Even before the pandemic, it was thought that the average adult made about 35,000 decisions a day. How the consensus landed on this number remains unclear, but based on my own experience of child care concerns, face mask concerns and infection rate concerns, it feels like that number has skyrocketed to 70,000 daily decisions. While many of these choices are made on “autopilot,” like deciding when to eat or sleep, there are still a vast number that require focus and time. There are instances, however, when we are so overwhelmed by having to make so many decisions, commonly known as decision fatigue, that many of us engage in decision avoidance. By simply closing the app, hitting the cancel button or clicking out of the email, we give ourselves an out from making a decision and continue on our merry — albeit procrastinating — way.
But some decisions, particularly when it comes to furthering one’s development and career, shouldn’t be put off in a bout of frustration. Unlike the never-ending list of Netflix content users have to exasperatedly scroll through (a known issue the company has tried to solve), content from learning and academic organizations shouldn’t be a stream of endless options. True, the proliferation and high quality of content creation tools, platforms and learning content libraries have been a boon to these learning organizations because they drive down costs and drive up access. But they’ve also resulted in an overwhelming number of choices for learners. Not only do they have to navigate a huge volume of choices in the learning space across the ecosystem, but they also have to decide when is the best time to consume such content. For many, the decision avoidance that results from this comes at the price of their own careers and upskilling.
To overcome this obstacle, learning teams must curate an experience that clearly demonstrates how these upskilling programs tie into opportunities for economic and internal career mobility at the company. At the same time, learning teams must understand why learners are coming to these platforms and why they’re engaging in the types of options and context they are selecting. By tackling these two questions, only then can learners make sense of their choices and succeed within these programs.
Why they come
At Guild, we gather data on the learners who access our platform from companies including Walmart, Chipotle, Disney, Target, Waste Management and Lowe’s to create better experiences. The data consistently tells us that learners are looking for economic mobility and opportunity. In a recent study with more than 600 participants, we found that 83 percent of respondents indicated “career advancement” as a driving motivation for using our talent development programs. Fortunately, approximately half of those learners are clear from the beginning of their journey that they want their mobility to happen internally with their current employer, and many are considering role transitions or pivots. We also see that just over a third of learners are motivated by a general belief that having a degree or certificate will open up future opportunities.
The war for talent is being waged by nearly every employer across the country. Knowing that your employees are seeking career advancement and then seriously investing in their objectives is an enormous lever in retaining the good talent you have and attracting the talent you don’t yet have by establishing an external brand around being an employer of choice.
To keep learners interested, however, one school of thought suggests employers provide a robust catalog for their education and upskilling programs. But in my experience, I have seen and continue to see metrics that reflect something altogether different. Back when I worked with the learning design team at Capital One, I compared our leading learning content providers at the time. I ran the numbers on our existing partners and found that while we were paying for access for 10,000 users, fewer than 1,000 had ever logged in, and most of the activity came from a small set of power users.
In a more recent analysis of one of Guild’s partners, we looked at IT training catalogs from another content provider and saw that a small audience of 70 users were generating half of content consumption, and almost all of the consumption was from workers upskilling from their current roles. The catalog did not address the large volume of users that were actually interested in reskilling into areas that were of highest demand for their employer.
In the end, while some business partners and even learners themselves believe that what they need are more choices that encompass a broad range of specialties, having that wide of a latitude can actually be paralyzing. As a result, users will likely exit the platform and never pick anything at all. Instead, it’s better to offer more refined options that are specifically suited to the desires and career goals of the learners.
The context they seek
When a team at Guild asked learners how many choices they prefer when navigating their talent development programs related to their areas of interest, half of all respondents said they prefer three to five options, with about a quarter desiring two options and 15 percent desiring only one option. Learners reported that 3-5 options provide “enough room for comparison,” but aren’t “overwhelming or intimidating.” In addition, three-quarters of learners reported they get overwhelmed with too many options. When learners find a curated catalog, they’re also more likely to believe that those programs serve as a “pathway to promotion” since they’ve been vetted by their employers.
When evaluating a particular program, learners are focused on the program’s format, flexibility and projected time to completion. Because of this, the more work that learning teams can do to surface that data on search results or catalog pages for the purpose of comparison, the easier it becomes for learners to go from “maybe” to “let’s do it.”
If your organization is considering using recommendations to help learners navigate their options, keep in mind that not all recommendations are made equal. When running a test in a user lab a few years ago, I compared recommendations from four sources: the learning system, the learning team, the person’s manager or teammate, and an executive from their line of business. Overwhelmingly, learners immediately took the recommendations from their manager or teammate. This is not unlike social media apps that use the same method to recommend things to us that those we follow have already liked. After their own team members, learners showed preference to their business executives. At the bottom of the recommendation list was, inevitably, the learning system itself or the learning team. When asked why, the learners admonished us with some version of the same refrain: “What do they know about me?”
CLOs, directors of learning experience and learning technology leaders alike should be eager to understand what’s happening with your learners as they interact with your platforms and content. It’s time to narrow the options to a few high-quality selections and put the right level of context in front of learners to help drive quick and impactful decisions about the opportunities to upskill and advance their careers.
