The success of e-learning in companies primarily depends on your employees' ability to learn independently. But how can you promote these self-learning skills? We have summarized the 5 most important tips for you:
Reading tip: We have already explained the term self-learning competency in another article and shown why this skill is so crucial in e-learning: The prerequisite for successful e-learning.
The further education of your employees continues to take place predominantly digitally in many companies. Many HR professionals are therefore increasingly relying on e-learning and time-shifted, asynchronous learning units. Independent learning by employees is more important than ever. In e-learning, your employees must take responsibility for their learning process. What sounds simple is, in practice, a significant challenge: Many employees must first learn this self-responsibility.
As the person responsible for continuing education, you should deliberately promote your employees' self-learning competencies before providing the first learning material. Only then can you be sure that they truly possess the necessary skills for independent learning.
Self-learning competencies are diverse
Self-learning competency has a lot to do with the self-responsibility of your employees. For you as the responsible person, this means giving up control and transferring it to your employees. They must take care of acquiring knowledge themselves.
Self-learning competency is important in four areas of the learning process:
The learning planning and organization: Your employees need to organize themselves well in e-learning. They require sufficient learning time, an optimal individual learning pace, and appropriate learning media.
The actual learning process: Learning is primarily determined by the content. To ensure that the learning process is successful, you should align it with the learning objectives.
The learning outcome: Control is essential for learning to remain truly successful. The alignment between the learning objective and the achieved learning level of your employees is crucial.
The coordination: Learning must fit into everyday life. Coordinating learning with other areas of life is therefore particularly important. The exchange among learners also increases learning success.
In all four areas, your employees need the appropriate competencies and resources. Learning processes always include self-directed and externally-directed parts. E-learning is also partly externally directed, for example, through the selection of learning media. “Self-directed” does not mean “without guidance”. On the contrary: Therefore, we will now tell you how to promote your employees' self-learning competencies.
How to promote self-learning competencies in e-learning
In order for your employees to develop self-learning competencies, you must support them deliberately. Therefore, in the first step, you should assess the current status and promote your employees accordingly on an individual basis.
Three examples of targeted support:
Do some employees have issues with technology? Then explain to them the course process, for example, in a short video.
Other employees may find it challenging to find their own learning pace – support them here, for example, with a template for a learning plan.
For many employees, it is difficult to allocate sufficient time for further education: Fixed learning times help here.
As the person responsible for further education, you can promote your employees' self-learning competencies at various points:
How to promote self-learning competency: Own representation // based on: Research Institute for Corporate Education
As the graphic shows, you can promote your employees' self-learning competencies at various points. With the following tips, this can be achieved at all five stages of the learning process:
5 concrete tips for promoting self-learning competency:
Provide your employees with the necessary learning content and sufficient input so that they can learn independently.
Delegate responsibility to your employees and allow them to decide on the learning process themselves.
Foster awareness of learning and communicate the reasons and objectives of your further education to your employees.
Explain to your employees why the individual learning measures are meaningful and place them in the overall context of their work.
Provide fixed times for feedback, questions, and suggestions to address your employees' needs.
If you equip your employees with this competency, both sides benefit: You, as the responsible person, can hand over the learning process to your employees, and they become independent of you as a course leader in their learning process!
Are you looking for further content and inspiration for your own further education measures? Then feel free to check out our learning materials. Our collection is, of course, free of charge and includes topics such as blended learning, e-learning, video production, and much more!
