Lots of people believe that if employees have access to engaging training in their Learning Management System, that should be enough for them to upskill on their own. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Providing adequate training is half the battle; the other is making it desirable to your team. With project due dates, upcoming tasks, and reports that need to be generated, why should your employee take additional time to review eLearning material? We know the answer; the next step is understanding how to market training to your employees.
Engaging Course Artwork
While course artwork may seem like the last thing to check off the list when making an eLearning course, it’s one of the most essential features. Have you ever heard that you should never judge a book by its cover? While people shouldn’t, they almost always do, myself included. The first aspect of a course your employees encounter is often the course image. That being said, if the image has nothing to do with the course or looks of poor quality, assumptions are already made about the course they are being assigned.
Bigger Brains recently had to deal with this issue in our courses. While our training is Uniquely Engaging, our course images displayed a computer monitor with the software logo on the screen (featured left). The course image didn’t tell you anything about the course, much less make it seem like something you should want to watch. After brainstorming and comparing with other classes around similar topics, we have settled on the design featured to the right. Showing smiling faces and people automatically makes our course images more appealing. Additionally, tying in the personality of Bigger Brains with the fun colors and background squiggles makes it seem like this course may be different from others in the industry. These changes have shaped our current artwork into a visually stimulating piece of media that paints our training as enjoyable and unique.
What’s in it For Me?
Some training topics are mandatory across the company. For example, a workplace harassment course is usually an annual requirement for many organizations. Other learning topics, however, are often available inside a company Learning Management System for individuals to take at their discretion. These topics can range from Microsoft Excel to Email Management to understanding the art of Active Listening. While these topics are beneficial, employees need to know what is in it for them if they take the course. This is why internal promotion is essential.
There are opportunities to create internal competitions of who can complete X courses in X amount of time. Additionally, there is the potential to market the course as being essential for career development. Adding an incentive to the available benefit increases the action taken on that benefit. If an employee knows that a library of over 200 Uniquely Engaging™️ courses is available to them at any time, that may be something “they’ll get to when they have time.” Instead, if courses about relevant skills considered in Quarterly reviews are only available for that Quarter, a more time-sensitive incentive exists.
Provide a Free Sample
Have you ever walked around Sam’s or COSTCO and seen those little free sample stands in the food aisles? Almost every time I pass one, no samples are left because people have already swarmed to the stands and claimed them! This same approach can be beneficial when presenting hard-to-swallow topics like Microsoft Excel or QuickBooks training. Instead of offering the entire 8-hr course at one time, start with a 5–10-min sample lesson.
Providing a sample can let an employee test the waters without fully diving into the materials of a course. Additionally, it can provide an avenue for them to see what the tone of the training will be. Bigger Brains provides embedded links to all the course samples for our courses so Learning and Development professionals can easily use them as promotional materials for available courses. Check out our YouTube page to view the course samples Bigger Brains provides!
