Building a Learning Culture - Step 3: Developing Your Learning Brand
Intro | Step 1 | Step 2 | Step 3 | Step 4 | Step 5
We’ve reached Step 3 in our five-step process of building your learning culture: developing your learning brand. Your brand is all about perception. Each employee has their own experiences with the courses they take, with your learning platforms, with the messages you send — all of these individual perceptions comprise your brand. A strong learning brand helps us have much more impact in our organization. It helps us communicate the important work we’re doing to improve performance and results, and it draws learners to proactively engage with our offerings.
And what do employees at your organization currently think and feel about learning? If you’re not sure, there are a few things you can do to find out. Send out a survey. Invite a few employees to participate in a focus group. You can also add a couple of learning-related questions to the employee engagement survey. It’s important to understand your current state so you know where the opportunities are. This also helps you set targets for improvement.
So how do you take charge of your learning brand? Some people hear branding and think logos and taglines and mascots. We think of your learning brand as the practical ways you can influence people’s perceptions of learning every single day. Here are a few ideas to get your team started with this important work.
1. Consider what you want employees to feel about learning.
What is the overarching message you want to convey — and what is the feeling you want employees to have about learning? A brand improvement project is a great team activity. You can start by having each team member interview a couple of employees to learn about their needs. Share your findings as a team and use these thoughts as inspiration as you brainstorm together about your messaging and strategy. Conduct focus groups to see if your messaging is resonating. Having a strong core identity and unified message is the foundation of every successful brand.
2. Audit the learning messages sent in your organization.
To do this right, you’ll need to review everything learning-related — including the automated messages sent from your LMS. These are all part of your overall brand — you have to think about them from the perspective of your learners. What feeling does each message evoke? This is your most frequent contact with your learners, so you want the feeling to be positive. Consider the changes you can make to improve the tone and the content. Develop a consistent voice as a learning organization.
3. Share the work you’re doing.
In our experience, learning professionals are very passionate about what they do and don’t like to be in the spotlight, but sharing your progress is an important part of building your brand! Tell the story of the new learning programs and courses that you launch. Explain the business goals each program is supporting and the performance improvement you’re seeing as a result. Work with your communications team to identify different channels and venues for sharing these stories. Your goal is to build confidence among employees and their managers in the learning experiences available to them and also encourage them to seek more development.
As you set out to build your learning brand, realize that companies everywhere are constantly measuring customer perceptions and always working to build their brand with their customers. They have entire teams dedicated to brand-building! It’s definitely a long game, so we encourage you to set long-term goals, work together as a team, and get creative about communicating the power of learning to your organization.