Modern Corporate Learning: Why e-learning is becoming essential for companies

Corporate learning is a method of providing employees with consistent and specific training and development in a company environment. In addition to the mandatory topics, it is also important to cover modern corporate topics such as sustainability, diversity, crisis and change management. This is what makes a company a Modern Company.

In this article, we look at the following questions and topics:

• What does Corporate Learning mean?
• What is corporate learning needed for?
• Why is digital learning important?
• What are the advantages of e-learning?
• What topics do users and companies want in corporate learning?
• How is corporate learning positively accepted by the workforce?
• Edutainment as a guarantee for success

The numbers speak for themselves. In 2019, more than 7.4 million people in the workforce participated in continuing vocational training, reports the statistics portal Statista.com. That is significantly more than 15 percent of all German employees. The trend is upward: In today's knowledge society, it is important that employees are always up to date on the topics that are important to them. Statista.com also states: "A look at participation in continuing education in Germany shows that educational offerings in this area have enjoyed growing popularity in recent years. For example, according to the AES reporting system (Adult Education Survey), participation in continuing education was 60 percent in 2020, ten percentage points higher two years earlier. In most cases, employed individuals participate in continuing education offerings (87 percent in 2020)."

This is why the concept of "corporate learning" is coming into focus. This is about an organization's ability to acquire, apply and share knowledge in order to explore new solutions and use them to improve efficiency and competitive advantage. While learning itself is a term companies use for their training department, corporate learning encompasses a much broader understanding that refers to a company-wide learning culture in which both the company and its employees are constantly learning and adapting. Or, to put it another way, corporate learning is a method of training, educating and developing employees within the company in a consistent, specific and strategic manner. As a core topic, the focus here is on knowledge transfer and knowledge exchange among employees.

Corporate learning is closely related to the principle of lifelong learning. According to the European Union's definition, lifelong learning encompasses "all learning throughout life that serves to improve knowledge, qualifications and competencies and takes place within the framework of a personal, civic, social, or employment-related perspective". Today, it is not only taken for granted that companies place importance on the continuous training of their employees in order to maintain employability at all times.

A survey conducted in 2016 and 2017, for example, found that from an employer's perspective, education programs have an impact on achieving business goals, including lower turnover and higher customer satisfaction, employee engagement, productivity and profits. Since the half-life of professional expertise is about five years, it is a growth motive for employees to keep developing and in this way secure esteem, recognition and prestige. Knowledge, skills and behavior change through targeted in-house training measures and thus represent a transformational cycle in the sense of professional competence, social competence, methodological competence and self-competence.

While blended learning as a didactic concept combines online and classroom components of instruction, e-learning is understood as the support of teaching and learning processes exclusively through digital media or tools. The advantage of e-learning is that employees can take advantage of these training opportunities without any hurdles. They are independent of time and space, and there is no threshold due to fear or shame to deal with certain topics. In order to make the e-learning offerings permanently accessible, it makes sense to build and maintain digital knowledge libraries. The pandemic has shown how quickly situations change from one day to the next. This also includes the immediate, decentralized availability of knowledge in the company. E-learning offers all of this!

The range of issues is wide. On the one hand, companies must ensure that employees fulfill their legal obligations, for example in the areas of compliance, occupational safety and health protection. On the other hand, the focus is on topics that companies should address with the claim of being a "Modern Company". These include, above all, future-oriented issues relating to awareness, cyber security, communication, sustainability, cross-cultural and diversity management. Crisis and change management are also part of this. These are all topics in professional development that "Modern Companies" need. After all, companies cannot operate successfully without competence in these areas, and employees expect to be able to receive targeted training in these sectors anyway. Since new topics can arise quickly, it is necessary to react quickly without sacrificing quality. This is what Security Island (www.security-island.com) stands for as an e-learning library. Security Island provides all topics in professional development, so that companies can meet their claim to be a "Modern Company".

Digital education in the company can only work if employees accept and positively embrace the corporate learning approach. Elements such as emotionality, interactivity of the courses, recognition of content relevance, and inspiring content are important for this, and it is also important to address learners with the right topics and professional and attractive storytelling. This facilitates access across all hierarchical levels and ensures that the content is truly understood and anchored. The focus is on high-quality audiovisual preparation and practical, interactive entertainment with didactic appeal. Digital corporate learning must therefore be an experience with meaning in relation to everyday corporate and personal life and meet current media standards, for example through the use of videos and streaming. This can also improve the reputation of e-learning.

Speaking of streaming: Education in 2022 is always also entertainment, i.e. education through entertainment - edutainment is the keyword. Professional and attractive storytelling is therefore important for conveying learning content. Storytelling is a narrative method used to pass on explicit, but above all implicit, knowledge in the form of leitmotifs, symbols, metaphors or other rhetorical devices. Storytelling facilitates access for employees across all hierarchical levels and ensures that the content is truly understood and anchored. To achieve this, storytelling relies on a high emotional component through lively, integrative language, practical relevance and multimedia content. Through the digital, narrative-entertaining learning consumption and highly innovative topics, the demands and needs of the employees of the working worlds are thus addressed and picked up at an early stage. In essence, it is about making current and relevant topics easily and quickly accessible. This reduces hurdles and increases awareness and knowledge transfer.

This means that the focus should always be on high-quality audiovisual processing and practical, interactive entertainment with a didactic approach. The Security Island e-learning library is therefore a compendium of training films on all aspects of mandatory training and all topics of the Modern Company. The video-based and interactive e-library sharpens the senses of the users, builds mindfulness and trains the really important topics of an innovative organization. The imparted knowledge is tested again by a quiz to create a higher sustainability and anchoring. Those who immerse themselves in the modules are not just lectured one-sidedly - individual cooperation is required here. This additionally increases the anchoring of corporate learning concepts.

Looking ahead to the new year 2023, there are further challenges for corporate learning. The shortage of skilled workers and the difficulties in personnel management, employer branding and recruiting will continue to increase. It is therefore crucial for companies to take the right measures in personnel development. This includes digital learning in the company, which must be aligned with the real needs of the employees and the newly developing topics for the best possible success. Then a company really becomes a Modern Company through digital learning.