A Digital Academy Versus a Learning and Development Officer
When you’re looking to expand the range of training opportunities available to your people, you might consider hiring an additional Learning and Development Officer. And whilst there are good reasons for using your internal team members to deliver training, it’s worth considering a digital academy, and the role this could play.
Here’s the compelling case for a digital learning academy and how you could benefit.
Posted 2 September 2022
Improving Performance
As you’ll know, there are many positives to building a high-performing team – everyone working towards shared goals, understanding how they fit into the bigger picture, and always learning and growing in support of personal and organisational growth - to mention only a few.
Because of this thirst for learning, those with high-performing teams often experience above average demand for L&D opportunities. As you support your people in this way, you may need some additional resources in the workplace and believe that hiring a Learning and Development Officer will free up resources and give you control over when and how your learning and development materials are developed and delivered.
Making Best Use of Resources
Whilst this can be true, often to make best use of resources in the workplace it makes sense to consider how a digital academy could support your L&D efforts. And here’s why.
By using a digital academy, you can:
- improve communications and knowledge sharing;
- align knowledge, skills, and competencies with business strategies;
- assess, advance and reward employee knowledge and skills; and
- improve operational efficiency and performance.
Available when needed
Opportunities for learning via your digital academy will be available 24 hours a day from the learning management system (LMS) component of your digital academy, enabling you to deliver training to your learners at any time, no matter where they are. If you don’t already have a LMS, or if you’re considering a change, eNetLearn could be a good fit for you.
Ready-made or Bespoke Content
In terms of your training content, you can add some off-the-shelf, ready-made eLearning content to your LMS and make this available to you learners instantly – no matter where they are. And in many cases, your provider can help to curate this for you, so that your workforce will get the most benefit.
Of course, if your needs are a little more specific, Bespoke eLearning, might suit you better. Partnering with an eLearning provider will give you access to all of the resources you’ll need to go from concept to delivery. This may include input from instructional designers, graphic designers, copywriters etc. who will all work together to make sure that the learning meets the needs of your learners and enabling you to deliver bespoke content in a consistent way across your entire organisation.
Streamline your assessments
You can also add a digital assessment (eAssessment) component to your digital academy, such as eNetAssess, to support, formative, summative and observational assessments. This will give you flexibility over your assessment delivery locations and times, as well as freeing up resources such as the admin burden and complexity of paper-based examinations.
When used as part of your digital academy, you’ll be able to streamline your assessment preparation, marking and moderating, as well as reducing the time it takes to get the results to your learners.
Recognise and Reward Learning and Achievement
And since continuous talent development is fundamental to keeping people resilient, engaged, and prepared for the future, adding a digital badge component to your digital academy, will enable you to recognise and reward learning and achievement. By doing this you can help keep your team engaged and motivated.
Capacity building
You can also use your digital academy as part of your capacity building efforts, since this enables you to free up resources within your workplace, whilst still realising the benefits of upskilling your people exactly when needed.
See the big picture
Other benefits of the digital academy approach include being able to easily track the activity of your learners and report on this data, so you can see the full picture of learning and development across your organisation.
Outsourcing your digital academy
Choosing to work with a digital learning and assessment specialist will give you access to the expertise you need to make your digital academy vision a reality. A good partner should quickly become a natural extension of your team, so do check that your proposed digital learning partner shares your values, supports your culture and is generally a good fit for your organisation.
