The Four Es: Your Fast Lane to Continuous Learning

The road to building a continuous learning culture can be long and potentially filled with potholes if you don’t have an effective strategy in place. To navigate over these organizational potholes, L&D departments must keep pace with the speed of business and advancements in technology to offer solutions that truly fit today’s modern learner.

If they don’t, they will be merely patching holes rather than successfully paving the way for 21st-century learning. But how can learning professionals begin laying the foundation? In this article, we’ll examine the tactics and strategies that L&D teams should have in place to ensure their talent is ready and able to bring value to an organization.

Continuous Learning Is the Key

Learning is not an isolated, one-time event. Employees learn through a series of events, activities, and experiences. Defined, continuous learning means structuring resources, expectations, and learning culture in a way that encourages employees to learn continuously throughout their tenure with the organization.

Effective learning starts with truly understanding your employees’ capabilities and, especially, the specific ways they consume information. Effective, continuous learning revolves around a combination of several holistic approaches we call the Four Es: education, experience, exposure, and environment.

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The 4 Es of Continuous Learning

Education encompasses elements we often think of in the context of learning and development. These elements generally have a defined beginning and end, and can be tracked. PeopleFluent offers a rich catalog of formal and informal learning sessions with embedded analytics to help you stay compliant, make timely decisions, and track impact.

Experience includes elements that generally occur while employees are in the workplace, and which may include stretch assignments, job rotations, and special projects. Companies rely on learning management systems to ensure alignment with their overall talent strategy performance improvement and coaching/mentoring activities.

Exposure comprises learning elements that involve interaction and relationships. It helps employees to develop by building connections with other professionals and thought leaders. Our social, mobile and collaborative solutions encourage knowledge gathering and, more importantly, enterprise-wide sharing and engagement.

Environment covers the various tools, systems, and other infrastructure that employees use on the job to learn or support them in their work.

Recommended reading: ‘The 13 Must-Have Features of a Learning Management’

The Future of Learning and Development

As a leading provider of next-generation, innovative learning solutions, PeopleFluent also takes a holistic approach to continuous learning. We provide an integrated experience with features and functionality, such as formal and informal learning, microlearning, on-demand video learning, social, and mobile.

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Whether you're developing Millennials to acquire the skills needed to continue your operations, or transferring knowledge from Baby Boomers to younger generations, your organization needs a comprehensive learning solution to deliver and facilitate classroom learning, social learning, collaboration, mentor programs, and video-based learning. As a result, organizations can build a world-class workforce with the knowledge and skills to truly thrive in an ultra-competitive, high-speed marketplace.

In order to maintain a competitive edge with constant skill building, training, and knowledge sharing, companies must ensure that they’re creating a culture of learning that delivers maximum impact. However, for many organizations, getting on the fast lane to continuous learning can seem to be well above the speed limit of their capabilities.

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Editor’s Note: This blog was originally published in 2016 and has been updated with recent insights and information.