How do you take a traditional learning experience like new-hire training and radically reimagine it for today’s learner? More importantly, why should you want to change your approach? There’s a growing consensus in the L&D industry that new employees learn more on the job than they do through formal learning events. Nonetheless, L&D is in a unique position to shape the experience of new employees from day one, which presents a prime opportunity to create a lasting impact as they begin their new roles.

Workplace learning is a two-way relationship between a company’s desire to stay competitive and employees’ need for information to engage job functions. With the struggle for competitive advantage expected to only accelerate, it pays dividends to create a flexible and technology-enabled learning ecosystem that can foster the future generations in the workforce.

Patient safety and compliance are major issues in hospitals today. One organization’s challenge was how to keep 7,000 professionals up to date and compliant regarding patient safety tasks and medical equipment. The issue was that formal learning wasn’t proving to be effective enough as medical equipment was changing with software updates on a regular basis.

A carefully executed eLearning scenario can pull people into a real-world application of new concepts and skills. Yet it’s rare that instructional designers have the time to create immersive scenarios with complicated branching and feedback. Under a tight deadline to redesign an online course in practical ethics, Pennsylvania College of Health Sciences still wanted to give students practice making realistic decisions before they began working with real patients.

Adults learn by doing what they’re being taught. As a virtual trainer, it’s your job to get them “doing.” But sometimes you may find your audience multitasking instead of engaging with the content, and as a result, their learning suffers. How can you keep people actively “doing” within the confines of your virtual platform?

Designing learning for a global workforce is challenging at the best of times. However, when you factor in that this learning must be virtual, mobile ready, and accessible to over 80,000 employees, the challenge becomes substantially more complex. This is the dilemma SAP faced when asked to develop a global diversity and inclusion program for its employees to boost awareness of the value of an inclusive work environment.

Back by popular demand, Hyperdrive returns to DevLearn this fall. This year’s Hyperdrive competition focuses on innovation, showcasing projects that are using technology and solutions to create new and exciting opportunities for learning and performance support.

Many businesses’ success depends on their customers and partners being skilled users of those businesses’ products and services. But sometimes those products and services are complex or otherwise challenging to learn. Unfortunately, the more people struggle to understand them, the less likely they are to use them effectively to unlock value (and come back for more).

Spoken words carry information far beyond what is found in the words themselves. Written words cannot convey inflection, tone, and true meaning, so it is not surprising that a voice-over recording can sound very different than what scriptwriters originally intended. What if there was a simple way to write scripts for voice narration that increases readability, leading to improved accuracy in delivery and minimizing (even eliminating) time-consuming retake sessions?

The airline industry is highly regulated. As a result, Alaska Airlines’ employees were tasked with completing numerous hours of training each year. With limited resources and time, they needed an innovative method to make this annual training feel fresh to their audience. For the first time in years, they decided that eLearning might not be the answer to the age-old problem of how to make a learning experience truly memorable. Their alternative: comics!

L&D is increasingly using video to address workplace needs, but where should you turn to learn how to make these videos engaging and effective? Hollywood, of course! For more than 100 years, the film industry has mastered the art of engagement, with good films keeping audiences riveted for hours. While not every workplace video needs to be a major production, there are many simple lessons from Hollywood that you can apply in your work to make better videos.

Graphics in the world of learning have been generally stuck in two dimensions. This limitation can get in the way of your ability to immerse the audience in a story or explain how complex models or processes work. Being able to add a third dimension would do more than just add flash to the content—it could actually make a real impact by making the content more understandable and engaging. But how can you create and add 3-D objects to your work, particularly when you don’t have the budget to hire specialty developers or buy expensive software?