To build capacity for change your digital learning should reach everyone and bring learning into the work
Digital learning has transformed access to knowledge. Almost anything we want to know is now only a search, video or conversation away. What we often lack is the shared context and alignment required to act on that knowledge. To get straight to solving specific problems we need to act on the discovery that access to knowledge is not the same as learning. Learning happens when people change. When they act differently, grow in new ways, have a conversation or reach an insight that changes the way they work with others.
So how can organisations make better use of digital learning? By doing two things.
1. Put learning within everyone’s reach
As budgets tighten, there is growing pressure to retreat to a world in which development opportunities are reserved for the small groups of people organisations think matter most. But there’s no going back to a world where you can reliably identify who that population is. Organisations don't know where the insight, capability or leadership they will need next is going to come from. In an uncertain future, they have to rely on the ability of the organisation as a whole to respond to change. You can’t just invest in high-potential employees if you don’t know what a high-performing employee will look like in five years. And you can’t give everyone else only the training required to comply with their current role if that role might look completely different in a few years’ time.
If you do, you risk creating compliance with obsolescence, misinvesting in yesterday's definition of potential and putting L&D budgets under further pressure when they fail to deliver. There’s no going back. But digital learning offers us a way forward: a way of making meaningful learning available to far more people.
What does that look like in practice?
At Grundfos, that meant rethinking who development was for. It's Global Leadership Development Portfolio was designed not only for first-time, experienced and senior people leaders, but also for indirect leaders: people who lead through influence rather than formal authority. That distinction matters. In a matrix organisation, leadership capability doesn’t reside neatly within the population carrying a management title. Grundfos's approach recognised that reality and deliberately extended development beyond traditional management populations.
For Orica, the challenge was how to reach them. Its frontline leaders are field based and spread across the world, including people working in remote locations. By designing its Frontline Leadership Programme to be accessed digitally, across regions and time zones and in seven languages, Orica has reached more than 1,700 current and aspiring frontline leaders across 100 cohorts.
These are different organisations facing different challenges, but both point to something important: digital learning gives us the opportunity to rethink who development is for, as well as how we reach them. The speed of transition from a world where we couldn’t afford to reach everyone to one where we can’t afford not to is blistering.
2. Bring learning into the work
Making learning available is only the beginning. It also needs to be useful. Too much digital learning still treats the learner as a lone individual consuming content from a screen. That may work when someone needs a specific piece of information or a straightforward explanation. It is less effective when the challenge involves judgement, relationships, collaboration or behaviour change.
The most important organisational problems are rarely solved by one person knowing one more thing. People need opportunities to apply ideas, learn from colleagues, practise unfamiliar approaches and reflect on what worked. Digital learning should help create those opportunities. It should prompt action, support conversation and connect learning with the work people do every day.
What does that look like in practice?
At Modulaire Group, that meant making the work part of the learning. Senior leaders taking part in its eight-week Conversations that Count programme didn't just learn how to have more effective conversations. Through a blend of digital learning, live facilitation and peer learning, they developed those skills while identifying, developing and delivering real business projects. The results went well beyond the learning experience. The top six projects had the potential to generate €1 million in revenue or cost savings, while the winning project reduced waste by 90% in eight months.
Reach gives more people access to learning. Bringing learning into the work helps them create change.
Learning has to leave the screen
This is where we need to be more ambitious about what we expect from digital learning.
Real learning might mean trying a different approach in your next meeting, taking a difficult topic into a team conversation or practising how you listen and give feedback, then reflecting on what happened. That is where digital learning gets interesting: when the technology prompts an experience in the real world, rather than becoming the experience itself. The content may help. The technology may prompt. But the learning has to leave the screen. That’s the critical test: not simply did somebody access the learning? but did the learning create something different in the work?
Access is not enough
Organisations are being caught by surprise by the speed of the transition to a world where everyone needs to learn through digital learning. At the same time, we are drowning in information. What we need isn't simply more knowledge. We need the context, human insight and experiences that allow people to do something with it.
The first generation of digital learning made content accessible to people regardless of location, position or experience. It succeeded. The new generation is different. It is about human learning design and expert facilitation catching up with the technology, so the depth of the learning experience can finally match its reach. And reach doesn't have to come at the expense of application. At Orica, 83% of participants report using their learning daily or weekly.
The potential for change is huge
Every organisation contains overlooked ideas, underused experience and undiscovered potential. Making learning more widely available gives more people the opportunity to contribute, grow and take responsibility for their own development. It can help organisations find capability in places they were not previously looking.
In a world of constant change, organisations cannot predict every capability their people will need. They can, however, create the conditions in which all their people remain curious, adaptable and ready to learn.
Digital technology makes that possible at a scale that traditional learning rarely could. But only if learning is treated as an opportunity for everyone, not a reward for a chosen few. And only if we move beyond content consumption towards building real learning experiences.
What we’re doing about it, and how you can join us
At its best, digital learning becomes part of how work happens. It can connect people across locations, introduce a useful idea at the right moment, structure a new experience or help a team reflect on its progress. It does not remove the human elements of learning. It creates more opportunities for them.
That thinking is behind Air, Impact's experiential learning platform. It takes decades of experiential learning design and human facilitation and translates them into a digital learning experience.
We’ve built it to pass two tests:
- Does it enable everyone to learn?
- And does it enable people to use learning where it really matters?
Getting both right makes digital learning more than a convenient way to deliver training. It builds an organisation's capacity for change by making learning part of how people work, adapt and grow. That has always been our mission. Digital learning needs to reach everyone and make its way into the work.
If your organisation is trying to do both, find out more about Air or sign up for a free demo and experience what this kind of learning can look like.