Understanding today's learners

As learning professionals, we have to be vitally aware of today’s learners. They differ from learners from a decade ago and all share some common characteristics.

Today’s employees are overwhelmed, distracted and impatient. Overwhelmed because with flatter organizations everyone is asked to do more, faster, and with less resources. Distracted because of social media, questions, meetings, email and much more. Impatient because time away from task means more overtime at the end of the day.

Consider these statistics from a recent survey by Deloitte.

•  The average employee is online 27 different times a day.
• Workers spend 41% of the time on things that offer little personal satisfaction and do not help them get work done.
• Most workers won’t watch videos longer than 4 minutes.
• People unlock their smartphones up to 9 times every hour.
• 2/3 of knowledge workers actually complain that they don’t have time to do their jobs.
• Workers now get interrupted as frequently as every 5 minutes, ironically, often by work applications and collaborative tools.

Additionally, 1% of a typical workweek is all that employees have to focus on training and development.

We, as learning professionals have to come to grips with these realities and construct learning experiences that take these things into account.

For starters, we have to have intelligent conversations with business leaders who claim to need training. Is it really a training need or something else? If it is training, how do we find out what is necessary to achieve the business outcome and how can we construct meaningful exercises around those needs? How do we keep the content at a minimum and the practice at the forefront? How do we create measurements from the onset so we know later if the training initiative was a success? Can the information be curated instead of created?

Rather than dive right into the next training course, we need to seriously consider these questions and understand our role is to help increase performance, not disperse a bunch of content. Everyone in this equation, the trainers, business leaders, managers, and participants will be happier in the end. Everybody wins.