Spend less on learning content.
Curate learning content faster, more efficiently (and more effectively).
Make your LXP work for you (not the other way around).
The above is what everyone in the Learning & Development (L&D) space wants. Everyone. We can all agree.
And yet everyone has their own solution to meet the above goals.
Sometimes the solution is social learning — employees liking, sharing, creating, and ultimately string together various content found on social networks to create “social learning playlists.”
Other times the answer is different forms of user-generated content or some cool design method like 5DI (I mean, that is pretty slick).
The Filtered solution to the learning content problem (and yes, there are some problems) is Content Intelligence — specifically, syncing your content with the skills that matter most to you and your organisation … not some pre-loaded skills framework.
This skills alignment ensures the content you already have in your LXP is spot on, ultimately enhancing it. Skills tied to content also help inform other content you may need. No assumptions, just data-driven decisions.
Time saved. Expenses reduced. Efficiency increased. Effectiveness improved. Everyone wins.
So let’s talk more about the why and the how of synching skills with learning content.
Why it’s essential to connect skills with learning content
Content gets in the way of building skills.
Specifically …
1. Paid content chews up your (already tight) budget: It can be challenging to benchmark disparate content sources against each other. Is social learning content more (or less) valuable than paid content? Is free content serving your organisation “better” than user-generated content? And how do you define “better” and “more valuable?”
All of these unanswered questions make the ROI calculation of various content offerings muddy.
2. Much of your content is out of control, unruly: Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created. That’s quintillion (with a Q). Learning content libraries are copious and incoherent (and often outdated and irrelevant).
Sidenote: Filtered culls unused content and eliminates it. Our platform also checks for broken or migrated links. Finally, we date stamp all assets to help find content that is (or may become) outdated and needs to be replaced.
Also, it can be a tremendous resource drain to manage multiple learning content providers.
In the end, your content sits underutilised, divorced from skills priorities.
Maybe it’s time for a benchmark of your content?
3. Poor discovery in LXPs: Poor learning content search results are frustrating and demoralising. Yet an overabundance of unorganised, unordered content in LXPs means this poor user experience is unfortunately commonplace.
And we know L&D budgets and resources are tight. We know teams are under pressure to deliver. We get you. We hear you.
But we are not here to just spit back the problems — that’s not helping anyone improve.
The solution: organise content around skills, specifically your priority skills.
Here is how we recommend accomplishing that.
The growing importance of skills.
Sync your content with your skills.
Easy enough, right?
Sure, but you first have to get the “skills” portion locked in.
Skills — and reskilling and upskilling — are a hot topic these days. We agree (see: Skills Landscape).
McKinsey wrote an article about reskilling workforces at large. Boston Consulting Group has penned a few things on skills mismatch. Even the UK government has issued a Lifetime Skills Guarantee. Finally, the #1 analyst in our space, Josh Bersin, has an entire podcast episode featuring skills taxonomies.
And the data supports the skills climate: 93% of businesses point to reskilling and upskilling as a top priority.
Most businesses now know “their skills” – the critical skills their workforce needs to succeed, yet the validation process is often skipped.
The time and effort (and sometimes money) it takes to check your assumptions about necessary skills is worth it. However, sometimes the approach is to jump into the deep end with a skill you think is needed and develop it. This method means you’ll validate whether it’s really needed (and learn a lot more) along the way.
Yet as soon as you start talking about skills, you’ll inevitably run into content. Even though content consumption plays a small role in developing skills compared to deliberate practice, it is a starting point because content is still the best avenue to help outline models and/or record the steps of your process.
If you care about skills (you do, you should), you must align that content closely to the skills you want to develop. If the content “sticks” and turns out to be useful, it’s a good indication those skills are important.
Even though content doesn’t develop skills on its own, it’s a great leading indicator that you’re getting it right (or wrong).
What happens when you align skills with learning content
Let’s go back to where we started, a level set, if you will.
Everyone in the Learning & Development (L&D) space wants to:
- Spend less on learning content.
- Curate learning content faster, more efficiently (and more effectively).
- Make your LXP work for you (not the other way around).
Spend less = save more: When you align skills with content, you have money on duplicated or unaligned content. This, in turn, frees up more budget to invest in effective skills development. When you have more aligned skills, you save money on content. This cycle continues.
Our Content Intelligence solution helps refocus content library procurement with priority skills, freeing up 30% of misaligned content spend to reinvest in skill development.
Faster content curation: Accelerate learning content curation for L&D and SMEs with high-quality pathways on any topic in minutes, not hours, and certainly not days.
Our Content Intelligence solution helps teams tag content by relevance to skills. Curators can then select the best content (curated by skill, recency, type, length, etc.) in seconds and add it to a playlist so they can focus on the finer details.
Supercharge your LXP: Increase relevant LXP search results from 10% to 90% and get a grip on all the learning content in your systems. Create raving fans. Wow end users.
Our Content Intelligence solution helps fix learning search by incorporating an excellent tagging system. Equally, (if not more) important, learning needs and trends change every few months so you can stay on top of these moving parts with agile multichannel campaigns.
Filter. Personalise. Amplify.
This is how we do it at Filtered.
FILTER: Prioritise skills, then filter out unnecessary content spend using data.
PERSONALISE: Curate and recommend content that people care about, helping them build the skills your organisation needs.
AMPLIFY: Engage your people with help from ours. Improve discoverability and end-user experience.
Embedded in everything we do are SKILLS.
