Reasons Customized Learning Solutions Fail With Solutions

According to the eLearning industry, nearly 90% of the organisations now offer at least one form of e-learning program for training, yet the completion rates of custom e learning solutions are 20% to 30% on average. But what is the reason for this gap of investment and impact?

This gap between these figures is mostly due to the improper implementation of customized learning solutions in the company or an irrelevant content strategy that makes the learners disinterested in training. But with the right initiative and team efforts, things can be resolved and act up to their value. 

What are customized learning solutions?

The custom programs are built for the training needs of one specific organisation, and the content is especially developed to satisfy unique learning objectives, learners, and businesses. The custom tone is clearly shown in video lectures, the LMS platform, sessions, and mostly in practice modules. 

Custom e learning development can be made with different formats like blended learning, microlearning, simulations, game-based learning, and mobile-first learning. 

Reasons Custom e-Learning Solutions Fail 

1. No clear briefing provided 

Most of the companies do not provide clear briefs, which leads to situations where the development partner has no clear instructions about the customer's goals and expected business outcomes. Then, the learning content turns out to be generic and overloading. 

To fix this, the learning and development team should take the initiative to create a brief document that contains exact data on its purpose and what learners will be able to do after completing training. 

2. Assuming the employee's point of view 

If the developer of the custom e learning development program just imagines themselves as the audience, of course, then the content will be customized to fit the needs of people who are not the actual learners. Hence, employees will have to deal with irrelevant training. 

To fix this, the L&D and team managers must do surveys and interviews with the targeted workforce and gain knowledge on identifying current knowledge, workflow, preferred device, time limits, and skill gaps. After this, the content will be designed to address these needs. 

3. Avoiding standard instructional design 

To gain positive learning outcomes, the organization must start with the right design of a training program. Instructional design delivers well-structured content, manages different modules so one part is not unnecessarily heavy, and adds meaningful assessments. If this step is skipped, no matter how valuable the content is, learners will not be able to retain it. 

To fix it, the company should hire an experienced instructional designer from the start. Someone capable of transforming the matter into learning objectives that learners can engage with. 

4. Excessively long content

The organisation believes that employees would be interested in any other form of learning once the custom e learning solutions course is complete, so they add most of the unnecessary content as well, such as policies, different procedures, and workplace rules. And this results in the content being too loaded for learners. 

To resolve this, the company can offer extra information, such as content in different extra docs or on the company website, which employees can access whenever they need. This way, learning will be more immersive, and workers can focus on important knowledge. 

5. Poor launch of the training program 

Every training program needs to be understood by its audience in terms of strategy and purpose. Launching the program with only the learners and team managers gives an impression of unwanted training on the employees, where they feel their time is wasted. 

To fix this, the organisation should launch the management as if it were a product launch. Include seniors and authorities of the company, use visually heavy meetings to explain its uses, and ask managers to be in charge of learning in different teams. 

The Conclusion 

The customized learning solutions provide a linear pathway to achieve the objectives of the organisation with personalised content that reflects its unique characteristics throughout the training program. This format fails in organisations at the initial stages, only when L&D and management departments do not take proper initiatives to brief, launch, and manage the program.