4 foxy hacks to make your learning budget work harder

In a difficult financial climate, budget limitations and cuts will be very much in the air for L&D. But don’t despair! For those who follow the Way of the Fox there is always opportunity to work smarter and get more bang for the learning buck. In this post we lay out four foxy hacks that can help you get more value for your learners out of a static or even decreasing learning budget.    

Even in the best of times, L&D departments frequently get called on to do more with less, since the value of learning to the business can be hard to prove. But economic circumstances such as those that most organizations are facing at the present moment make it far more likely that budgets will be highly constrained.

In times like these, smart learning professionals will be looking to maximize the value of existing assets. Here are four foxy ways to make sure you can safeguard and even improve on your current digital learning provision while also reigning in spend.

Hack 1: Make more of the tech you’ve got

The first thing to ask yourself is whether you’re getting the most from your existing LMS (or other learning tools)? A feature of the learning systems market in recent years has been ‘features bloat’ – the tendency of learn tech vendors to overload their systems with more and more features in the hope of attracting the widest range possible of buyers.

Research has shown that when this happens to a technology product, users baffled by the profusion of choices offered to them tend not to use the system to anything like its full capacity. So, it may well be that there is useful functionality within your LMS that you are not taking full advantage of.

Time perhaps to take a look at your system(s) and see what you could make more use of – particularly for engaging learners. Since the LXP came on the scene, LMS vendors have typically added extra functionality in the direction of becoming more LXP-like; e.g. in terms of better presentation of content, better browsing, etc. so it is particularly worth looking at whether you can better leverage underused features of an existing platform to engage learners.

Start in a small but meaningful way to improve your existing training provision focusing on priority areas of training. Review training formats, current learning assets, tools and platforms to see where improvements can be made to deliver more effective learning outcomes. (The ‘improve’ step is the first of five essential stages of a digital learning transformation explained in this blog) 

Hack 2: Deploy some re-design thinking

Very often, the approach to creating a new learning programme is set-it-and-done. An unfortunate tendency in our industry is for L&D departments not to evaluate programmes rigorously, beyond ‘happy sheet’ data, to see how effective they were. This means an opportunity is lost to see where programmes could have been improved. It might not seem like a big idea to suggest that you should go back and tweak your existing training programmes, but often it is the apparently small (and cheap) improvements that end up having the biggest impacts.

Learning is a process that goes through discrete stages from initial engagement, through knowledge retention, to transfer into practice. At each of these stages incremental improvements can be made which together can add up to a big impact – according to the 1% principle of marginal gains as championed by famous  UK cycling coach, Sir Dave Brailsford.    

Look at redesigning existing programmes in ways that will help them reach more people, have better learning impact, and/or be more cost effective. Initially these could be simple and focused on learning design (using different approaches such as flipped classroom or video learning).

Would a course benefit from taking a more blended approach – or from using follow-up practical workshops to embed learning in practice (using ‘spaced practice’ as recommended by learning theoreticians)?

Hack 3: Learning activation

One of the surest ways of getting more bang for your bucks is taking steps to ensure that your learning provision has the widest possible reach within your population of target learners. It has become self-evident within the world of online content that ‘if you build it, they won’t come’. Designing clever learning activation campaigns will not only bring your learning provision to the widest possible audience, but in the process, you will also start to build more of a learning culture within the organization.

Typically, this might take the form of designing and implemented communication and adoption campaigns involving (for instance) emailers, news articles on internal news portals, use of social media such as Yammer and MS Teams, and working with function leads and others to build awareness. Unleash your inner marketer and create games, competitions, videos and collate learner and leader testimonials to get some sizzle and excitement around your learning.

Hack 4: Learning analytics

Last but certainly not least among our hacks is upping your game on learning analytics. Now is the ideal time to expand your capability in this area. In fact this is such a core recommendation of ours that in a way it begins right at the start of your effort to get more tangible results out of your existing investments in learning technology and content. If you are looking to redesign courses or programmes, as mentioned in Hack 2, you would need to do some impact evaluation of past cohorts to see where things are going less than perfectly and there is room to improve.

Techniques such as the Will Thalheimer’s LTEM evaluation model can help you establish a causal chain in a learning programme, from engagement through to transfer and outcomes, that will show you where the ball is being dropped, and thus how better results can be achieved.

However, your engagement with learning analytics should go further than just enquiring into past programmes.

Data is instant nowadays. We have real time analytics from many platforms that can tell us what is going on right now with learners, not just what happened six months ago. And there are also predictive analytics that can tell us about the future, and AI that can help us automate elements of learning.

We live in a data-saturated age, and today’s organisations run on data. It’s the new oil, and you need to get drilling. More data is available to you, as learning professional, than ever before; but you may have to go out a get it – from your IT department or functional leads. Don’t settle just for what is produced by your LMS.

With a better analytics capability you will be in fuller control of all your learning activities, and better able, not only to know more about the value you are creating for your organisation, but also to increase that value and target your budget spend for maximum effectiveness, while simultaneously keeping costs down.

So there are four hacks that you can use to make your budget go further. For expert help with putting them into practice, contact Learn Fox now for an initial chat to discuss how we can best support you.