To engage your audience, you must first understand them. What motivates them? What does learning mean to them? What has their learning experience been so far? And, most importantly, why is learning important to them? 

Although understanding your audience should be a fundamental skill in any L&D professional’s toolkit, a fast-paced environment, lack of resources, and clashing priorities can all lead to L&D teams skipping this step. 

Unfortunately, doing so can be a fatal error, as failing to understand your audience can lead to some all-too-common problems. Stop us if you’ve heard these before. 

Problem 1: L&D doesn’t take enough time to understand and promote the impact of their learning program on the learner. Therefore, the learner doesn’t understand the value of the learning, diminishing the program’s impact and engagement. 

Problem 2: The learner is being asked to do something new in an already busy working schedule.

Problem 3: The learning content is laborious and predictable in its delivery style (i.e. always long-form video with American accents)

To overcome these problems, we’ve identified a few essential steps that you can take. 

In a recent podcast, Lucy Dunleavy of Learnbox explained that when she was working in prisons to help reform inmates (some of the most challenging people to engage in learning), it was important to build ‘pre-learning’ into the process to drive success.

In the same way that you should stretch before starting a workout, your mind needs some preparation time before focusing on learning — particularly prescribed learning. That’s where pre-learning comes in. Think of it as a warm-up for your learners. 

You can build up to formal learning after starting your digital learning strategy with something like a book club, which is a perfect pre-learning tool. 

Using a provider like Blinkist to organise a book club that meets physically or virtually can get people used to learning. In turn, pre-learning gives you more exposure to your learners while also opening their minds to other learning possibilities.

Rather than throwing your learners straight into the deep end, ramping things up slowly with pre-learning can result in more open-minded and engaged learners.

Change is one of the only constants in life. Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell humans that. As habitual creatures, we can be highly resistant to change. Most of us are probably apprehensive about changing desks, let alone changing the way we approach learning.  

In L&D, resistance often comes from staff being used to the old way, which can be a roadblock to L&D’s progress and success — especially when it comes to engaging learners. 

For example, Emerald Works' 2020 State of Learning Report found that 36% of L&D leaders have traditional expectations that are difficult to challenge, while 29% of L&D teams say they are negatively affected by the pace of technological change.

How do high-performing teams overcome resistance to change? 

The good news is that high-impact learning cultures (defined as the top 10% of surveyed companies) are a shining example of what is possible when L&D teams embrace change. Among HILCs, only 18% say that leaders have traditional expectations that are difficult to challenge, while just 9% say they are negatively affected by the pace of technological change. 

The best part? More than half of HILCs (56%) say they increase employee engagement with learning, compared to just 22% of other organisations.

Resistance to change is natural. However, employees who are holding on to traditional expectations of L&D should be encouraged to embrace a growth mindset, moving on from ‘what always worked’ to ‘what is working now.’

One way to facilitate this change is by posing the question, ‘could there be a better way to learn?’ Often, the answer is a resounding yes! 

For further insights on driving higher learner engagement, be sure to read our articles on aligning L&D to the organisation’s strategy and what the modern learner needs. 

Different learner preferences and learning capacities

Failing to appreciate different learning styles and preferences is another impediment to learner engagement. 

According to Shift eLearning, the average employee has less than 1% of their working week to dedicate to learning. That equates to just 5 minutes per week. Given this, techniques such as just in time learning and learning in the flow are essential to engage learners on their own terms. 

CEB research finds that 57% of learners now expect learning to be more ‘just in time’ than it was three years ago. Similarly, Emerald Works' 2020 State of Learning Report found that “96% of time spent learning occurs in the daily flow of work and only 4% of time occurs away from the flow of work.” 

How can I cater to different learning styles? 

Given most learners are so time-poor, offering learning content that doesn’t suit their preferences is a surefire way to lose their engagement. Instead, learners must be reached in the flow of work in a way that suits their learning style, preferences, and capacities.

That’s where Go1 comes in. When it comes to meeting a wide range of learning needs, we have done the hard work for you. Decide what is best for your organisation on any given topic by selecting from a comprehensive collection of general and specialist learning libraries in the Go1 Content Hub. By accessing your content from one source, you'll never have to compromise on what to deliver, ever again.

For more insights, be sure to subscribe to the Go1 newsletter to stay on top of all the latest L&D trends. Or, you can book a demo today to find out how Go1 can help with your team’s learning needs.

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To engage your audience, you must first understand them. What motivates them? Why is learning important to them? To answer these questions we’ve identified a few essential steps that you can take. 

Digital learning content should drive higher learner engagement

To engage your audience, you must first understand them. What motivates them? Why is learning important to them? To answer these questions we’ve identified a few essential steps that you can take.

Many of you have probably come across the term “sales readiness.” If you follow investment news, the sales readiness space has taken sales enablement by storm over the last few years. With that in mind, it’s worth asking, why are so many global, high-growth enterprises increasingly turning to sales readiness and migrating away from an LMS or traditional sales enablement solutions?

The answer lies in the evolution of learning at these companies, which have come to see the clear ROI of sales readiness solutions and the immediate, positive long-term impact they’ve had on customer-facing teams. Many sales enablement and L&D leaders realise that an ongoing learning and professional skill development framework offered by a sales readiness solution can achieve what LMS and many enablement solutions are simply unable to do: unearth gaps in knowledge and skills, enable reps to retain knowledge, practice proficiencies, and incrementally hone their selling skills.

The secret sauce behind sales readiness is “everboarding.” What is it? Rather than a single course or sequence of one-off learning modules to help sales (and customer-facing) teams essentially memorise the products and services they sell, sales readiness provides a deeper understanding and ability to learn and effectively apply skills.

As Amesite puts it, “Everboarding is an advanced onboarding model backed by learning science and designed with the understanding that one-time exposure to information is not sufficient for long-term knowledge retention. Studies on learning and retention show that it is challenging to retain content after a single exposure. Repeated exposure, over time, in different contexts is the answer to storing new information in long-term memory.”

Everboarding is important for several reasons. For starters, Gartner finds that sales representatives forget 70% of information within a week of training and 87% of information within a month of training, on average. What’s more, nearly a quarter of organisations say onboarding new hires is one of their top three sales challenges. In contrast, Mindtickle finds that everboarding services that meet or exceed sales reps’ expectations can improve quota attainment by 16.2%.

In other words, onboarding is one-off training, while everboarding is continuous, ongoing training. With everboarding, sellers are ready and prepared to have impactful, productive interactions with prospects and customers. By further enabling sales reps to observe, learn, practice, and apply the knowledge and skills accrued through readiness programs, they can successfully bridge capability and enablement gaps. 

Here are five key components to enable your team to be sales-ready:

1. Take one step at a time: incremental, customised skills training and knowledge retention

You’re probably familiar with onboarding and ramping up sales reps and other employees, whether through HR or L&D or enablement programs. The key differences with a readiness solution are that it is asynchronous, personalised, and ongoing. Yes, the core onboarding process includes everything you think it would: HR compliance and tech skills training, an overview of the company, as well as its products and messaging. But how long will it be before reps forget much of what they’ve learned?

As mentioned above, research shows that people won’t retain much of what they’ve learned after just a week thanks to the “forgetting curve.” On an intuitive level, this just makes sense. Of course people are going to retain more skills and knowledge when they are learning continuously, rather than completing one-off onboarding courses. 

That’s why readiness solutions are essential for high-performing sales teams — they provide ongoing learning via spaced-out micro-content, as well as regular updates and assessments to continually unearth knowledge gaps and ensure reps retain knowledge in the long term. What’s more, readiness platforms provide innovative ways for reps to apply what they’ve learned all from the convenience of their mobile devices. 

2. Practice practice practice: applied skills training  

A pro in any field will tell you the key to success is practice, practice, practice. That’s exactly why readiness solutions have become so popular with enablement and L&D teams. Leading sales-readiness platforms like MindTickle allow reps to practice skills and apply knowledge with the help of virtual role-plays. 

Role-plays fill in the gaps between knowledge and delivery by simulating real-world scenarios, including pitches, demos, cold calls, emails, objection handling, and more.  Managers can give feedback to reps to improve pitches, focus on key terms and messaging, and learn from their peers.  

Practice makes perfect, so there’s no better time to start practising sales readiness. 

3. Become remote-first and always ready: virtual events, peer collaboration and live interactions 

Sales kick-off meetings are important events that prepare sales teams for success. They boost engagement, align sales teams with the organisational strategy, offer key information to succeed in the field, celebrate wins, and help sellers learn from losses from the previous year.

The importance of SKOs and quarterly business reviews have only grown since last year’s pandemic-induced lockdown, requiring companies to look for virtual options to run engaging, productive sales meetings.

Virtual sales events are integral to sales enablement and have naturally found a home on readiness platforms like MindTickle, the platform of choice for numerous organisations to make their sales events effective and engaging.

4. Deliver the right content in the right context: curated content 

“Content is king.” Remember the phrase that defined online interactivity over the last few decades? Well, it’s still relevant today, especially for sales reps who need to navigate increasingly complex sales cycles and interact with increasingly savvy buyers. One key challenge for L&D and sales enablement leaders is finding the right content for their programs and the best solution to make content available just when reps need it. If done manually, it’s time-consuming.

Luckily, there are not only content providers such as Go1, which offer excellent, relevant, and curated content, but also readiness platforms that can integrate curated content as part of a content management system. With an integrated solution in place, reps can consume content when they need it most, be assessed or certified on this content, and practice what they’ve learned from content in different real-life scenarios. 

5. Learn from the pros: Empower structured, 1-on-1 coaching sessions

Coaching can improve revenue by as much as 28%. More and more, revenue and enablement leaders have added coaching to their everboarding processes. 

Initial onboarding and everboarding are critical aspects of enablement, but coaching is arguably the most important – and frequently most difficult – to implement because it’s based on reinforcing and building on a foundation through continual, structured, individualised sessions. Coaching requires structure as well as follow-ups that improve not just incremental knowledge, but specific skills and behaviours.

It’s because coaching can be more complex that many organisations have avoided it — to their detriment — until comprehensive solutions like MindTickle came along with out-of-the-box, AI-guided coaching sessions built into its platform, easily integrating coaching with enablement and complementing existing LMS solutions.

A sales readiness solution is the best approach your organisation has in readying your sales team and maximising their potential to improve deal win rates and sizes by making them more capable and effective at selling. With a comprehensive sales readiness solution, you’ll be able to bring together all of the five ket components listed above, and have the added benefit of gathering the metrics you need to improve training, content and coaching to continuously and incrementally improve team performance.

Our partnership with MindTickle provides teams with a comprehensive, data-driven solution for sales readiness and enablement that fuels revenue growth and brand value.

Want to learn more about how you can leverage Go1 content on the MindTickle platform? Request a demo here.

Sales readiness is one of the most important aspects of any business. Learn more about the five key components that comprise a sales ready team!

Sales readiness: 5 key components to a sales-ready team

A sales readiness solution is the best approach your organization has in readying your sales team and maximizing their potential. Gene Epshteyn, Senior Product Marketing Manager at MindTickle, shares his top tips for creating a sales-ready team. 

Looking for innovative leadership training?

Mindscaling designs leadership training that makes an impact. They have over 100 micro-learning courses in our Premium library covering some of the more unique aspects in leadership, and have created learner paths on topics like Creating a More Balanced Workplace, Innovation, Doing the Right Thing, and a series of the Small Acts pathways on Confidence, Innovation, Kindness, and Team Management, just to name a few.

Mindscaling courses include real-life scenarios, action-oriented next steps, quizzes, and testimonials that will help you feel confident about the training you are providing to your leaders and they are all available through the Go1 Premium Library. 

This AU based safety provider gives us 10 courses around physical safety and how to manage personal risk. Courses include videos and a series of knowledge checks. 

This UK based financial services provider gives us 43 courses in UK and US financial compliance courses.  Their courses include knowledge checks and a final assessment.  

What’s new from our current content partners?

Leadership and Management – Cegos – MyStory series, video-based scenario courses to help upskill managers and leaders

Health and Wellbeing - Blisspot - Meditation series to help with all areas of life

Soft skills - ​​​​​​​Skillshub - Rapid Recall Boost series to improve personal development

Healthcare - AMC  – Updated Compliance courses (OSHA, HIPAA, Harassment)

Data Security  - Bob's Business – Malware and Data Security in English, Spanish, French, German, and Dutch

May is Mental Health Awareness Month in the US and UK, so I've been curating playlists to help our customers have a better understanding and awareness of mental health in the workplace. Exploring mental health, how we take care of ourselves, and how we take care of others is so important and we have great content to assist our customers in building a better place to work. Beyond Blue's Introduction to Mental Health is a good place to start, as it talks about removing the stigma and how to set boundaries to ensure your own mental health, as well as talks about what companies can do to support their employees.  

Keep a look out for more information about Mental Health Awareness Month from Go1, as we work to create playlists that help companies adhere and understand the new international standard around creating psychological safety for employees and supporting mental health initiatives in the workplace. 

The Go1 Content Insider is your first stop for all things new in the Go1 Content Hub. In this April update, find out the latest and greatest in the world of content!

The Go1 Content Insider — April 2021 edition

When planning a learning project, you will probably ask the same few questions. Who needs it? When do they need it? How do they need it? 

While these are all valid questions, this list is missing the most crucial question of all: why do they need it?

Failing to understand why a learning project is essential is a fundamental misstep. Too often, L&D teams anchor themselves to an assumption rather than taking the time to conduct in-depth interviews with the end-user.

Most learning projects break down at this point because L&D teams have not had enough exposure to the subject matter area that they need to help upskill. In fact, according to The Transformation Journey’s 2019 Report, only 24% of learning leaders proactively encourage learner-centric strategies. 

Similarly, Emerald Works’ 2020 Back to the Future Report finds that “[learning leaders] try to understand their audience using transactional data. But they can’t use this data to measure impact, create transformational success, or change behaviour...they’re looking through the wrong lens. For example, only 16% believe their people engage in online learning without prompting. But 74% of learners say they’re happy to learn online without prompting.”

This disconnect occurs because we are failing to understand the why. Reacting based on assumptions and developing a plan without truly understanding your audience will usually backfire when it’s time to implement and execute your plan. 

For further insights into understanding your learner’s needs, be sure to read our articles on aligning L&D to the organisation’s strategy and what the modern learner needs. 

3 pitfalls of failing to understand your audience

Understanding your learner’s needs should be L&D 101. Here are three pitfalls that can arise when you skip this vital step. 

While there is always going to be a gap in your subject matter knowledge, ideally, you need this gap to be as small as possible. If you don’t understand your learners’ underlying needs, they won’t engage with the learning content in the way that you expected. At this point, it becomes harder to re-engage the learner as momentum in the program is lost.


Procuring learning content without thinking of long-term engagement will mean engagement drops off later in the project. For example, just including long-form video content for upskilling a sales team over 60 days will get laborious very quickly as the learning experience becomes too predictable.


A lot of the time, L&D priorities are tied to things that are easy but make a small impact on the business strategy, rather than things that are harder but make a big impact on the business strategy. To really make a difference, L&D must go out of its way to flip this script. 

While this may sound straightforward, showing genuine curiosity about your stakeholder’s needs can be highly beneficial from an L&D perspective. 

3 essential upskilling opportunities for L&D

Breaking these ingrained habits won’t happen overnight. However, to accelerate this process, L&D teams must take this opportunity to embrace upskilling to equip them with the necessary tools to understand their audience’s needs. 

This process starts with three essential skills:

In conjunction, these skills can help L&D teams break free of assumptions and hone in on the relevant facts. 

LinkedIn’s 2020 Workplace Learning report highlights the importance of upskilling, finding that the top five in-demand soft skills for L&D are currently creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, and emotional intelligence. All of these skills can play a major role in understanding your audience's needs. 

Ultimately, by upskilling yourself in the stakeholder interview process, you will stop anchoring to what you think is required, and start to really understand what your learners need. After all, understanding learners’ needs should be at the very heart of what L&D does. 

Too often, L&D teams anchor themselves to an assumption rather than taking the time to conduct in-depth interviews with the end-user. We offer insights on how to avoid these pitfalls and better understand your learners' needs.

Start small and focus on priority skill gaps to better understand your audience

Too often, L&D teams anchor themselves to an assumption rather than taking the time to conduct in-depth interviews with the end-user. We offer insights on how to avoid these pitfalls and better understand your learners' needs. 

Start small and focus on priority skill gaps to better understand your learners 

Everything starts with strategy. It's your guiding light. 

Those without a clearly defined strategy spend time trying to make an impact everywhere, while usually experiencing success nowhere. On the other hand, defining a strategy gives you the guardrails to focus, learn, and make the impact that you want and your company needs.

Your strategy will define everything from your budget to the level of executive sponsorship you need, the skills you need to prioritise, and how you measure the impact those skills will have on organisational performance.

Complicating matters, different departments have varying projects, ideas, and stakeholder needs. Clashing priorities mean it’s easy to get pulled in different directions and lose sight of broader organisational goals. 

Unfortunately, when it comes to strategy, L&D teams encounter several common problems: 

Problem 1: L&D isn’t operating like a business within the organisation. 

Problem 2: L&D are perceived as order-takers.

Problem 3: The L&D team doesn’t have an executive sponsor to fight for them. 

To overcome these barriers and create an L&D strategy that aligns with your organisation’s strategy, you need to answer several questions...

Is there evidence of need within the business?

It should go without saying, but if a stakeholder’s request doesn’t align with a business need, it’s okay to decline that request. 

Next time you receive an L&D request, pause for a second. Resist the reflex to jump in and immediately fulfil the request. Instead, ask one simple question: “What is the evidence of need?”

By keeping this question in mind, you will ensure any requests you fulfil are aligned with a broader organisational need. 

The positive news for L&D teams is that this simple step can lead to huge improvements. According to Emerald Works’ 2020 Back to the Future report, 94% of high-impact learning cultures (defined as the top 10% of companies) say their L&D activity is fully aligned with the strategic goals of the organisation. 

By comparison, only 49% of other L&D teams say their L&D activity is fully aligned with the strategic goals of the organisation.

As such, high-performing teams reap the rewards of aligning learning and organisational goals. 

For further insights on aligning L&D to your organisation’s strategy, be sure to read our articles on learning value vs business value and crafting a digital learning strategy that creates value. 

If your stakeholder doesn’t have an answer to the question “What is the evidence of need?”, then other departments in your organisation can be excellent resources to identify business needs. 

It’s a good idea to speak to teams like IT, internal communications, and marketing since they already track employee behaviour and offer rich seams of data that can give you the evidence you need. For example, they may have insights into the ‘help’ subjects that people are searching for on the company intranet, details of performance goals, or results from employee engagement surveys.

Only when the data shows clear evidence of a need, your next step should be to drill down to discover the strategic value of this intervention to the business.

What is your stakeholder trying to achieve?

Once you’ve identified a clear business need, it's time to find out what your stakeholder is truly trying to achieve. 

Remember, the request MUST be tied to a business goal.

If you need help locating your organisation’s business goals, you can always access resources such as recent company reports. Failing this, it can be helpful to ask the Project Management Office to see what areas of the business they’re investing in, or even speak to HR and people looking at strategic workforce planning to see what skill gaps they’re facing.

Above all, don’t be afraid to ask. L&D must use all the information available to align itself with the desired business outcomes.

Who is your representative on the executive board?

Identifying a business need and clearly defining your stakeholders’ goals is essential. However, without representation at the executive level, you will likely spend most of your time running into internal blocks and getting nowhere fast. 

Gaining executive buy-in is still a challenge for many L&D teams. The 2020 Go1 State of Learning Report identified executive buy-in as the “final hurdle”, with 42% of executives either neutral or actively not supporting their L&D teams. 

Still, getting a seat at the executive table is essential to your L&D strategy, and it all starts with aligning learning value and business value. 

To start this journey to executive buy-in, we’ve identified five ways you can work more effectively with stakeholders.

5 ways you can work more effectively with stakeholders

Move from a transactional to a transformational relationship with stakeholders.

Understand the stakeholder’s motivations and stressors.

Spend time shadowing (or interviewing if remote) people from different departments in the organisation. Understand their working schedules and the types of learning that may fit around them.

When it comes to strategy, L&D teams encounter several common problems. So, we've put together a guide to overcoming these barriers and creating an L&D strategy that aligns with your broader organisational goals.

How to align L&D to the organisation's strategy

When it comes to strategy, L&D teams encounter several common problems. We've put together a guide to overcome these barriers and create an L&D strategy that aligns with your broader organisational goals. 

Exciting news just in - Rosetta Stone awards Go1 as their APAC Innovative Partner of 2020 and Certified Channel Partner of 2021! 🥳

The whole team here at Go1 is absolutely thrilled to receive these awards and are excited to continue working alongside Rosetta Stone to use the power of language and literacy education to change people’s lives. 

Through our partnership with Rosetta Stone, Go1 customers have access to the very best online language learning resources to help their employees speak confidently with colleagues and customers all over the world.

Go1 Senior Manager, Content Partnerships, Luke Turner

Rosetta Stone are the world’s premiere language learning software. Their range of self-directed online training resources allow learners to really immerse themselves in the language learning journey.

Rosetta Stone awards Go1 as their APAC Innovative Partner of 2020 and Certified Channel Partner of 2021

At its core, it’s a simple question. However, as L&D professionals, we often forget to ask: what does the modern learner need? 

It’s easy to get caught up in shiny new toys or engrained thinking habits and forget to factor in our learners’ needs. This question should be front and centre of your decision-making process, driving any strategic moves. 

Let’s take a closer look at the modern learner’s needs. 

What are the modern learners’ L&D options? 

As we know, the modern learner is used to viewing high-quality media in everyday life, with access to learning through Google, YouTube, and other modern technologies only ever a click away. 

With so many options competing for their time, L&D teams have less time to grab learners’ attention. For example, research suggests that Gen Z have developed 8-second content filters. As such, if you don’t grab their attention in the first 8 seconds, you may never get it. 

Unfortunately, L&D doesn’t always offer a learning experience that considers these factors. The modern learner has many options, so to meet their needs, your L&D offering must stand out immediately in a crowded marketplace.

How does upskilling impact the modern learning environment? 

Technology is also having another impact on the modern learner’s needs. You’ve probably seen this a million times, but the point still stands: technology adoption is driving a need to upskill staff. And the best talent will fuel the best-performing businesses. 

Accordingly, upskilling and reskilling are at the heart of almost everything that the modern learner needs. 

For instance, 48% of L&D employees say their team is underskilled to deliver on business needs. What’s more, 54% of employees will require extensive upskilling or reskilling by 2022. 

In other words, the modern learner is desperate to be equipped with the right skills to get ahead in a changing world and deliver what is needed within their teams. 

What skills does the modern learner need? 

To keep up with these demands and attract the best talent, the World Economic Forum predicts that learners will need the following skills by 2025: 

Resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility

Similarly, LinkedIn’s 2021 Workplace Learning Report identifies leadership management, creative problem solving and design thinking, and communication as the top three skills for the future. 

The common link here is that soft skills have surpassed hard skills as a priority for the modern learner. To meet the modern learner’s needs, focussing on the above skills is an excellent place to start.

How can the modern learner stay up to date with changing skill requirements? 

As we’ve seen, the modern learner needs many general and subject matter specific topics to support their professional development. 

For example, a new sales manager may have to be upskilled in HR processes, IT skills, and project management. However, they may also need diversity and inclusion training as part of a broader company initiative.

Further, they may want or need to become better at closing sales online, competitive analysis, or online contract negotiation.

Adding to the modern learner’s challenges, they may have as little as 30 minutes of formal learning time per week as they juggle meetings, customer requests, and the need to maintain a healthy work-life balance. 

How can the modern learner keep up with these challenges? 

To summarise, the modern learner is faced with a mass of appealing learning options but often has limited time for formal learning. Adding to this, they have diverse subject matter needs and require upskilling to stay up-to-date in a changing world. 

Most importantly, the modern learner needs structure and support to help them learn efficiently. That’s where Go1 comes in, offering comprehensive support for the modern learner’s needs. 

Our customers cover the majority of their learning outcomes with off-the-shelf courses from the Go1 Content Hub, while we continuously add new, award-winning content providers at no additional cost to the customer. 

This means more time to focus on learning, with the breadth and quality of content required to grab the modern learner’s attention and satisfy their varied skills needs. 

To learn more about the modern learner’s needs, be sure to read our articles on closing the L&D skills gap and how technology has changed the way we learn. 

At its core, it’s a simple question. However, as L&D professionals, we often forget to ask: what does the modern learner need? This question should be front and centre of your decision-making process, driving any strategic moves. Let’s take a closer look at the modern learner’s needs.

What does the modern learner need?

At Go1, we’re learning content experts. We know the market and we advise HR and L&D teams every day on how to take a library of digital learning and curate it down to be relevant to learners’ needs.

In our conversations, we hear the same concerns again and again. For example, effective content mapping requires a breadth of content, team capacity, executive sponsorship, and additional skills that L&D teams often don’t have, such as project management and performance consulting.

As such, we find that most companies face the same common challenges when mapping learning content to their organisation’s skills. These challenges include breadth of content, time to deliver high-quality learning opportunities for every employee, and team capacity. If you’re reading this, you’re probably all too familiar with many of these challenges. 

Let’s delve deeper into some of these challenges to understand why they manifest, and, more importantly, how we can overcome them. 

Deeply understanding your learner’s needs (organisational awareness)
It’s easier to assume your learners’ needs and what they want to achieve than to undertake a comprehensive performance consulting process. However, these assumptions create a gap between the learning that’s happening and the business-impact it’s having. Eventually, the project is seen as low-impact because the L&D team failed to understand their audience to the required level.

Team resourcing/prioritisation
There are often many training needs to juggle across different departments within an organisation. 

Time to assess, implement, and evaluate
Often a reactive business unit, L&D don’t have the time to do an in-depth analysis. Evaluation of the effectiveness of learning programs in-line with business objectives is challenging if analysis hasn’t been comprehensive. 

Lack of content breadth to meet the identified learning needs
Having access to a static collection of content means skill gaps that can’t be met by your existing vendors requires ongoing procurement and its associated costs. 

Available content is less relevant over time (constant procurement)
Even when managing multiple vendors, new skills and knowledge is required across your workforce. Developing in-house content to meet these needs takes more time than buying content off the shelf, starting from 49 hours per 1 hour of eLearning content developed. As such, many organizations turn to vendors that supply multiple libraries to meet shifting content requirements at a fraction of the cost.

As mentioned, we hear these same challenges again and again when talking to customers and partners, which is why many use a solution such as Go1 to address their challenges. 

Luckily, where there’s a challenge, there’s a solution, so we’ve put together an 8-step guide to deliver a digital learning project: 

Still, the volume of high-quality ‘off-the-shelf’ content to include in blended learning makes for a daunting content selection process. At Go1, we want to make it easier to go through the mapping process and eliminate worries about content breadth. That’s why our customers cover the majority of learning outcomes with off-the-shelf courses from the Go1 Content Hub, to complement the nuanced, contextual content built in-house.

Having the Go1 Content Hub can also mean never having to procure content again. For popular topics, we work with a wide range of well-regarded partners to ensure coverage, leaving more time to assess, implement, and evaluate learning strategies. 

You won’t have to worry about content decreasing in relevance over time either, as we continuously add globally recognised new content providers at no additional cost. 

Additionally, simple filtering allows users to see the range of content available under each topic to cater to different learning styles, while also taking the stress out of team resourcing and prioritisation. Similarly, course descriptions and learning outcomes are available to help decide which courses are the best fit. 

Getting the right learning technology in place won’t solve all your learning problems, but it will enable you to have an impact on a larger scale across the organisation, while also reducing the headcount and time you need to deliver your projects. 

At Go1, we’re learning content experts. We know the market and we advise HR and L&D teams every day on how to take a library of digital learning and curate it down to be relevant to learners' needs. So, we ask, why is mapping learning content to skills so hard?

Why is mapping learning content to skills so hard?

At Go1, we’re learning content experts. We know the market and we advise HR and L&D teams every day on how to take a library of digital learning and curate it down to be relevant to learners’ needs. So, we ask, why is mapping learning content to skills so hard?

Written by guest blogger Michelle Ockers, Learning Strategy Expert and host of the ‘Learning Uncut’ podcast. Michelle helps build future-ready learning organisations. She is a leading contemporary learning practitioner at the forefront of modernising learning and keeping the profession relevant and impactful in organisations.

Recognising your thinking habits and being willing to think differently allows you to see alternative solutions in the system you are trying to change. Let’s revisit the three compliance training challenges raised in part one of this blog to see how shifting our thinking habits can open up alternative approaches. 

If you haven’t already, be sure to read the first part of this blog Thinking differently about compliance training for a quick refresher. 

The business first thinking habit helps you move away from completion rates as the primary measure of successful compliance training. Instead, it makes you look for more meaningful indicators of success.

Here are some practical tips that emerge from the business first thinking habit:

Move on from course completion. Instead, ask whether people can understand and follow policies and procedures to gauge their attitude toward compliance.

In part two of her blog series, Learning Strategy Expert Michelle Ockers examines how L&D professionals can reinforce new thinking habits and increase the impact of their compliance solutions.