Titan Learning
Posted on 5th July 2023 at 13:48
Linking learning content to commercial performance!
What is Titan Learning?
From an IT perspective, it’s a SAAS product that comes with the advantage of a mobile application to support user engagement.
From a business perspective, it’s a business performance learning platform that enables you to see the commercial impact of your training offer.
From Haynes Oliver’s perspective, it’s 3 years of work bringing to life the idea that you can have your cake and eat it!
So, in simple terms Titan Learning gives a business the opportunity to link their learning content directly to their commercial performance and while this sounds straight forward, the thinking and technology behind it are significant…but we would say that!
Fundamentally Titan Learning enables a business to link learning content attached to a competency directly to one or more Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
By working in this way, Titan Learning lets the commercial performance set the initial learning priorities for the training on offer. Secondary to the commercial performance is the machine learning that offers suggestions for learning content based on peer activity and evaluation scores.
With flexibility in the uploading of data, its API compatibility allows for integration with other performance platforms reducing the administration burden. Once the performance parameters are set, the algorithm updates individuals learning priorities at pre-defined intervals and where there are any changes to previous priorities, a push notification is sent to the mobile application informing the individual(s) linked to the specific competency what they now need to address, ensuring that employee knowledge is always kept up to date and inline with the business requirements.
So why does Titan Learning exist?
This is less simple to answer, but here goes!
Speed to Competence – for many years, employee ‘learning paths’ have been created as a result of a Training Needs Analysis (TNA) allowing the individual to see what their current knowledge gaps are while laying the path to final competency. Due to changes in most job roles over the past 15 years the learning paths have become increasingly complex, often due to reductions in staffing levels without the reduction in work activity. By the nature of the increase in job role complexity, the volume of required knowledge has also grown and subsequently the length of time to achieve competence has increased. Combining this with the well known changes in how younger generations prefer to work and how quickly they look to change their job roles, these elongated learning paths are no longer fit for the modern workplace!
Training Engagement – whether employee or employer, engagement can be a significant challenge. For some time now, it has been the focus for many companies to introduce technology that supports concepts like ‘learning on demand’, ‘micro learning’ and ‘blended learning’ but most of these continue to offer the learning in a linear learning path. Much focus is placed on the quality of the learning content and delivery methodologies to increase the engagement of the delegate but when it comes to the engagement of the employer, it tends to be quite draconian. Penalties are placed on businesses that fail to send people on training, usually for late cancellation of courses without any understanding of the reasons that this may happen.
Training levies are introduced so that companies are paying for training whether they use it or not. In franchised environments, it is often part of the franchise agreement to train your people and if you don’t achieve certain targets, you can be penalised through the franchise standards. The only mildly helpful method that I have experienced is to invite the employer to attend the training course themselves so they can see the benefit, but even this has a negative impact due to employers’ time out of the business!
Return on Investment – I’m sure that some people reading this will have spent time with their head in their hands trying to figure a way of calculating ROI and I’m equally confident that in the main they will have had limited success. If you’re a training provider trying to retro fit an ROI model to existing training content then I feel your pain as this is a flawed exercise that requires disproportionate amounts of effort for the given output, especially if you’re using models like Kirkpatrick as this needs ‘baking in’ to the design of the learning from the outset! I also believe that there is an issue with the vocabulary used - this is an issue for every industry! We can often get lost in our own challenges and forget who we are communicating with; let’s not forget that a large proportion of the people making the decision on whether individuals attend planned training are operational managers who, while intellectually understand the value of
training, do not understand a lot of the language used around why they should train their people (ROI). In simple terms, if you’re an operational manager whose personal performance is measured monthly and ‘losing’ your people for 2 days of training while you’re tracking behind your month end target will compound the current underperformance, what is your decision going to be? Send them anyway and risk your own personal performance/reputation or take a hit on the penalty applied to your business?
So, what are the benefits of Titan Learning?
While there are many benefits, in light of what we have talked about so far the key ones for today are:
• Knowing your training offer is directly impacting your commercial performance, giving you an understandable ROI
• Letting your commercial performance dictate your people’s training priorities, letting competency be steered by that performance
• Allowing your people to have access to their training through mobile technology, supporting engagement
• Keeping your people’s knowledge as current as possible by avoiding linear learning paths
In summary
If you have an established training offer with an extensive portfolio of learning that is delivered through traditional methods and the level of investment to date dictates that you keep doing what you’ve always done, then Titan Learning is unlikely to be for you.
If, however you are a progressive thinking organisation that accepts your training offer could do much more for you and following the crowd isn’t how you want to progress then Titan Learning could just be what you’re looking for to enable the next level of learning impact on your business performance!
If you are interested in finding out more about Titan Learning and would like to see a demo in action, please message us at contact@titanlearning.co.uk
Dave Bownes
Director,
Haynes Oliver Limited
Share this post: