Before starting your L&D digitalisation, you should answer these questions : Is the company culture supporting a culture of learning? Where is the digital culture in the company? What digital tools have been implemented?
What resources do you have to embark on the adventure? Do you have the skills and experience in designing digital learning offers?
This reflection is crucial in order to make some important choices right away.
You should start by designing an initial program that aligns with company business priorities. This will allow you to concretely understand the ins & outs, the difficulties, and the necessary resources. It will allow you to make more informed decisions afterwards (for example: avoid buying a library of several thousand contents when the company is not ready for digital learning).
Concretely: start with a customised program focusing on a target population and use the feedback to continuously improve it.
Identifying a top management sponsor within the company is key to ensuring sufficient importance for the digitalisation project. In the end, implementing a digital learning strategy revolutionizes the overall practices of the company. The ideal is ultimately combining the Digital Learning strategy with the overall business strategy.
Around this sponsor, a steering committee should include the HRD, the IT department, the communication department, but also include representatives of the business & operational teams.
This steering committee will be in charge of the step by step implementation of the Digital Learning strategy.
In most cases, it can take several years before you have a mature digital learning strategy.
Knowing where you are starting from allows you to act on effective levers and adapt to each specific business situation.
This can be conducted through online questionnaires supplemented by qualitative interviews. A varied sample should be chosen: learners, managers, leaders and top management.
The debriefing of results enables the various stakeholders to become aware of the issues, but also raises awareness around the needs for action and investment.
When the project takes shape, governance including steering committees, content designers and relay ambassadors in the field, will allow the project team to validate its proposals and decide on how to involve learners and managers.
The holy grail of any Digital Learning project is knowing how to collaborate between centralized activities lead by Corporate functions (eg: investment in a common platform, definition of instructional design standard, graphic standards, approved external partners, etc.) and decentralized lead in the countries (eg: creation of content in subsidiaries, by the experts or by the learners themselves in the case of User Generated Content situations, and use of new media such as virtual or augmented reality).
In addition, the community of instructional designers will share thes best practices and continue to learn together in this rapidly growing market.
