When training content feels generic or disconnected from an employee’s day-to-day role, learners inevitably see it as a distraction rather than a tool for personal growth. True engagement happens when building programs that learners actively seek out because the training feels relevant – and makes them more confident in their actual roles.
The wisest thing L&D teams can do is not fall into the trap of believing that a high completion rate doesn’t automatically equal an engaging or relevant training program. Finishing a module only shows that a learner reached the end of a module. It doesn’t reveal whether they understood the material, felt engaged, or developed actionable skills that were relevant to their roles.
At VirtualSpeech we’ve found that there are three keys that make training feel relevant and engaging for learners, which can be the difference between L&D teams achieving their goals or missing the mark:
The Three Foundations of Highly-Relevant Training Programs
Tailored Training For Each Role
Training drives real engagement when employees recognize their actual day-to-day environment inside the learning materials. The simplest way to ensure your training hits this mark is to put yourself in a busy learner’s shoes and ask, “Will this actually help me do my job better?”
It takes only minutes for an employee to determine whether learning material speaks directly to their daily friction points or if it’s a generic exercise created just for compliance.
This requires moving beyond high-level concepts to incorporate role-specific terminology, internal processes, and real client dynamics.
For example, a mid-level software engineer might need to practice saying “no” to scope creep during sprint planning without damaging team alignment. Meanwhile, an enterprise account executive needs to handle pricing objections during complex renewal negotiations. Delivering a generic communication workshop to both leads to disengagement because neither sees their daily pressures reflected in the content.
To build genuine relevance, L&D teams have to work to uncover frontline teams’ actual challenges, rather than relying solely on top-down direction. Try interviewing recent hires about onboarding gaps, shadowing customer support calls, reviewing failed deal notes, and consulting directly with frontline managers to learn the exact pressures employees face every day.
Training programs built on relevance will be more effective in not only keeping employees engaged, but in encouraging them to use their newfound skills in their role.
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.
Structured Pathways & Assigned Learning
Providing employees with unrestricted access to a massive LMS catalog containing hundreds of courses often triggers choice paralysis. Faced with many options and a limited amount of time to train, learners choose the easiest option – doing nothing at all.
Often, the most effective L&D programs replace open-ended catalogs with targeted, structured learning pathways. The advantages of this are that:
- Employees know exactly what they need to complete
- In what order it should be completed
- How long it will take to complete
- And how it supports their current performance or career progression.
This means that structured pathways like VirtualSpeech’s Assigned Learning feature play a critical role for L&D teams. By allowing admins to build targeted training modules tied to specific skill development needs, learners jump into the platform and are immediately met with their customized learning pathway – and instantly understand how that helps them improve.
Active Practice Over Passive Content
There’s a big gap between knowing what to do and executing under pressure. Traditional L&D programs rely too heavily on passive content delivery – think long videos, slide decks, and text guides.
This type of passive content is capable of providing some foundational context, but it’s often boring and time-consuming, while also not doing enough to drive real behavior change on its own.
Skill development requires active, experiential learning based on the activity learners do every single day. This is why VirtualSpeech is built around our experiential Learning Cycle:
- Practice: Learners experience realistic workplace simulations
- Feedback: Learners receive personalized advice based on their performance
- Reflect: Learners discuss next steps with an individually tailored coach
- Apply: Learners apply their newfound skills in the workplace
When learners actively experience a situation, receive feedback on their performance, reflect with our AI Coach, and experiment with adjustments to their technique in a safe environment, they retain information at a higher rate.
Most importantly, this process is makes training feel more relevant. In VirtualSpeech’s case learners are participating in recreations of their actual roles, and facing representations of their actual workplace challenges. This type of active learning feels significantly more relevant than a slide deck or a generic, checkbox video.
Your Next Step To Building Relevant Training That Learners Will Love
As important as it is, there’s much more that goes into creating a great training program than just relevance. But making training relevant (and therefore engaging) gives you a strong platform to continue building from.
Our latest resource, Beyond Completion: Building Training That Learners Actually Use, is 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, relevant training program that your learners will love
If you want to take the next step, that’s where to start.
