Remote work and digital collaboration have become the reality of business. This poses a challenge for organizations that want to keep their people up to date on the skills they need to meet business goals in a constantly changing context. In this new hybrid work reality, you as L&D professionals are expected to provide new and attractive upskilling experiences to meet the changing demands of employees along every stage of their careers.
When called on to deliver transformative impact for the workplace, business, and individuals, you’ll need a focused upskilling strategy to meet your goals and deliver on stakeholder expectations. Blended learning should be at the center of your strategy because it provides a dynamic combination of individual and group experiences. But you can make an even bigger impact by including meaningful social exchanges that keep your hybrid and remote workers connected – to each other and the business.
In the fast pace of business change, facilitate powerful and effective skills development
Blended learning with active facilitators encourages social interactions because participants have the opportunity to ask questions, exchange ideas and upload their own business cases to share. Whether online or in person, facilitators build a dynamic and collaborative virtual environment by fostering that critical human touch. These experiences can build human connections through peer-to-peer exercises, role-playing scenarios, and the development of action plans for tackling thorny problems.
Facilitators can also stimulate important exchanges between people, empower learners to guide their own development journeys, and help create a supportive and deeply engaging environment. They can send reminders, offer feedback, and coach individuals through assessments and relevant assignments. You can be confident that when facilitators are guiding the process, it creates a more enriching experience for everyone. In fact, according to our internal data, participants of facilitated programs reported an 18% increase in managerial confidence, 59% higher feelings of organizational belonging, and 40% higher levels of behavioral change.
Blended learning can stimulate motivation and commitment
When you provide the right blend of training, you’ll keep your learners focused and motivated. An effective blended program should mix live virtual sessions (synchronous) with online individual training (asynchronous) to keep employees communicating with, and learning from, each other. We know that people learn best together, so when you add moments of connectedness you encourage your employees to support each other’s development. The right blended combination can build understanding and collaboration through peer-to-peer interaction, expert facilitation, feedback, and assessments. This offers deep benefits to individuals and organizations, because it enables employees to take charge of their own development while also learning to collaborate with colleagues.
Turn the theoretical into real-world practice
Blended learning can turn theory into practice by giving learners real business problems to solve using their newly acquired knowledge. They can put freshly acquired skills to the test in a safe and supportive environment before practicing what they’ve learned in the real world. And by tracking and reporting progress per learner and per path, you can gain a better understanding of what works for your employees and what doesn’t. This allows you to tweak and adjust your programs within shorter time intervals to continually drive business outcomes and satisfy stakeholders.
Blended learning is a strategic and adaptive methodology
Before you can design an effective blended program, it is critical to define the business and learning outcomes that you want your program to achieve so that your efforts align perfectly with business needs.
Here are the best practices we recommend to give your people of the skills they need while measuring progress and impact:
- Make sure each blended journey has a clear start and endpoint, and award certificates of completion to individual learners.
- Include both self-directed and facilitated modules.
- Allow learners to measure steps and progress, and send automatic emails on the completion of tasks.
- Feature high-quality, diverse content that’s relevant to a learner’s duties and supportive of objectives.
- Offer content and activities that enhance understanding and application of knowledge.
- Avoid boring slideshows and PowerPoint presentations to focus on more engaging, interactive formats.
- Create a realistic timeline that fits into the flow of work to prevent learner burnout while maintaining engagement.
- Make sure your program’s content is relevant to the learner’s level of experience and knowledge, as well as to their cultural preferences.
In a sea of change, focused upskilling will remain a constant
No matter what the future holds for today’s businesses, it’s clear that organizations will continue to prioritize focused upskilling all along the career journey. Embracing a collaborative and social approach in your blended programs can help develop a highly skilled, engaged, and adaptable workforce that can meet today’s rapidly evolving business and organizational challenges.
CrossKnowledge offers blended learning solutions for focused upskilling that target specific populations with impactful experiences. Our award-winning blended programs are designed by our experts using outcome-based learning. They combine guided and cohort-based experiences with virtual facilitation and twelve different types of activities keep learning experiences engaging and fresh. Meaningful social interactions encourage collaboration that helps boost performance and profitability.
Grow your employees with focused upskilling to nurture thanks to blended learning, and develop your employees into high-performing individuals and future leaders.