How To Cater For Different Learning Styles When Training Employees
Diversity in the workplace has become a common thing. People from all walks of life are coming together to collaborate and deliver amazing work.
With the ongoing pandemic and remote working becoming the norm, the future workplace will be filled with an even more diverse variety of resources and organizations will need to adapt.
While thinking of different cultures, holidays, time zones and other aspects of the diverse life of your employees is important, one of the places where diversity in the workplace is overlooked is during employee training.
Almost every business on the planet is delivering employee training in some form. From compliance training to on boarding, from employee manuals to career development opportunities, employee training takes many forms.
Just like the diversity in your workplace and the diversity in various forms of training, there is diversity in the way people learn.
The most widely accepted model of learning styles identifies four different learning styles:
- Auditory learning
- Visual learning
- Learning by reading/writing
- Kinesthetic learning
Identifying the prevailing learning styles within your organization’s workforce and addressing them with your training can bring incredible improvements to the impact of your organization’s employee training efforts.
But how can you go about doing that?
Let’s find out:
Conduct A Survey
The best way to learn more about your employees? Ask them relevant questions.
Begin by creating a survey that helps you identify the learning style of an individual. This survey should include questions about their preferred way of consuming information, about the subjects they excelled at during their education years, and other similar questions.
Once done, ask all your employees to fill out the survey. With the results, you can gauge the learning styles of individual learners at your organisation.
Find The Right Tools
Designing a learning experience that caters for different learning styles can be a difficult and time consuming task. Thankfully, there are tools that you can employ to make things simpler.
While you may already be using elearning tools, you may need to replace them with tools that offer features that will enable you to cater to the learning styles at your organisation.
For instance, if you see a prevalence of visual learners at your organisation, you will need a learning management system and an authoring tool that are not only compatible, but are individually capable of supporting visual content like instructional videos.
The good news is, elearning tools are extremely affordable. Moreover, to ensure compatibility, you can purchase different tools from the same vendor. For instance, the iSpring Suite is a well known product that offers course authoring, publishing, managing, and tracking capabilities, along with web conferencing features that enable virtual instructor led sessions.
The best part is that purchasing such suites of products is usually more pocket friendly than purchasing individual products. The iSpring Suite pricing is usually charged based on the number of users you are training. THis means, if you are a small business with a small team and a limited training budget, you can still enjoy the features and utility of a world-class product.
Dedicate Resources
Dedicating learning and development resources to improve the results of your company’s training efforts is an expensive but effective undertaking. With their expertise, instructional designers and L&D professionals can craft custom learning experiences that cater to a variety of learning styles.
An alternative to the same would be to hire a content provider to create training content for your learners.
Conclusion Learning about different learning styles and creating relevant training experiences can involve a lot of confusion and a lot of effort. Yet, the subsequent results of this effort are definitely worth your while.
