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Giovanna_Enea
Discoverer

At the end of the day, somebody has to do it. Somebody has to turn the concepts and ideas of the future ways of learning into practical programs. But how do you establish a growth mindset and a continuous learning culture when the majority of your workforce is not sitting in the same place at the same time? How do you achieve this when required skills and knowledge are changing constantly in response to today’s dynamic environment?

When I visit customers, there is usually an overall consensus on what they want to do. What’s unclear is how.

Their questions usually fall into these two buckets:

  1. How can we improve the effectiveness of our training programs?
    We have all experienced it. We finally make the time to attend a training course. At the time, it all makes sense. Then, a few weeks later, we try to apply what we learned on the job. We’ve already forgotten plenty. Other information is a lot less applicable in real life, and we have no place to go back to where we can transfer the theoretical learnings into better business results. This is frustrating for the learner and inefficient for the company.

  2. How can we build a culture of learning and sharing?
    Much of our work and learning, particularly in knowledge-intensive organizations, happens in networks – networks that go across geographies, time zones, departments, and sometimes even companies. As a result, the challenge is often, as one customer put it, to bring the “social” back into social learning.

Many of our customers have started to rethink their learning strategies. They have come up with different answers on how to best combine formal learning with collaborative and informal ways of learning, transforming the process for both their employees and their training departments.

Here are two practical examples to illustrate how your company can transform its learning strategies, benefiting from the SAP Jam Collaboration and SAP SuccessFactors Learning solutions:

Blend physical with digital training rooms to improve learning effectiveness

Combining physical training with online learning groups is a natural starting point. You can try it with a few courses and expand over time. One company looked at the entire life cycle of a training class and identified various areas where SAP Jam can improve the way it has been delivering training, from assigning pre-work and managing logistics to increasing the engagement during the class and connecting the learner with information and experts after the class.

SAP Jam offers work patterns for training rooms that are out of the box and can be modified to fit your learning needs. You can configure how the SAP SuccessFactors Learning-based course integrates with SAP Jam so that after signing up for a training class, the learner is automatically invited to the related SAP Jam training room. No additional administrative work is required.

Here’s an example of what a training room work pattern can look like:

Customers reported that they received the following benefits: a significant decrease in program dropouts and the creation of alumni networks that support employees to apply the gained knowledge when “back on the job.” These results had a major impact on improving the training effectiveness and complies with the observation that, “If your goal is to produce long-term retention, and if your goal is to produce behavior change, then....”

Topic-based learning communities

Most companies are familiar with the concept of topic-based learning communities, where experts can create and share information, documents, and videos. SAP Jam provides templates and tools to support this aspect of continuous learning.

Another example is leadership training programs, where current and new leaders are working together on putting leadership principles into day-to-day practice. Customers use SAP Jam to train their salespeople and other personnel by asking them to record and share videos of their product demonstrations for feedback, something that may not be possible if you are sitting in a classroom packed with 20 or more training participants.

Based on customer feedback, there previously was no easy way to actively inform these learning communities about available trainings. Following our design principle to bring together both formal and informal learning, learning administrators and instructors can now advertise related courses from learning systems to drive awareness and registrations. They can now reach learners who are not actively looking for training. Learners can ask questions and clarify expectations before signing up for training, or even submit training ideas. This, in turn, helps drive the ROI of the learning content by exposing it to new audiences who didn’t know the course and content existed.

These are only two examples describing some of the key scenarios of how customers are using SAP Jam and SAP SuccessFactors Learning for training and employee development.

For more, follow this blog series and watch this video.