There are many online resources explaining what a learning culture is, but few provide practices companies can employ to develop their learning culture. Before determining resources to support learning projects, it's essential to create vision for what learning looks like at company.  How can your sales representatives engage with clients, while learning? How can teachers engage learning as they work with learners? How can healthcare providers engage learning, while working with patients? It is important to define what that looks like before determining how to build it.

Consider this:

A healthcare provider that needs to advise a patient on a new blood pressure medication. In a private conference, the medical provider brings up a 3 minute eLearning module on a medications for managing blood pressure. Using a large computer monitor, the provider displays and works through the course with the patient to determine the best solution. The provider office has contracted with pharmaceutical sales representatives to provide the latest in blood pressure medication, and the course both informs the doctor and the patient. The eLearning course uses a branching feature to help align the patient's ailments and body type with the best solution.

This eLearning course is worth .25 CPE, so the time spent working through the course with the patient - 5 minutes max - also awarded the provider professional development credits. This is what a learning culture looks like!

The first step is to clarify the vision for your company's learning culture. If you are developing onboarding plans, let's determine how learning fits into the work trainers complete to onboard, and the new employee onboarding experience. Let's talk about how to grant new customer service representatives access to your library of resources (job aids, interactive manuals, eLearning) during onboarding, so they get experience using them to perform.

Then, let's evaluate your current learning resources (learning specialists, learning objects) to determine how they fit into your new vision. From our analysis work, we can identify expectations for learning projects.

Although technological tools are being created faster than many corporations can acclimate and use them, the goal should not be to keep up with trends. The goal should be to identify what tools are needed and seek solutions to business needs based on the latest technological tools. The business objective leads the tool.

Let's talk about how your company determines the best tools to use, how new tools are onboarded, and how involved your employees are with tool selections. Your employees should report that the tools you've provided both make them more efficient and push them to learning new ways of doing business.