What is learner engagement in the workplace? We define learner engagement plus why you should harness it.
When you’re upskilling or training your employees, you want them to feel invested. However, training (compliance in particular) can sometimes feel like a tick-box exercise. The truth is, fully engaging your employees in their learning benefits both them and your organisation. In this blog, therefore, we’ll look at:
- What learner engagement is
- What an engaged employee looks like
- Different types of learner engagement
- The benefits of high learner engagement
- The challenges of achieving high learner engagement
Let’s get stuck in…
What is learner engagement?
Learner engagement is a measure that highlights the level of a learner’s participation. It looks at different types of learner engagement and quantifies how engaged an employee is in their training. Put simply, learner engagement measures how successful a learning experience is.
What does an engaged learner look like?
An engaged learner will tend to display some easy-to-spot qualities. That said, these might not always be visible day to day. Generally speaking, an engaged learner will be:
- Keen to participate
- Get tasks done on, or ahead of, time
- Motivated and putting in effort
- Asking questions and doing further work
- Inspired
- Encouraging other learners
An engaged learner can often carry on this enthusiasm to the rest of their work, meaning better results for you and a more content employee. Encouraging engaged employees means training is done on time, results are excellent, there’s participation in discussions and more.
6 types of learner engagement
It’s generally accepted that there are six types of learner engagement: cognitive, emotional, behavioural, social, physical and cultural. Importantly, finding the right balance between each is key to creating a fully optimised learning experience.
In addition, you may want to consider blended learning, which combines online and face-to-face approaches. With that in mind, let’s explore the six types of learner engagement in more detail.
- Behavioural learner engagement
- Cognitive learner engagement
- Emotional learner engagement
- Social learner engagement
- Physical learner engagement
- Cultural learner engagement
Behavioural engagement
Put simply, behavioural engagement highlights action and effort. You could categorise things in the list below as behavioural engagement:
- Paying attention
- Asking questions
- Seeking help
Cognitive engagement
Cognitive learner engagement shows that learners are genuinely interested in the subject matter. In fact, cognitively engaged learners often go above and beyond requirements because they enjoy the training or feel positively challenged.
Emotional engagement
Affective or emotional engagement shows any emotional reaction to tasks. The greater the student’s interest level, the higher their enjoyment. And this reaches out to other factors too like curiosity, sense of belonging, positive value and more.
Physical engagement
Sometimes, the most effective way to learn is by doing. Of course, this doesn’t apply to every scenario. However, in fields like healthcare, learners may need to practise tasks such as taking blood. By doing so, they begin to connect the dots and develop repeatable physical skills.
Cultural engagement
Cultural learner engagement reflects how your organisational culture promotes learning. For instance, you might publicly recognise employees who complete certain courses. As a result, learners feel more integrated, which helps drive engagement and improve knowledge retention.
Social engagement
With the rise of modern technology and social media, we believe the fourth principle to learner engagement is social engagement. That’s enjoying sharing notes online, congratulating, or rallying colleagues through online debate, showing a competitive spirit.
All of these can show highly engaged employees. And what’s even better is that you can encourage this principle with the right tools in place. We use Totara’s basecode to provide organisations with bespoke learning and talent platforms. One flavour they offer is their Engage platform. This is a specific social and engagement platform that can help you create conversations around your learning content.
From sharing tips and tricks relating to your course content, to sharing quizzes or asking questions, the Engage function unlocks the door to the fourth principle: social learning.
Benefits of high learner engagement
The benefits of learner engagement may seem obvious. Nevertheless, it’s worth exploring them in more detail. Broadly speaking, there are two perspectives to consider: the impact on learners and the impact on the organisation.
The importance of learner engagement for learners
A learner’s level of engagement highlights their commitment to upskilling and developing their knowledge and skills. So, what are the tangible benefits?
Lower dropout rates
Even when training is compulsory, completion can be a challenge. However, high learner engagement reduces the need for chasing and makes learners less likely to abandon courses halfway through.
Higher knowledge retention
While disengaged learners may complete training, they’re unlikely to retain it. In contrast, engaged learners are more involved, which leads to better knowledge uptake and retention.
Improved learner performance
Better knowledge and skills can only be a good thing. Organisations that offer opportunities to develop stand to see a continually improving workforce. Low engagement teams are 14% to 18% less productive
Because disengaged learners struggle to apply knowledge, overall job performance suffers. As a result, engaged learners are better positioned for growth and progression.
The importance of learner engagement for employees
It’s not just employees who stand to see benefits. High levels of learner engagement are great for workplaces too.
Improve learner performance
Engaged learners are motivated learners. They’re keen to learn, develop and perform well. The skills they learn through learning content makes them more adept at their job, meaning better work performances.
Build a culture of learning
Engaged employees help you to establish a learning culture. And a good course is going to get good feedback and recommendations, meaning you’ll get more staff asking to learn, or engaging more in their training.
Establish better working relationships
Social relationships in the workplace are important. And learning can help foster them. Just think first about all the different people who might sit together on a particular course. That’s new relationships being established across teams. But it also helps deepen previous relationships too. Especially if you use a tool like Engage to provide a space for social discussion, quizzes and questions.
Encourage personal development
Investing in your people is a worthwhile endeavour. Not just because it’ll improve work performance. It can also improve learning transfer across teams and help reduce employee turnover. More engaged employees stick around for longer and that’s very good news for your bottom line.
Challenges to achieving high learner engagement
There are several obstacles in the way when it comes to achieving high learner engagement. We have these down to:
- A lack of learning time
- Poor learning tools
- Negative mindset
- Previous experiences
Let’s go through each in a little more detail.
A lack of learning time
Your employees are busy. They’re managing full days of work and are easily distracted by ringing phones, urgent tasks and whatever else crops up. This can leave learners disengaged and lacking time to properly dedicate to their development.
When they do engage with learning materials, they might try to skip some of it, or rush through it. Solve this by allocating set time, away from the hubbub of work, to dedicate to learning. You can also create short courses that can fit more easily within the working day.
Pro Tip: We worked with West College Scotland who have used our LMS to create a filter on courses based on time taken to complete. This allows even the most time-strapped employee to make time for learning.
Poor learning tools
If you want your employees to get the most of their learning, then it’s best to consider investing in an LMS. A learning management system can help you centralise all of your learning and talent data and information. It removes the admin work from a lot of L&D processes and allows you to get better data on where your learners are up to.
Pro Tip: We’re a leading partner of Totara and we use their codebase to create a totally unique learning and talent platform that is made-to-order by our customers.
Negative mindset
Not everyone is going to take to learning. They might have had poor experiences previously that mean they are simply past the point of learning anything new. Some people are also simply just resistant to learning and training, and these tend to be disengaged from the get-go. The trick around this is to show the value of your L&D materials. What will they stand to gain by getting involved?
Previous experiences
Whether it’s a bad teacher, poor quality learning materials or enrolling in poor fit courses, there are a lot of things that can leave a sour taste in your employees’ mouths. The trick here is to squash any concerns early on. Create an environment where learners can regularly and safely share their feedback.
Pro Tip: To help solve this issue, we created ThinkLoop, our 360-feedback tool. Customers use it to gather and share feedback on employee performance. But you can also request and share feedback on learning courses too.
Start creating high learner engagement in your workforce
Think Learning is a leading learning and talent platform that supports customers across sectors get more out of their L&D departments. From feedback, to process building, learning management system to performance management, we’ve taken the great bits of Totara and added our own plugins and tools to help create a truly bespoke solution. Book a demo with our team to learn how we could support you to achieve your L&D goals.
