How to market your learning and development

We’ve all been there … we want to train our managers or employees in something that we feel is important – so we create a training programme. Then we worry that they might not attend voluntarily so we make attendance mandatory. The result? Resentful delegates who begrudge having to take time out of the day job to go to training that HR is making them do. Not great. Instead of the parental approach of making people attend, we need to sell our learning and development. We need to think like marketeers to generate interest and ensure that when they do attend that they are in the right head space to learn.

Here are six techniques you can use.

Why would they want to learn this?

The first technique and probably the most important is to think through ‘why would they want to learn about this?’ It’s not enough to simply schedule a course and assume that it will appeal. In his brilliant book, ‘How people learn’, Nick Shackleton-Jones talks about how people have to care about learning if it’s going to stick. So, we need to get inside their heads and work out what will turn them on – and what might turn them off.  One way of doing this that works really well is to create persona based on what might motivate different types of employee to want to invest their time in their development. The L&D team at Sky, for instance, found that they needed to appeal to two different types of people. There was the type that responded well to ‘staying ahead of their peers’ or ‘positioning themselves for promotion’. So, they used language like – ‘Don’t fall behind’ or make sure you get ahead’ to appeal to them. The second type was put off training if it meant time away from focusing on the operational side of their job. So, for this group, they focused on the promotion of micro-learning opportunities with straplines like ‘This will only take you five minutes!’

How do you position learning?

The second technique is all about how you position learning in your organisation. Do you present it as somehow separate to the real work? Or could you position it more as something that is just part and parcel of their working day? Something that everyone here does? This is what Schneider Electric does with their hashtag #whatdidyoulearntoday? And J&J’s mantra of ‘Growth isn’t optional’ positions personal development not as a nice to have extra – but something that we all do.

Watch your language!

And thirdly, what’s the language you used when describing L&D opportunities? Do you talk about training programmes – an immediate turn off – or are you more creative? Like at Telefonica where they talk about ‘learning shots’ instead of micro-learning or at Abercrombie & Fitch where they use Touch Base to promote their informal mentoring.

Think influencers

Fourthly, think like Instagram and use influencers. Find influencers in your organisation to recommend content, talk about their personal learning experiences, share their favourite resources and help spread the word. These will be the people who love learning, get excited about progressive approaches to developing their skills and others will listen to them.  These influencers play a vital role in driving engagement and will help win over those who might not otherwise be interested, and it doesn’t feel like HR/L&D are always the ones driving it.

Take the learning to them

The fifth technique is to take the learning to them and create opportunities to develop in the places where they spend their time – rather than sending them to a separate venue or platform. Set up dedicated channels on your normal comms hub (MS team, Slack etc,) like they do at Patreon where they created a Managers’ Slack Channel as a development space for managers to discuss different topics with each other and share recommendations and advice.

Marketing campaigns

And finally, why not think about your programme of development in terms of a Marketing campaign to get people engaged? For example At Getty images, the leadership development team started a custom of “WeLearn Wednesdays”. Every Wednesday, they get their leaders to share one recommended online course through Slack.    In your campaigns use polls or quizzes or ask questions to get people engaged and sharing their ideas or their favourite resources.

So, in summary, let’s get rid of our mandatory training – or at the very least, only use sparingly for the most critical of areas. Instead, think like a marketeer and sell your L&D through the use of persona to target your messaging, change its positioning so that it’s seen as something that we do everyday, use language that’s more human and appealing, take the learning to them, use influencers and invest in marketing campaigns.