eLearning Trends 2023

In the wake of the Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting, there are a few trends that learning and development leaders will want to keep their eye on in 2023 to inspire a curious, compassionate, and competent workforce. E-learning has been the law of the land since COVID-19 and has shown us all that it’s not going away anytime soon. After all, there are a lot of benefits to well-implemented e-learning.

E-learning initiatives allow learners to participate in learning material at their own pace, retaining more information than traditional mandatory training. However, a few growing trends seek to take e-learning initiatives and workplace development to completely new heights in 2023.

1. Blended learning

There’s more to e-learning than elective and online recorded lessons. Instructor-led training is making a comeback! On-demand learning is great for a lot of learners, but it doesn’t work for everyone. In fact, a study by the Training Industry found that 55% of learners surveyed preferred ILT (instructor-led training, typically live and in the same physical location) as their preferred training method.

However, there are a lot of barriers to offering ILT at a large scale, including cost and resources. The solution is to take a blended learning approach, with a mixture of virtual instructor-led training and on-demand recorded content.

Using multiple types of instruction like synchronous virtual instructor-led sessions in conjunction with on-demand recorded content, can actually increase learner engagement and keep their attention for longer.

Learning preferences are important to take into consideration when providing workplace training. Training programs delivered using more than one preferred modality are more effective. Learner preferences are more likely to be met with a blended learning approach over purely VILT or elective eLearning. Blended learning can also be more cost-effective than ILT or a complete eLearning solution, depending on the providers and programs chosen.

2. Personalized learning

Personalized learning experiences improve employee engagement and retention. Lessons that are irrelevant to the person or their respective career path are unlikely to remain with them.

Instead, lessons that have been personalized to the specific learner increase retention as well as aid their career development. Personalized learning also contributes to creating a culture of continuous learning at your organization, leading to improved employee retention.

According to a study by Deloitte, companies with a continuous culture of learning experience 37% higher productivity and are 92% more likely to innovate.

Personalized learning also takes the learner’s previous knowledge and experience into account. There’s nothing worse than sitting through a training session of something you already know front to back. Most learners put in that situation would fall right asleep - and lose their trust in workplace skill development.

With personalized learning, learners can pick up where they left off and continue to develop their existing skills or learn new and exciting ones. As a result, they may actually complete their training at a quicker pace. However, a wide variety of learning materials should be available to your learners at all times to encourage continuous learning.

3. Intentional skill development

In a 2020 study by Gartner, 70% of people surveyed said that they didn’t feel they had the skills to do their jobs well. That can have a big impact on workplace productivity, performance, culture, and retention! To combat this, eLearning providers are developing ways of tackling skills development at its core.

This includes not only hard and job-related skills, but soft skills as well such as communication, time management, emotional wellness, and psychological safety. Addressing skill gaps within your own workforce is important, as 81% of employees report that they leave due to limited growth opportunities within their own company. Providing existing employees with ways to level up, and grow their personal and workplace skills while climbing the career ladder, is one way to improve retention and company culture from within.

However, in line with one of our other trends, personalized learning - personalization is a must when developing skills training for your workforce. Not every skill is necessary for every employee. If an employee has no intentions or interest in becoming a people manager, it may not be a great use of their time or company resources to put them through a new manager skills development program.

Personalization is key, and the ideal solution will provide actionable suggestions that improve output in the most relevant areas. This can be as simple as a teacher suggesting independent reading for a student, or as sophisticated as an AI-enabled LMS that premaps skills to content paths on behalf of the administrator.

4. Microlearning

Now this one may not be new to you - after all, microlearning is very popular in the L&D space these days - but for good reason! Research has shown that the process of learning complicated subjects in small, repetitive chunks is the most effective method for retention. A popular misconception is that microlearning was introduced during or just before the pandemic - but actually, microlearning has been around since the early 2000s, when online training first became widely available.

What is microlearning, exactly? While there’s some debate, most L&D professionals agree that microlearning is video content as long as thirteen minutes and as short as just one to two minutes. Microlearning is content that is exactly as long as it needs to be, focusing on what is a “need to know” rather than a “nice to know.”

Microlearning can assist learners to meet learning objectives overall as it can help prevent overwhelm or knowledge overload. It can even be combined with blended learning to provide the best and most effective experience possible.

Traditional training experiences such as all-day instructor-led training or long videos have been shown to be less effective, as learners do not retain as much information due to overwhelm. Physical instructor-led training can also be quite costly, so to use up a lot of company resources on a method that doesn’t stick with the learners is not very efficient.

Social learning is one of the hottest and fastest growing trends we’re seeing take off in late 2022 and will certainly follow in 2023. Closely related to gamification, social learning is a way of sharing career development with others. Learners want to be able to celebrate what they’ve learned and showcase it to others in their professional networks.

In fact, a survey with Degreed found that 87% of those surveyed reported that sharing knowledge with their networks was essential for learning. There are multiple ways to incorporate social learning into development and training strategies. Social learning can be enabled through LMS features such as the ones available with Dream See Do. Social learning can also be implemented through internal knowledge bases, blogs, videos, or podcasts.

Social learning also plays a large part in encouraging and cultivating a learning culture at work. If employees can see and actively participate in the learning of each other, it encourages and motivates them to continue their own learning, which is a cyclical process.

Social learning can also be implemented through content lesson ratings, comments, sharing videos or playlists, and polls. This Harvard Business Review article covers a few of the strategies for shaping the culture of an online learning space to be socially supportive rather than isolating. Last but not least, gamification can be tied in with social learning through achievement rewards, leaderboards, progress tracking towards goals, and more.

Dream See Do is there to see you through all of the learning trends of 2023 and beyond. Partnering with Dream See Do means prioritizing your employees and choosing training methods to uplift them and encourage them to forge their own paths within your organization. Training empowers employees to apply for internal promotions and learn the skills necessary for the job, closing skill gaps and improving employee retention.

Create an entirely customizable learning experience for your employees with Dream See Do.