Today’s rapidly evolving working landscape has required organisations to rethink the way they do work, and in turn, the skills required to perform them.
Often, Learning Design is presented as the solution. But what do L&D teams need to know and how can they effectively design learning for their employees?
PLUS UTS recently hosted a webinar where we explored these issues with an industry expert panel. We share our key takeaways below:
The roadblocks that challenge L&D teams
In the fast-paced world of corporate learning, L&D teams face many challenges that demand expertise and adaptability. We asked our panellists what challenges L&D teams face, now and in the future:
“Getting buy-in from upper management in leveraging a digital-first approach to learning. A lack of understanding from management that a digital-first approach gives us many affordances,” says Zerafina Zera, Industry Learning Experience Designer, Manager and Creative Technologist.
Dr Keith Heggart, Course Director of the UTS Graduate Certificate in Learning Design at UTS, added: “Providing personalised opportunities going forward. We must find ways to meet the individual training, development or leadership requirements instead of a blanket, sectoral or cohort approach.”
Gamification in making learning fun
There are obligations as learning designers to make things interesting. A ‘one size fits all’ model doesn’t work, and that’s where gamification comes in. But does that mean making things fun? Claire Seldon, Industry Learning Learner Designer and Gamification Consultant, disagrees:
“Fun doesn’t always equal learning. One of the reasons why gamification has failed in some ways is because people get focused on adding fun, and that gamification was about these high-level, easy things to plop on top of a PowerPoint,” she says.
“The best video games are hard; an easy video game is not fun. You want that challenge. A good math problem will grab you and take you, and it hurts your brain almost, but you like it because that struggle is meaningful and hard.”
Why choose a university like UTS for corporate training and upskilling?
Sebastian Krook, Senior Learning Designer at UTS, says universities are well placed to provide corporate training and upskilling as they are authentically learning organisations.
“It’s a legitimate space to be nerdy, to immerse yourself in something that has nothing to do with corporate objectives or participating in a cultural initiative. You eliminate the cynicism you can find in L&D initiatives by working with the university that way,” he says.
“We collaborate with the industry partner who has the experience, we’ve got the academic and research experience – we bring these two things together to make training incredibly specific.”
