“I can’t wait to spend the next three hours completing a required training course” – said no one ever.

Training doesn’t have to be boring. And it certainly doesn’t have to be limited to on-boarding and compliance mandates. But often it’s painfully boring and only used to complete required courses. Ethics and sexual harassment sessions sound familiar?

L&D user adoption is an ongoing issue. In fact, 67% of organizations struggle with learning technology user adoption.¹

For L&D departments, this issue is incredibly frustrating. You’ve done the due diligence to select the perfect technology to meet the needs of your teams. You know learning can be hip and cool. You’ve put a lot of time into building out just the right content.

So why isn’t anyone using your learning management system?

Here are the cold hard facts:

• 88% of employees don’t have time (or make the time) to engage with L&D offerings,
• 64% of managers don’t encourage, enable or follow up with L&D, and
• 64% of people are not aware of what is available in their LMS.²

Yikes! There are a lot of factors at play, but the issue seems to be less of a learning problem and more of a marketing problem.

Here are a 5 ways to take a page out of marketing’s book and jazz up your L&D strategy: 

• Make it known. Between emails, texting and push notifications, the workforce is distracted. Sending one-off L&D email updates isn’t going to get people to engage. Make the LMS easily accessible and partner with someone on your marketing team to develop a sophisticated communication strategy that includes internal email updates and social sharing plans. Plus – if it isn’t already – make sure your LMS is available in your organization’s intranet.
• Make it valuable. Fill your LMS with fresh, interesting content that satisfies the needs of a diverse audience. Think about featuring suggested or trending courses on the homepage. Get creative! Maybe even offer free video content like Ted Talks (people really dig those!). Remember, the workforce is watching and engaging with learning content throughout the day, they’re just not doing it in your LMS. You can put an end to that!
• Make it short. People don’t have a lot of time on their hands. According to Bersin, most learners won’t watch videos for longer than 4 minutes. Think about offering snippets of content, rather than long, drawn out videos. Encourage people to take a 15 minute breaks, log into the LMS and watch a short video.
• Make it a game. Friendly competition never hurt anyone! Adding some gamification to your learning content results in higher usage and engagement. Some options include badges and leadership boards that allow people to showcase their completed activities and advancement. You could even offer a small prize at the end of each month to the learners with the highest usage levels!
• Make it shine. Showcase the results of your learners! Profile people within your organization that are reaping the rewards of investing in ongoing learning and training. Recognition pays off in a big way, and it’s important to not just make your LMS shine, but your users shine too!

Looking for more insight?

Those are just a few ways to start thinking out of the box! If you want more insight, join Meridian and Fistful of Talent during the next  L&D Hangout series, What L&D can Learn from Marketing, on April 21, 2015 at 2:00 p.m. ET. And check out our brand new whitepaper, Why Learning and Marketing Should be BFFs.

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¹ Towards Maturity “Reinvigorating-Compliance-Training,” 2013
² Bersin, ” The Real Challenge with Learner Engagement: L&D Has a Marketing Problem,” 2015