High completion rates often hide a fact that a lot of L&D teams ignore: finishing a course does not guarantee a change in workplace behavior. Bridging this completion gap requires L&D teams to evaluate the entire learner experience, rather than taking the narrow view of just tracking completions.
The short and simple fact is that improving training adoption requires you as an L&D team to shift focus away from enforcing completion deadlines that make training feel like a checkbox exercise. Real impact comes from making training engaging, relevant, and easy to use.
To understand how organizations can improve training adoption, we reached out to five senior leaders across a variety of industries to paint a picture of what separates great training from the ineffectual:
Co-Design Training To Understand What Learners Really Want And Need
Training is for your learners’ benefit. It’s designed to help them improve their skills and talents, which then has a positive effect on business outcomes.
But if employees can’t see why the training will help them, they won’t connect with it. The key is to involve your training audience in the creation phase of your initiative. Adoption surges when the learning materials directly reflect an employee’s daily operating environment, and what better way to achieve that than by working with them to understand what they need?
Kristiyan Yankov, Co-Founder of Above Apex, even recommended involving employees well before content creation begins. Traditionally, L&D teams typically start with top-down mandates, but identifying the specific points of friction your learners are experiencing in their day-to-day (e.g. through interviews and surveys) and building your training around it allows employees to apply what they learn immediately – and creates the intrinsic motivation for them to take part.
Role relevance is the key to training engagement. Our free eBook, Beyond Completion: Building Training Your Learners Actually Use, explores this in more depth, but the top-line is this: When you’re designing training, put yourself in a busy learner’s shoes and ask yourself “Will this actually help me do my job better?” If the answer isn’t a resounding yes, you need to go back to the drawing board.
Colleen Barry, Head of Marketing at Ketch, shared a similar sentiment, emphasizing that employees must understand why training matters to their personal work before investing their attention
Repetition Beats One-Off Sessions When It Comes to Knowledge Retention
The forgetting curve is an important concept in L&D, which tells us that without repetition, most of us don’t retain information well. To combat this, Tom Bukevicius, CEO and Co-Founder of Scube Marketing, advised against treating learning as an isolated, one-off event.
Lasting retention happens through continuous reinforcement over time, and we know this instinctively. Practice makes perfect, as the saying goes. So rather than sending automated completion reminders, try and encourage managers to spend five minutes during weekly check-ins debriefing with team members on how they applied a specific aspect of their training.
This refresh brings the learned concepts back to the front of a learner’s mind and helps make it stick – and is the foundational concept that VirtualSpeech’s AI Coaching is built on.
Use our Training Audit Tool to discover your L&D team’s strengths and weaknesses — and where your most urgent areas of improvement lie — based on best practices founded on our work with hundreds of enterprise L&D teams worldwide.
Treat Learners Like Product Users
Peter Barnett, VP of Product Strategy at Action1, suggested that L&D teams adopt a product mindset. When employees encounter an experience that is confusing or cumbersome, they’ll actively avoid it – no matter how much you stress its importance. His advice is to reduce friction at every stage by delivering clear communication regarding what learners will actually learn and precisely how long it will take.
A focused 15-minute module with a tangible outcome feels much more approachable than navigating an open-ended course catalog, something that’s easily achieved with VirtualSpeech’s Assigned Learning functionality.
Peter also highlighted the value of analyzing actual usage and drop-off data. If employees consistently abandon a module halfway through, the content is likely too long or poorly structured rather than a sign of low motivation.
When Training Happens Matters Just As Much As How
Timing plays a decisive role in whether learners adopt your training enthusiastically. Colleen noted that training yields higher adoption when delivered close to the moment of actual need – so embedding just-in-time learning experiences that are available when they’re needed can have a big impact.
VirtualSpeech is a great way to deliver training when it’s needed. If a sales rep has a tricky client call coming up, they can jump into the platform and practice it beforehand, boosting their confidence and preparation.
In general, bite-sized refreshers and searchable resources integrated into daily routines outperform long courses expected to be remembered months later – especially in situations where the courses are the only type of training available.
Colleen wrapped up by highlighting that in her view, low adoption is rarely a motivation issue; and more often stems from this poor timing, awkward delivery formats, or a lack of relevance.
Building A Culture of Learning Matters
Bogdan Condurache, CPO and Co-Founder of Brizy.io, pointed out that building a culture where learning and personal development is acknowledged and appreciated goes a long way to creating natural training adoption. He specifically called out manager involvement, noting that when managers talk about training, encourage their teams to use what they learned, and recognize people who apply it, adoption becomes part of the organization’s culture.
This is where gamification is a powerful tool. For example, you can create a training leaderboard, where employees can earn points (or bragging rights) every time they use a technique they learned in a recent training module in the real world. VirtualSpeech offers built-in scoring and leaderboards, making it easy to activate a sense of friendly competition amongst teams.
How to Build Training That Learners Embrace
When creating a training program that drives real adoption, there are a lot of moving parts. That’s why we built our latest resource, Beyond Completion: Building Training That Learners Actually Use, a free downloadable guide that dives deep into every aspect of training adoption, including:
- Why the adoption gap exists
- What meaningful adoption looks like
- How to build a great training program that your learners will love
If you want to take the next step after absorbing this expert guidance, that’s where to start.
