Truth is relative. In the corporate world I recently left, I learned a few things about how eLearning is taken and viewed in the real world that you may not realize.
Believe me, this is not something that I, as an automotive Instructional Design
er, wanted to hear or find out.
It is something you need to be aware of. It may not be true in every company, but my gut tells me it’s true a lot of the time. So hold on, here we go!
Truth #1 – People don’t voluntarily take eLearning (or most training).
People generally take training, in particular eLearning, because they are required to. In many cases, bosses are tasked with getting everyone in their group to take certain training, or a certain amount of training every year. Rarely does the boss check if you learned anything in the training. As long as they can check off the box on their own performance reviews that says their people got trained they are good.
Kinda puts all that hard work you put into developing fabulous training into perspective, huh?
Truth #2 – People will skip to the end and pass the test without taking the course if they can.
Say what?? Yep, almost everyone I’ve met at a variety of companies will go to the end of a course and take the test to see if they can pass it. If they pass it, cool, they’ve avoided the course. If they don’t pass, they will try just reviewing the parts of the course applying to those they missed and take the test again.
Or, as they take the test, they write down the answers to the questions and when they take it again, they know what ones they tried before. I’ve seen people do this a bunch of times rather than actually take the course. They’ll do this even if you have a pool of questions. Eventually they’ll get a passing score.
And if you think this is only hourly or non-management folks, think again! I know a lot of learning and development management folks that do this. Yep, the folks that should know better.
Truth #3 – People don’t necessarily want to learn anything new.
People get comfortable with their jobs. They know how to do all the pieces, they come in every day and do what they need to do, and then they go home.
Then something changes. A new computer system. A new legal requirement. A new process.
As much pain as people seem to be in with change, you’d think we were literally stabbing them. They’ll put off doing something new as long as they possibly can. It usually ends up coming back to truth number one – someone will have to make them take the training.
Conclusion
Hopefully I didn’t know too much wind out of your sails with this one. Isn’t it better to know that the workplace isn’t as rosy as you or your customer may think?
Yes, this is a bit of a reality check.
Now you can go back to your previously scheduled reality.
