When timing is everything

“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule,
but to schedule your priorities.”
– Stephen Covey

Matching learning to the rhythm of your business

When 1st90 Co-founder and CEO Paul Middleton started his company 5 years ago, his priority was developing a platform for delivering learning in the flow of work. Inspired by Josh Bersin and other talent development leaders, he knew there had to be a better way to provide non-disruptive, on-the-job learning at scale.

Taking a cue from successful consumer mobile apps like HeadSpace, FitBit, and others, he and his team relied on the science of learning and habit to break down big behaviors into smaller, bite-sized learning combined with quick actions and repetition to help establish new behaviors with just 5-10 minutes of learning every day, They added a social component that enables members of the learning community to support each other in their learning journey.

Along the way, they also created award-winning learning paths, starting with typical learning needs for employees in transition, such as bringing new managers quickly up to speed, onboarding new employees, and pre-boarding new hires. Five years in, they’ve learned a lot about how people learn.

But they also realized something fundamental to what they could really do with the power of their platform. It was an aha! moment that dawned on them after years of development as their learning library of micro learning steps gradually expanded to cover more business needs.

While providing non-disruptive, engaging learning in the moment, they realized they could also develop custom, multi-step paths to match key calendar moments that occur in the rhythm of every business to both enable and accelerate business results. They call it learning in the flow of business. And they realized that they could provide learning for 10,000 people with about the same effort as 100 people, making their solutions affordably scalable.

Here are few other things they’ve learned about learning with 5 years of experience backed by their platform’s analytics:

• About 15 percent of learners are self-starters and don’t need structure to support them. They’re going to do and learn everything they need to on their own.
• Another 15 percent won’t do it at all. They just aren’t interested, and you cannot help them.
• The 60-70 percent of learners in the middle will benefit from the structure 1st90 brings. Unlike their self-starter peers, they become overwhelmed by the deluge of public learning already available but they will succeed when presented with brief daily learning that’s fresh, engaging, and relevant to their work.

Paul also offered these key tenets for learning in the flow of business to be successful:

• Focuses on skills required for business success
• Non-disruptive, integrated into the workday and workflows.
• Timely, business-critical for key calendar moments
• Personalized, choose what you need when you need it
• Leader-driven, embedded into business activities

Could your organization benefit by helping your people master their on-the-job skills when they need them most? Talk to your Advantage partner or contact us about bringing a 1st90-driven learning initiative to your organization that can be timed to the unique rhythm of your business.

One great thing for 09.19.23 – Watch the replay from our webinar today on Learning in the Flow of Business with our thought leader partners at 1st90. Susan Burnett, whose career spans decades as a learning leader at Gap, Deloitte, HP, and others, shares how she was able to change learning outcomes as Chief Learning Officer at Yahoo! – a task that can be accomplished much more easily today with 1st90.