Part of developing an impactful and long-lasting workplace philosophy is finding a way to institute a continuous learning culture. Because despite everything, learning isn’t something you can approach or view as a one-off event.
Look at it this way: merely completing a course or earning a certification or degree doesn’t imply that you suddenly know everything and no longer need to continue learning. The truth is that trends are always changing, and you’ll always have something new to learn each day.
All these stem from companies, industries, and markets being dynamic! With this in mind, you must remain aware of a few essential factors, such as:
- New technologies will continue to come up every so often.
- The economy never rests and is unceasingly undergoing a cycle.
- Education, training, and certification requirements will never stop changing.
- Current laws will, at some point, get modified as new ones get passed.
Understanding Continuous Learning
Lifelong or continuous learning refers to the ongoing pursuit of knowledge. It’s a process that can take on any form – from watching a documentary to getting a degree, and most importantly, it is self-motivated and voluntary.
Developing a continuous learning culture in your company, according to many HR consultants, will help you reap untold long-term rewards in areas touching on employee productivity, retention, and engagement. You need to stimulate your employees to continue growing, or else the company will:
- Fall out of mandatory compliance, especially on matters to do with certifications.
- Become complacent and stagnant.
- Fail to align with customer expectations.
- Get overtaken by its competition.
The desire to continue learning has become so strong among modern-day professionals, with a recent study showing around 60 percent of employees are willing to do it outside their workplaces. The implication here is that the workforce has become motivated to continue improving its skills and is willing to do it independently if the company fails to make this an option.
This motivation ought to encourage managers to find ways to engage their people in developing continuous learning habits. In doing so, some of the questions you should ask yourselves include:
- When are the employees likely to harbor an interest in learning?
- What learning techniques will work best? Do they need lectures or access to more active learning opportunities?
For companies that have successfully cultivated a continuous learning culture, there’s a case to be made for encouraging the development of active learning opportunities. Such opportunities ensure the learners engage with their trainers and are an effective way to bolster innovation.
Five Ways to Create a Continuous Learning Culture in Your Company
1. Introduce a Learning Management System
Introducing a learning management system is an excellent way to help employees develop personally and professionally and create a continuous learning philosophy. While at it, consider getting them access to career-related conferences to support their growth.
Other incentives can include providing tuition reimbursement for new certifications and ongoing higher education or sponsoring them to work-related webinars and seminars.
2. Create a Learning Plan
Management can develop a learning plan that showcases the company’s employee learning initiatives. Such a document should include the strategy adopted by the firm and highlight how it intends to implement it.
An ideal learning plan should spell out clear objectives of these learning initiatives and provide defined processes of how it will achieve all its goals. Its purpose is to give supervisors and their people a sense of direction and offer clarity whenever confusion arises.
Any plan the management drafts ought to suit the company and address both its short- and long-term needs. Developing a learning plan can assist in getting you started on your journey to encouraging a philosophy of continuous learning in the workplace.
3. Implement Bespoke Learning Management Platforms
There are many traditional and AI-based learning management platforms available today to promote employee growth. You can use these platforms to provide e-learning courses on a broad number of topics.
The advantage of such a system is that employees can choose courses they find convenient to their learning preferences. You and your management team will benefit from turning to it to track course completion.
You can also use it to establish which of your employees have an ingrained learning mindset.
4. Set Aside Time and Resources to Facilitate the Continuous Learning Model
A continuous learning culture will only take root in your company if you take the time to nurture it. This calls for you to allocate enough time to create strategies and plan on how to implement them. Every program will require a lot of effort at first before it can take root.
You have to note that the only way cultural change can take effect in a company is if you take the initiative to think it through and ensure there are enough resources to make it work. For this, you’ll need to have a budget and an effective internal marketing strategy.
Remember, you need to market this model to your personnel if they’re to buy into the need to develop a continuous learning philosophy. And thanks to the tools provided by eLearning technologies, your employees will be able to learn according to their preferred schedules.
5. Share Success Stories
No matter the industry, every company will always have personnel committed to lifelong learning. Some do it to remain busy and engaged during their downtimes, while others see it as an avenue to ongoing personal development.
Encouraging such employees to share their success stories with their colleagues can motivate the hesitant ones to try it. Success stories can include how continuous learning has led to higher productivity or helped improve a service or product.
Depending on how you approach this technique, you could have your top people share stories of how ongoing training has helped contribute to succession planning. Use these stories as examples of how ongoing learning can lead to on-the-job promotions and better salaries.
Conclusion
Companies can encourage life-long learning among their people using different techniques such as short courses at local colleges, work-related workshops, and even eLearning courses. Informal options can include watching educational television or listening to podcasts.
The important thing to remember is that having a continuous learning culture will immensely benefit the company and its people. Employees will begin to feel valued and will become innovative, leading to better productivity.
Management will come off better financially due to improved productivity and will also get to enjoy better employee retention rates. In the long run, every company should consider looking into lifelong active learning opportunities as these will help them thrive and become more competitive going forward.
