An insider’s guide to effective content curation

We recently gathered insights and advice from some of our Go1 Content leaders to bring you an empowering and rounded guide to effective content curation.  

We’d like to offer a big thank you to our Go1 thought leaders below for their time and knowledge in compiling this guide. 

Loretta Konidaris, Senior Manager, Talent Enablement 
James MacDiarmid, E-Learning Content Curation Manager 
Lea Ann Wardle, Customer Success Manager 
Ollie Callaghan, Customer Success Manager  

Content curation is a fluid, ever-changing role in learning and development. It can be impacted by accessibility, technical integrations, and workforce distribution, not to mention the end users’ learning needs and goals.  

The need for content curation is unmoving. Go1’s Senior Manager of Talent Enablement Loretta Kolidaris notes that ‘if learners are spending most of their time trying to find the most relevant content, they can lose motivation fast.’ In other words, merely having access to learning does not necessarily mean that your people will learn. As a content curator, it is critical to reduce any points of friction when learners want to access content, thereby presenting relevant and engaging learning materials.    

For a beginner to content curation, it’s easy to become overwhelmed. Sandwiched between discovering organizational and learner needs, and an immense library of learning resources, decision paralysis is understandable.  

To help overcome these challenges, we interviewed some of our internal content curation experts and gathered the following key points for effective content curation.  

Discover your learning spaces and priorities 

When faced with a world of learning options, your first step must be to pause. While it may sound counterintuitive, you should take this opportunity to discover the needs and gaps that learning can fill at your organisation.  

This step will hold a compounding influence on the success of implementation, engagement, measuring impact, and more. Do not miss this step.  

You can gather insights into learning needs via multiple avenues, which are increasingly becoming more accessible thanks to digital integration.  

For example, you can: 

• Begin with any currently rolling, mandatory, or compliance-related learning. 
• Utilise survey tools to gather perceived (present and future) skills gaps for individuals, teams and organizational change
• Leverage professional development tools to discover common and unique learning goals. 
• Open conversations with your recruitment team to uncover trending gaps or upskilling opportunities. 
• Ensure there are clearly communicated pathways for people to submit learning needs to your team. 

This can become a long list, and not necessarily one that is clearly defined from the outset. However, these tips should form the basis of your first curation effort.  

Remember to lean on your support team, whether at Go1 or your learning provider. They have walked countless teams through the process over the years and know all the common pitfalls. 

As a Customer Success Manager, Ollie Callaghan has seen information overload at play: 

A lot of clients believe their whole world is going to be consumed by having to sit down and watch 89,000+ pieces of content. Once the process is explained a little more and the initial batch of recommended providers is offered, they generally start to feel a little better about things. 

Align employee and organizational learning needs 

In the modern working world, employee and organizational learning and development needs often overlap.  

Purposeful, two-way communication between both stakeholders is where compounding growth can really take off. When employees are seen, engaged, and find purpose within an organization, they are more willing to align their learning to the organization’s needs for mutual benefit.  

Below, Loretta provides a glimpse into how things are done here at Go1: 

We are always listening to our employees through things like engagement surveys and focus groups that help us understand current challenges. Therefore, the two (employee needs and org needs) often align.  
It’s also important to provide autonomy and choice. The systems and processes enable employees to drive their individual learning and their own careers.  
Internally at Go1, feedback from CultureAmp has helped us prioritize things like a performance and feedback framework to drive consistency, focus efforts around belonging, and set up individual budgets that cater to individual learning needs. 

By considering the employee learning experience, you will also enable growth and continue effective content curation. What's more, establishing clear feedback loops is vital.  

In the context of any essential compliance training, there is usually space to improve the experience and reduce friction while still meeting organizational needs. Mandatory compliance training must be relevant, interactive, and time-saving while providing all the necessary information. 

Start small to go big 

 Another of Go1’s star Customer Success Managers, Lea Ann Wardle, summarized this belief beautifully, saying: 

You can have it all, just not all at once. Don't feel like you need to roll everything out at the same time (it will be overwhelming, won't get done, and will leave a bad taste in the teams’ mouths), so curate with achievable timelines.  

What is relevant and engaging to your team will be different to what works for another team. So again, starting small and building upon what works will be more fruitful than building big and restarting from scratch.  

With each additional curation, you can build upon metrics, qualitative insights, and newly discovered needs.  

 To quote James MacDiarmid, our E-learning Content Curation Manager, ‘in an age where they say content is king, just remember, quality is queen.’ If you take the time to deliver quality to your people, you will see the dividends in their engagement and growth.   

The insights and expert tips gathered from conversations with our Go1 thought leaders were too comprehensive to condense into a single article. So, watch this space for more content curation guidance to come! In the meantime, start with the above: Discover your learning spaces and priorities; Align organizational and employee learning needs; and start small to go big.  

To see how Go1 can solve your organization’s unique learning needs, get in touch with a member of the team today for a demo. For more insights, you can also subscribe to the Go1 newsletter to stay on top of all the latest L&D trends.