Design thinking in Learning

Many companies are starting to embrace ‘design thinking in learning’. This means creating more personal and generally better experiences for our workforce development programmes.

One driver for this change is the common use of social media and video in our everyday lives, think about your use of Linkedin, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and YouTube. They all have one thing in common, a good user experience.

This is a challenge for our modern Learning and Development teams, perhaps they have built some legacy curriculum which needs updating, perhaps they are using a corporate Learning Management System which hasn’t been updated, or maybe it’s just never had any ‘design thinking.’

According to a recent report from Bersin by Deloitte with Glassdoor, learning and career opportunities have become a key driver for employees. Furthermore, Harvard Business School reported that 84% of business leaders feel it’s need to improve organisational learning.

Corporates such as Autotrader are embracing this shift, they are looking at how they can link culture, learning and environment into one to create an awesome experience for their workforce.

Autotrader offices

The role of Learning and Development Needs to Change

Think about it, with the current business world moving faster than ever, the L&D team can no longer cater for the demand for learning within the design. The relationship with L&D and the business needs to switch, from ‘learning is done by L&D’ to ‘L&D facilities the learning’. For example, a retail business recently had great success with this model, instead of inducting a new employee on a 2 week course, they reviewed a successful employees experiences for 9 months to create a journey map. They found that it was a mix of experiences both informal and formal that took place. Following this research the company built a mobile app which had the formal/ mandatory learning, but then leveraged social aspects to create the informal learning via connecting with subject matter experts in the company and meetings with clients.

In doing so, this retail business demonstrated that design thinking can work, with their evidence based research they were able to improve return on investment through the use of technology to facilitate the learning.

Webanywhere and their partners Skipton Building Society will be attending the next Yorkshire Organisational Development meeting at Asda House on the 18th of October. Guest speaker for this meet up is Myles Runham, Former Head of Digital at the BBC.

For more information, please contact us.