Most of us are familiar with the tropes of dating, especially when it’s not going well. The conversation that doesn’t flow well, the overly planned dinner, or big gestures that feel more performative than genuine. In short, it’s the sense that someone is pushing for a connection or trust before it’s earned.
Learners know when the experience isn’t aligned with their needs. It shows up when learning is mandatory and presented without context, when it’s generic, or just clearly designed without them in mind.
And we know, no one falls in love because they’re told to. And no one engages with learning because they’re required to. The job of L&D includes understanding the learner and building the experience around their reality: attention, like attraction, can’t be forced.
Bad dates can often follow a pattern: one person’s talking, the other person’s attention is divided between listening and wondering when it will end.
Learning can fail in the same way. Regardless of the time and resources invested in creating programs and content, success isn’t a guarantee unless these efforts are centered around the learner. Learners, of course, don’t care how many hours went into the development of a module. They’re asking a simple question: does this matter to me?
If a learner is asked to complete an experience that doesn’t connect with their role, their challenges, or their priorities, their engagement with the learning will suffer. This is why starting from the perspective of a needs analysis, understanding the learners’ needs, the context and the desired performance outcome, is a critical step in the process. When you build learning that the learner can immediately connect with their own interests, you create the environment for engagement. Learner curiosity follows clarity of purpose.
When learning reflects how the learner’s work actually happens, they can feel it. Maybe not in their fingers and in their toes (as the old Troggs song might imply) but in their gut. Learning content that’s designed generically and doesn’t click with the learner is not likely to connect with the learner as much as learning that reflects how their work actually happens.
We are in an era when personalization of the learner experience is potentially transformative. Between the tools, which can support highly responsive branching and AI-enabled content curation, and the learning designer’s understanding that’s focused on relevance and context, we can and should create learning that’s personalized. When learning feels personal, the learner’s attention will feel natural.
Even the right content at the wrong time won’t work, just as a thoughtful romantic gesture at an inopportune moment may fall on its face.
Learners don’t want to reject learning, but will reject learning that feels like an interruption or is simply “one thing too many” on their plate. By understanding your learners’ work demands and building a close and collaborative relationship with leadership, you can influence the architecture for learning that happens before the first module or class. Even the perfect content, delivered out of context, can feel like an interruption.
Creating the environment for delivery and engagement is important. This can be realized through on-demand learning that’s delivered as a performance support or otherwise in the flow of work, which will feel supportive rather than disruptive. Or at the other end of the delivery spectrum, it can be a multiple day off-site classroom experience, provided your learners have been supported by their management so that they feel they can take the time to focus on the experience rather than being pulled back to their job.
Timing turns good intentions into value.
The best relationships aren’t built only on grand gestures. They grow through listening, responding, adapting, and collaborating. Your learner relationships follow similar steps.
This means being sure your programs evolve. That you collect relevant feedback and take it seriously. And when content is current to the roles and reality the learners interact with on the job daily.
By keeping your learning experiences and content current and relevant, you can grow your relationship with the learners. It’s a foundational brick on the way to building trust and a learning culture, where learners look at the value they gain from learning, not just take it as an obligation.
Learners resist less. They learn to embrace the opportunities they’re given through learning. And they’re more willing to come back.
And that’s perhaps the most basic advice for learning leaders, on Valentine’s Day or all year: when learning is designed with care, delivered with intention and in the conditions that enable it, learner’s don’t feel the ick. They might even fall head over heels for it.
