’s say you’ve got a standard onboarding course for sales reps. Two join at the same time, one with two years of experience and another entering their first role.
Now, they’re both relative newbies, but there are still significant differences in the support and information they’ll need at this point. One might need pointers on ‘the corporate world’, the other might need a reset on bad habits that could have been built in their first role.
The point is, personalising their pathway connects them to relevant content they need to grow into their role.
And not long ago, we were faced simply with the capability to upload a single course at a time.
However, in HowNow, we allow you to easily create custom pathways and courses, tapping into the existing Nuggets you’ve created and all that amazing curated content. You can then add relevant context around it all, tailored to the individual
Tapping into the power of artificial intelligence (AI)
Think about the likes of Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube that we use every day. The more we’re on there, the better they get at recommending relevant content – and more often than not, the recommendations are pretty useful. Some LXPs apply the same principle to recommend relevant content to learners. We do it based off people’s job roles, what people in the same roles or teams have used, the skills they’re trying to build, and more.
Detailed analytics and real-time reporting
Reports are only really useful if we can access them when we need them and use the insights to drive change. Luckily LXPs tend to deliver on this front, offering the ability to customise reports and run them in real-time. Meaning you can build a picture of the metrics that matter and communicate to people when it’ll influence decision making.
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Finding, researching and buying the right LXP
An important caveat to all of the above is that you shouldn’t lead with a feature-first mindset when you go looking for an LXP, learning platform or other tool.
Sure, you want a platform that helps you onboard people, BUT what does successful onboarding look like? Which problems and challenges are you trying to solve? And what’s the root cause of them?
Let’s say you own a small business delivering meals to people. If you go to a dealership looking solely for a van, you’ll leave with a van. But let’s say your biggest problem is delivering to customers on time, in congested areas at busy times.
And you only take a handful of orders at a time anyway.
Maybe a moped is going to work better! This is why you need to go with a problem-first mindset, as opposed to searching for a specific solution.
These questions will help you think in these terms 👇
You’re either taking the plunge into your first learning platform, or your current system feels like the set of armbands you need to ditch now you’re ready for the development deep end. Either way, there’s a pool of questions you’ll need to ask before you can understand which learning platform will help you do more than just float.
The questions you need to ask yourself can be broken down into two categories: the bigger picture (the questions you need to ask about your needs) and the finer details (defining the platform capabilities required to satisfy those needs).
The questions below apply to both. Our focus here is on your needs and working out what you need in the platform, not what that platform is.
The bigger picture: getting in touch with your learning needs
Which problems are you solving for people?
Your learning goals are directly linked to your business goals, because the ultimate idea is to develop skills that deliver a better customer experience. So, it makes sense to establish which problems you are aiming to solve and the people that are affected by this issue. That way, you can prioritise the problem in your learning strategy and the platform you choose.
Who are your learners?
The most important consideration should be your people! After all, a learning platform is only useful if people use it and it helps them progress.
Start with the job role or department your learners operate in. Is it the entire workforce or a particular team? Perhaps you’re working with customers, partners or resellers? Once you’ve established this, you can assess how those employees work and what they might need from a learning platform. If it’s a combination of teams and people, consider the differences between their needs too.
What are your learning goals and needs?
You can also think of this as what you’d like to achieve by using a learning platform. Are there compliance courses that you need to manage more efficiently? Are there skills lacking in your team that might be holding you back? Do you want your employees to have better access to resources in their daily workflow? It could be a combination of learning needs, so it’s important to recognise the most pressing and your overarching goals.
Where do your people want to learn and how do they do it best?
A combination of questions one and two, you’re really asking what methods of learning are best suited to your people and objectives.
If day or week-long courses have always been greeted by groans and struggles to stay awake by 4PM, you’re probably ready to try something new. Perhaps your learners are better suited to bite-sized content that they can access on-demand? Do you think all your night owls are going to be switched on for a 9AM session? They’ll probably learn best in the evening, at their own pace. Let’s not forget those early risers either, up hours before the workday starts and itching to be productive.
Devices and content types are just as important. If you’ve got plenty of commuters who enjoy literal learning journeys, you’ll need a platform with a mobile app. If they’re taking public transport, then guides and articles are great, but not so much if they’re driving to the office. Are there any podcasts or webinar recordings they could listen to on the way?
What’s your current strategy?
There must be something about it that’s led you here? Learn from it!
What’s working right now, and what do you need to improve? How much of that relates to your current learning platform or lack of one? There are bound to be things you’d do better or differently with another platform in place, so consider what those are. You don’t have to wait until you’ve found a new tool or system, there’ll be things you can act on now.
Are you growing?
We don’t mean to sound like the elderly relative you’ve not seen for a while, but have you grown? And how much bigger are you likely to get in the short and long term?
It’s all well and good picking a platform that fits your current learning needs, but you need to make sure it can scale with your company as it grows. Think about the number of employees, areas of the business that are likely to expand and how that might influence your learning strategy.
What’s your budget?
This is not the time for window shopping! We don’t want you to fall in love with a learning platform and then see the price tag. Set out your budget and search for options that fit within it.
The finer details: what are you looking for in a platform?
How quickly can you get up and running?
If you’re not in a rush this might seem less important, but it’s well worth considering the time it will take you to set up courses and pathways, begin reporting and get up to speed with all your other learning goals.
Of course, a lot of this depends on the learning resources you already have at your disposal and how much you’ll need to rely on the platform to provide content. Which leads us nicely onto…
What content is available on the platform?
Ideally, you’ll want to consider the quality of the curated content in a platform, how you’ll complement your own resources with it, and how easy it is for learners to find that content.
So, this is a big one. A lot of learning platforms find third-party content and make that available to your learners. Where are they getting it from, and how are they presenting it?
In HowNow, we surface free courses from the likes of Udemy and LinkedIn Learning, alongside insightful online resources from high-quality sites. They’re organised into channels by topic, which your learners can subscribe to, but they’ll also receive recommended content based on their skills and interests. The more they use the platforms, the more we use AI to understand their behaviour and their recommendations just keep getting better. And when they need to find something quickly, the search bar is always open!
Is it smart enough to drive self-directed learning?
Give someone a course and they’ll learn for a day, give someone a learning platform that recommends content and they’ll learn forever! If a platform has an intuitive user experience and taps into artificial intelligence to deliver relevant resources, your learners get a lot of value for minimal effort. What better way to encourage independent learning and limit change management than self-directed learning?
Does it integrate with your other systems?
When your platforms talk to each other, it creates a better learning experience, so consider which of your current tools it needs to work in tandem with.
Finding platforms that play well with others prevents knowledge and data silos because that information is more useful when it can be accessed everywhere. This is how you create a continuous learning culture and the ability to learn in the workflow. Imagine being able to find resources in the same places that you interact with customers! Or share knowledge directly in your messaging tools.
Will it create social learning?
By this, we mean whether it empowers your people to share their knowledge and the resources they find with their colleagues?
Social learning not only helps connect the people in your business, but it also ensures your experts are sharing knowledge with everyone else. If someone in your sales team is a heavy hitter when it comes to closing deals, they can share tips that directly relate to their experiences in the business. This form of contextual knowledge is priceless in terms of learning and development.
It doesn’t have to be as complicated as this, it can be as simple as adding a helpful article to the learning platform for everyone else to enjoy. We don’t mean to brag, but we’ve got a browser extension that lets you do that directly in the resource in just a few clicks. Social made simple!
How detailed are the platform’s reporting and analytics?
This is key to understanding the platform’s impact on employee learning, skills developed and if you’ve achieved your goals.
It’s time to revisit your goals and determine what reporting capabilities you need to understand them. If it’s a case of developing skills, do you need a platform that enables both employer and employee to provide an assessment of proficiency? If compliance is a key goal, you might benefit from a dashboard that can be filtered by status. It’s important to consider how easy it is to create reports and whether the insights can be shared with your other platforms and people.
Will it make your life easier?
We’re ending on what’s probably the most obvious and important question!
Will this platform save you time, automate admin tasks that eat into your resources, and make your people more productive? If the answer’s no, it might not be the tool for you! But it’s key to understand how much time you have to invest in the platform and where it will help you free up valuable hours.
The first thing is to be clear on what you want to see in a trial or demo. If you’ve got that clearly-defined problem, it’ll be easier to convey that to your sales rep, and this allows them to show you how their platform solves it.
Next, capture feedback in consistent ways. If not, you can’t be objective about the options you’ve seen or tested at different times, and that makes it harder to resist recency bias or the convenience of going with the ‘easiest’ option.
You should also consider who you need to involve and when. Whether it’s technical capability or decision-maker sign off, there are people you’ll need to loop in at the right times to ensure you don’t get too attached to a platform that simply won’t make it through with stakeholders.
Finally, consider how your requirements and company will change over time and understand if that platform can scale and flex with those.
Building a business case for your LXP
There’s an art to building a business case! You’ve got to capture the need for an LXP, explain how it’ll add value and convey the risks of doing nothing. You’ve also got to capture it in a clear and succinct form that can be understood and accessed by even your busiest stakeholders.
We often talk about aligning learning with business goals and problems here, but figuring that out here really will make everything else easier.
The need, the goals, the problems it solves – they’re all much easier to communicate with that impact angle in your arsenal.
Plus, you’ve got the social proof and data you can leverage, the ability to use your competition as reference points and plenty other ways to win people over. This guide helps you capture and communicate it all…
If you’re putting together a business case for a learning management system or learning platform, then your business is literally our business! Or at least it will be if we pull off a compelling argument that conveys learning platforms as vital to the development of people and progress towards company success.
Firstly, remember that the purpose is to convince a decision-maker that your proposition is worthwhile. Keep it brief, convey the essential information in an interesting way, talk positively about the future and hammer home the benefits. Here are a few of the key points your business case should include and address.
Justify why you need a learning platform
Present the costs and ROI
Discuss the risks and benefit of using and not using a learning management system or platform
Present a number of options and your recommendation
Support your argument with numbers
These key points and the structure for your business case apply regardless of whether you’re choosing a learning management system (LMS) or learning experience platform (LXP). If you’re unsure which might be best, we’ve explained the differences here. If you’ve already got a good idea, it’s time to focus on how you make a compelling argument for why you need it.
Justifying your need for a learning platform and including it in your business case – jump to:
Justify your need for a learning platform with these statistics
Drive productivity by cutting back on time spent searching for information
Many learning platforms enable people to find information and resources in the flow of work, it’s one of their key benefits. When we talk about the LMS vs LXP debate, the words making up those acronyms tell us all we need to know. The LXP is all about the learner experience, while the learning management system makes life easier for managers, and the below explains some of that – these numbers will help you justify just how much time you’ll gain back by using one.
In 2012, it was reported that employees spent 1.8 hours searching for information each day, by 2015 it had risen to 2.5 hours. For most people, that’s a third of the working day. We have become slightly more productive since then, but a 2019 survey still placed the figure at around 25% of their day.
With your learning platform acting as a knowledge base for all your resources, you’ll drastically reduce this time. It’s estimated that an internal knowledge base reduces research time by up to 35%, but if you pick the right platform you might be able to surpass that average. These kind of numbers will be really useful in supporting your business case.
Developing, engaging and retaining employees
It’s not all about the flow of work though, learning platforms help you create pathways to development for employees – giving them the tools to build new skills and move into new positions. The wonderful bi-product of that is that you’ll see a rise in employee engagement and retention, which will definitely help your LXP or LMS business case.
Here’s the quick rundown by numbers:
68% of employees say training and development is the company’s most important policy. That’s according to ClearCompany, who also reported that 76% of employees value career growth opportunities.
However, only 29% of employees are “very satisfied” with the current career advancement opportunities available to them at work.
So, training and development are important to employees, but the majority of organisations are neglecting this area. By investing in employee development, you can drive engagement, retention and your appeal to potential candidates. Here are a few more reasons why:
e-learning increases retention rates by 25-60%.
Employees who feel highly engaged are 87% less likely to leave their companies.
According to Oxford Economics, the cost of replacing employees sits at around £30,000, when you consider the loss of productivity and hiring costs.
Companies with highly engaged workforces are also 21% more profitable, which leads us nicely onto…
Using learning platforms to drive profitability
If we told you that the time wasted searching for information could equate to more than £6,000 in lost hours and productivity per employee, per year, would you be shocked?
We already mentioned that the average employee spends 25% of their working day searching for information, but we’ve not calculated the monetary costs. If the average employee works a 40-hour week then they’d spend 10 hours of that searching for knowledge, and with average hourly pay in the UK reported to be £14.80 in 2019, that equates to £148 per week. If we look at the generous end of the annual leave spectrum and say an employee works 42 weeks of the year, that would work out to be £6,216 annually.
Some less meaty maths also points to the fact that a learning platform reduces the time and money spent on face-to-face and formal training. Studies show that e-learning reduces training time by between 40% and 60%, while simultaneously reducing expenses for travel, instructors, venues and time spent out of work.
Structuring your business case for a learning platform
The executive summary
This is the greatest hits of your business case: following the same structure, picking out the key points and selling them in a compelling fashion that convinces the decision-makers. For some, this is the only section they’ll read or the influential factor in whether they continue beyond the summary. It’s recommended that you write this last, or at least finalise it as your final act.
Why do you need a learning platform? Address the problem or opportunity
The important thing is to establish the context that led you to this point. Have you reached the limit of the system(s) that you’re already using? Are you operating without a platform and that’s created a different ceiling to learning and development? These are two of the likely reasons you started looking into learning systems and platforms.
Two strings to your bow here are your ability to link it back to the company’s goal or vision and the inclusion of any data that supports why this issue needs to be addressed. If it is a case of replacing the current platforms, you should provide details on why they’re no longer fit for purpose or providing a return on your investment. Ideally, you should be impartial and factual at this point.
Dive into the specific L&D goals
Setting the general scene is absolutely vital, but so is explaining the more specific goals a platform will help you achieve. You can also think of these as the smaller problems or opportunities through which you highlight who will benefit and to what extent. Ultimately, this helps your cause as it shows how you plan to use the learning platform in practical and relevant scenarios.
Will it help you create a more efficient onboarding process that enables joiners to contribute sooner?
Is knowledge currently being buried in silos where it should be shared?
Are you facing an upskill battle when it comes to developing the traits and competencies your team’s need?
Could it be the key to addressing poor levels of staff engagement and retention?
Think of the specific instances and pain points that drove your search for a learning platform.
Discuss the competition
If there’s one guaranteed way to get attention, it’s bringing up how your competitors are using and benefitting from learning platforms, especially if you can draw on some data. If you can’t get the scoop on your rivals, support your argument through insights on a similar company from a related industry. As we’ve alluded to throughout this, hard data will trump anecdotal evidence in your business case, so make sure you crunch a few numbers.
Assess the available platforms and options
You will have drawn up a shortlist of learning platforms, and this is the time to present the risks and benefits, costs and implementation timelines for each. Remember, doing nothing is also an option, so it’s important to address the risk and cost of no action.
Your recommended learning platform
You’ve been factual and diplomatic up until now, so it’s high-time you unleashed your passion for driving a better L&D future through your desired platform. There are a few ways that you can do this: you may choose to further explain the risks and benefits of adopting this platform, you might outline the project timeline in detail to highlight when the decision would pay dividends or discuss who will be involved in its delivery.
The important idea is to show that you’ve considered the resources required and the scale of moving to that platform.
Sell what the platform will help you achieve – ‘Features tell, benefits sell’
Possibly the best way to present your argument is to forget about the features and focus solely on the benefits and value your preferred tool offers. This is more powerful because you can talk about how it will positively impact return on investment, which is arguably far easier when talking about an LXP or ILP.
You could focus on how they cut down the time it takes to search for knowledge, which increases employee productivity and helps create a culture of learning at the point of need. In turn, that reduces the training costs associated with the traditional methods of learning and development. Learning platforms also cut down the ramp up time for new starters, by connecting them to useful knowledge and people in one searchable platform. Combine all of these points and you’re more likely to engage and retain your employees, meaning the cost of staff churn is reduced.
Conclusion
Keep this short and sweet. Simply summarise why it’s important to address this problem and reinforce why the plan you’ve proposed is the most effective way of solving it.
Click the image below for your PDF version
Your PDF version of building a learning platform business case/LMS business case
Need help with your learning platform business case?
Putting together a business case can be daunting, right? Especially if you’re not familiar with learning platforms!
We’d be happy to lend an ear if you’ll give us a few minutes to discuss the benefits of HowNow. We’ll scratch your case, if you help ours!
Check out our other learning management system (LMS) resources
How can I use an LXP to reach my goals? Common ways companies use them
Wait, isn’t it a bit late to tell us about the common problems LXPs solve! No, because you’re not common, you’re a unique L&D problem-solving machine.
Plus, as we wrote about earlier, going to market looking for a tool to help with onboarding or mentoring isn’t necessarily the right mindset. Not until you’ve worked out the problems you’re trying to solve and what success looks like…
Now that we’ve covered that off, it does make sense to go through some of the common ways companies use LXPs to reach their goals and achieve success.
Onboarding
Two pretty damning statistics explain why people turn to LXPs for onboarding:
Only half of all new hires said they felt productive and capable of doing their jobs – suggesting that onboarding wasn’t personalised or structured to help them reach productivity in their role.
Only 40% of new hires in larger organisations had the tools or equipment needed to start their roles right away – with 57% of overall employees frustrated by legacy tech, it’s no wonder new hires don’t feel those tools are taking them to productivity.
LXPs tend to have flatter learning curves, allow you to personalise pathways to ramp people up for THEIR role and tap into subject matter experts for contextual knowledge – hence their usefulness as onboarding tools.
Developing leaders
Whether we’re promoting from within or hiring from without, leaders need our help in getting up to speed – and the ability to personalise learning experiences make the LXP the leading option.
New managers internally might need help and guidance on how to lead, and this is where internal experts and capturing their knowledge is extremely helpful. L&D teams can help directly by setting up low-pressure practice scenarios where they’re applying what they’re learning.
And that’s even more helpful if we’re setting realistic short-term goals around what they’re doing in the role.
People with leadership experience are probably clued in on the skills needed to lead but have no clue about how things work at your company. So a learning pathway that sets expectations of leadership in the organisation and helps them understand things like product and culture is incredibly useful.
It’s the flexibility of an LXP that makes it so useful for welcoming managers or upskilling new leaders… speaking of which.
Upskilling employees
It’s not sustainable to buy or borrow talent every time you encounter a skills gap. Freelancers eat into budgets, new talent takes time to get up to speed – and that’s why building internally is your best long-term bet.
It all starts with understanding the current skills profile and skills gap. Which skills do you have internally – individually and as teams – and which skills do you need to perform? The difference between the two is your skills gap.
No company has time to learn the things they once knew! And yet they do it all the time…
Because they have a leaky bucket! Knowledge from internal experts isn’t captured and shared, they leave the company, and all that wisdom goes with them.
And this happens because our daily behaviour or culture is not one of capturing knowledge!
A useful Slack message, part of an article, a snippet from a podcast episode or YouTube video – these are all things that can tackle current challenges but pass us by in real time.
The point is, if we can capture the gold living in the minds of our most knowledgeable people, we can build a collective brain that everyone can benefit from. We’ve now got a compound level we’re building on, rather than some people repeating the mistakes of others or not learning from the people who’ve overcome their current problems.
Here’s a great example that benefits both sides. Expert A gets asked the same question again and again on Slack, each time they respond, it eats into their time and they become more and more worn down by answering it.
The person at the end of the answer is at the mercy of how long it takes them to reply, that’s if they even know to ask.
HowNow’s Slack integration allows you to save a message directly to your learning space, meaning we create one consistent response, and begin building knowledge in one central place.
Those Nuggets can then be used to drive a search-first culture, where people search the learning space before sending yet another message.
Compliance training
A very important caveat before we get into this one. Yes, compliance is necessary and needs to be done. No, it’s not the first thing you should be asking people to do in your LXP.
There is often very little direct correlation between compliance and somebody doing their job better! Meaning people are unlikely to see the value in using your platform – you’re better off cutting down the time to value and building a positive feedback loop.
Instead of going compliance-first, let’s say we connect you to something that makes you better at your job when you encounter a challenge. That’s your first interaction with the LXP. And it means you quickly experience the value of using it, making you more likely to do it again.
A 400-page PDF, 50-video course, or some ‘click next’ compliance training just won’t do that.
Having said that, certain LXPs (nudge nudge) make managing compliance easier and cut out some of the parts that make it tedious for both parties.
Let HowNow do the heavy lifting and lighten your compliance load!
HowNow lets you report in real-time, giving you an in-the-moment picture of who is and isn’t compliant. That not only makes it easier to report back, it also allows you to only remind the people who haven’t completed – rather than pestering everyone.
We also allow you to set custom rules around compliance, meaning we’ll automate delivery of repeatable courses and content. If it needs to be completed every year, set a 12-month interval. If every new starter in a particular department needs to finish a course, integrate with your HR system and build rules based around team and joining date.
There are two common situations companies find themselves in: they’re looking for their very first learning platform or they’re moving from an LMS to an LXP. And we’ve got dedicated resources on each.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t give you a quick summary.
Launching your first learning platform
There are essentially three stages to this: planning, building and running.
Planning: This is your discovery phase, get out from behind your desk and go speak to your stakeholders and end users!
Which problems are they facing right now?
What’s the context when those are arising (where are they working etc.)?
Where do they need help in reaching team and business goals?
How is learning happening organically right now?
If you know these things, you know how to communicate the value of an L&D strategy or learning platform to your target audience. It’ll also help you tap into existing behaviours, build a learning brand they love, and deliver value in a shorter window to show them value faster.
Building: How are you setting up for launch? These are all the activities you do ahead of time to engage people, drive awareness and prepare for day one success.
Pilot with small groups before rolling out, create a communications plan around those value propositions, ensure you understand the platform inside and out, and test all the technical elements needed for a smooth user experience.
Running: How are you collecting feedback after launch and using that to refine your approach? Who isn’t logging in yet and why? Are you optimising to help people align with business goals and reach value in a short period?
These questions are crucial as you try to drive activation and engagement with the platform. And without engagement, your learning initiative won’t go very far.
Moving from an LMS to an LXP
Now, this presents challenges of its own. But the best mindset to have is that this is a clean slate!
You’re moving for a reason, so don’t simply migrate everything from your old space to the new. Use the data from your old platform to understand what did and didn’t work before – and then consider if the format is conducive to reaching goals in your new platform.
A great example would be that you had a 100-page PDF with a huge number of views in your LMS. But the reason you’re moving learning platforms is to make resources available in the flow of work – one massive document simply won’t help. So, you convert it into microlearning-style resources, designed to tackle a single problem at a time.
And there are other considerations to make too: will the current culture support the shift? How are you migrating data over? How will you be populating your learning space? What’s the timeline and communications strategy, and so much more.
Meet the LXP that supercharges your people development
From bringing all your resources to the end of a single search to empowering subject matter experts to share wisdom with teammates, HowNow is designed to give your people the skills and knowledge they need to perform their role effectively, everywhere they already work!