Corporate Learning Community With Social Learning: Dissecting the Inevitable Correlation

The altered working circumstances, which were mostly sparked by trainees’ inquiries, have elevated social learning to a huge extent. This essay will describe how L&D professionals may use social learning experiences to create a corporate learning community.

Workers in training and development frequently concentrate on moving past learning curricula to establish an organizational culture of learning. This frequently entails going above and beyond to provide materials and initiatives that contribute to making learning and progress a pleasurable and important aspect of people’s jobs. Despite the variety of methods to establish a robust learning culture, among the easiest ways is to achieve it by creating a learning community inside your company. Your company may foster an atmosphere where people acquire, appreciate, and actively participate in their advancement by utilizing learning.

Social Learning: What Is It?

Let us examine social learning’s definition and practical applications for businesses. According to the broad concept of social learning, people acquire new routines, concepts, and behaviors by imitating someone else’s activities. Social learning activities are a big part of how we study, particularly at the beginning of growth — i.e. understanding how to take the first steps, talk, and communicate in social environments.

The theory of social learning also maintains that knowledge can be acquired both through directed training and behavioral observations. Social learning has always been crucial for adults as well, even though it may appear more relevant for kids and young people. Adults pick up a lot of their behavior from watching and copying others, particularly when it pertains to communication.

Simply stated, even for grownups, social learning profoundly affects learning. This really is evident in numerous induction and initial hire skills training for professionals, where students frequently have the chance to follow people in their positions. Whilst businesses frequently use different types of social learning during induction, they frequently neglect to extend the very same social instructional strategies to larger, company-wide training initiatives. Many companies lose out on chances to involve and train their personnel by doing this.

Why Do Organizations Not Take Advantage of Social Learning?

So, why are corporations not using widespread social learning when it is such a potent instructional strategy? The majority of the time, it is just too much to handle. A mix of active and synchronized aspects is needed for socialized learning. Instead of using sophisticated and efficient training courses, many firms opt to use simple and effective ones. Workers must engage with each other frequently and with an intention of educating themselves, which may be challenging to plan for and administer. Additionally, socially driven learning courses often take longer than their equivalents, which might be a barrier.

Corporate Social Learning’s Advantages

Thankfully, social learning frequently has more good effects than negative ones. In addition to offering a more sensible approach to learning, observational interaction is typically more effective and long-lasting than conventional learning techniques. Additionally, staff members frequently have more in-depth business expertise and may make use of and enhance social learning’s naturally collaborative nature. The ability of social learning to assist your business in developing a supportive classroom community and culture may be its most significant benefit.

Among the finest methods to reshape conventional one-and-done development programs and integrate knowledge into the workflow is through social cognition. Your company can establish an education and growth mindset which transcends past click-through boot camps by developing learning programs where colleagues can share experiences and knowledge and deal with difficulties collectively.

Now that you understand the basic fundamentals of learning in social groups, let us examine what learning communities are and how you can enhance them via social elements.

How Does Training Take Place in a Business Learning Community?

A corporate learning community is formed when like-minded employees from various departments come together to establish learning groups and explore the concept of peer tutoring. The social theory of behavior and academics, which claims that employees who are a component of a learning cycle can gain new intellectual knowledge and develop new behaviors by seeing and copying other people from the community, is the theoretical foundation for the concept of creating such groups.

This learning is more efficient than formal education in a class or other settings. When executed properly, these groups aid in fostering a corporate training environment that encourages business L&D goals and promotes knowledge exchange throughout the firm.

Why Should L&D Teams Create a Corporate Learning Community?

There is decreased opportunity and time for remote employees to learn via conventional training techniques under the workplace paradigm shift — following the COVID-19 pandemic. Workplaces are much more blended than before, with a greater percentage of employees choosing workplace flexibility. Both types of learners need a deep learning approach that differs from the conventional distant learning strategy to expand their educational chances. A corporate learning community assists in connecting the two categories and overcoming such gaps.

Cooperation and communication are more difficult in a blended office as a large number of workers are cut off from their colleagues and peers. Inside a hybrid workplace, training loops promote cooperative learning. More significantly, learning via social networks encourages information exchange among blended workers since it brings people together for the purpose of transferring knowledge.

How Does a Corporate Learning Community Drive Employee Development?

Establishing your own corporate learning community is a fantastic strategy for maximizing training at a mass level.

L&D may then back off and serve a supplementary role rather than controlling how, where, and when learning takes place by empowering people to take responsibility for their own education. Employees exhibit a more varied set of abilities via elite networks in the blended work workplace of today, wherein constant learning is essential.

Additionally, learning communities promote the development of member-driven work groups and promote improved user and facilitator interaction, mentoring, and evaluation. This is inclusive of training managers, supervisors, instructors, L&D experts, and facilitators.  Single community participants are more accountable for adhering to their pledged instructional objectives through communal, peer-group reinforcement and prompts.

Why Is Social Learning Important in the Development of a Learning Community?

Merely 10% of learning occurs via formal training, in accordance with the 70/20/10 Framework for Training and Development, while 90% occurs through observation of others. It means that social learning is an essential tool for both trainees and businesses in the modern distant workplace environment. According to a blended learner, a strong corporate social networking circle enables 90% of the workers to participate in worthwhile work-related educational activities. From a business perspective, collective learning may bring together remote, disinterested learners, support distant trainees in organizing themselves, and promote class participation to meet a wide range of educational goals.

How Can Social Learning Be Used to Create a Learning Community?

It is obvious that the mixed working paradigm will continue to stick because 83% of participants in an Accenture study on the workplace of the future acknowledged that working remotely is a current reality. But according to a Forrester Consulting report on employee satisfaction, only 50% of those polled think that because of this innovative work structure, employees have access to the training, mentoring, and training programs they need to advance and flourish in their positions.

It is obvious that L&D professionals are yet to master the use of social learning. But social learning is more important than ever in the hybrid workplace of today because it is far simpler for distant employees to attend a web-based group learning session than it is to arrange face-to-face training workshops. A corporate learning community enhances entire educational experiences and staff satisfaction in the blended work environment by providing broad-based education and training possibilities to each and every employee, regardless of whether they’re in the workplace or working remotely.

Which Social Learning Techniques Can You Employ to Create an Organizational Learning Community?

A decent social learning method integrates the following techniques with a broad range of social media components, such as host-driven discussion forums, blogs, webinars, YouTube clips, content sharing, etc.

• To handle user questions and provide help more effectively, choose how to organize the community into working groups, topics, and departments.
• Promote conversations, exchanges, perspectives, and accomplishments among participants to foster encounters and involvement.
• Promote your community and link students. Encourage employees to take part in your company’s learning community.
• To pique everybody’s interest, carefully select your educational materials, especially microlearning and mLearning materials.
• Use gamification to infuse fun, foster community competitiveness, and focus on certain learning objectives. The excitement is increased via certificates, awards, contests, and scoreboards.
• Utilize user-generated content (UGC) — the foundation of social learning that occurs when individuals in a community assist fellow members in studying.

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Corporate Learning Community as an Example

When creating your own corporate learning community, L&D executives must aim to foster a sense of involvement, collaboration, and openness. Below  are three illustrations of how to create a vibrant community:

Depiction

It could be a cool concept to gather SMEs from every group of stakeholders and provide authority to the group on a broad range of topics, including IT, strategy and processes, how and why to guides, etc., if the goal is to create an organization-wide congregation to nurture discovering a new LMS, payroll, billing, or HRM application.

Involvement

A learning community’s capacity for success depends on how widely its members participate. Additionally, an advocate for that group must be involved to promote involvement in social training loops. This position is different from SMEs, and s/he should serve as the team’s principal cheerleader and motivator. A suitable illustration might be a facilitator position for a group that encourages community members to get involved more in the firm’s health and wellness effort.

Acknowledgment

Being social beings, people all yearn for approval and recognition for the important contributions we make. Giving people in a corporate learning community online credentials that show interpersonal appreciation for reaching specific benchmarks, such as the quickest module finishers, highest grade on a task, no manufacturing flaws, best management improvement advice, the month’s best employee, etc., is one way to show people you care about them.

An Illustration

Encouraging a learning community to actively participate in the company’s Workplace Health Week is an illustration of how to combine these tactics.

Advertise the event by posting fliers, banners, photos, and articles. The designated health administrators from the business’s administrative and HR operational departments are to act as SMEs for pertinent health circumstances.

Next, choose an advocate to use instant messaging, online forums, and group chats to motivate employees to engage with and take part in the activity.

Lastly, encourage more social learning engagement by giving out prizes and perks so that workers can be commended by their coworkers for their accomplishments.

Conclusion

Any corporate learning community could aid in bridging the divide that exists between a diverse group of professional trainees in today’s mixed workplace environment.

To be successful, these communities must find the correct representatives, encourage widespread involvement, and generate a sense of excitement and involvement. Internet forums, gamification, resource moderation, user-generated content, mobile learning, and microlearning are a few methods that can be used to accomplish this.

We believe the techniques outlined in this article give you the necessary pointers to assist L&D professionals in embracing social learning experiences as a workable learning paradigm. In the interim, please get in touch with us or post a reply below should you have anything particular to be addressed.

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