Reasons employee neglect your learning system

Encouraging employees to learn new skillset or improving their current skillsets can be an uphill battle sometimes. You may have spent a great deal of effort to come out with a Learning and Development module (either computerize or manual), but employees have a lackluster attitude in using it.

And there are a number of reasons, such as:

1. Are they excited about it

Ideally, it shouldn't be just about employee requesting for training with subsequent approvals. It's often that someone in the middle of their career sees learning as something they "have" to do. Their superior must also block out the training time to avoid scheduling conflicts, makes a note on the employee's record of new skill levels or certification.

Learning is like going for a hike. To keep yourself motivated and energized, you should think of the next hill -- not the entire length of the trail. After that hill, you can take a break, look back at your accomplishment, have a sip of water, and then look ahead at the next hill. Approaching learning, in the same way, can make it feel less intimidating,


2. Poor contents

In large organizations or fast-paced industry such as IT (where technology change very fast), it's easy for the content of your Learning module to lag behind requirements. You may invest in a library of training material for all occasions with the risk of too generalized, hard to find content or too generic to really have the desired impact.

One solution is to structure the content differently. The bite-sized approach order topics, principles, techniques, information into individual chunks, effectively mini-training sessions that last minutes rather than hours. It's more focused, it also makes bespoke training courses easier to construct, assembling them from only the necessary content, avoiding all extraneous information.

3. Learning culture

A learning organization encourages continuous and collaborative learning at all levels, taking a long-term perspective, with the aim of becoming or remaining highly competitive in its market.

Financial crises, job uncertainty, even political turmoil, all have an impact on the workforce and workplace behaviors. For some time, it's possible we've been adopting more of a bunker mentality - just get the next job done. Understandable, but it doesn't encourage long-term thinking and planning and development is all about the future - preparing for the job that must be done tomorrow.