Learning Curation as an Employee Retention Tool

It’s Thursday night. You’ve had a long week and you’re looking forward to a relaxing evening. You sit down on the couch, pop open a Very Popular Streaming Platform, and start looking. 

Fifteen-second trailer after 15-second trailer goes by, but the promise of something better keeps you looking. Before you know it, 40 minutes have passed, you’re out of steam and out of time. Guess it’s another rerun of The Office or Gilmore Girls. 

This very real example applies beyond streaming content. It also applies to learning. Many companies offer their employees a huge swath of learning options, get them logged in and say, “good luck.” Employees get overwhelmed with choice and end up choosing nothing (admittedly, the “watching reruns instead” part of the analogy falls flat here). 

The key to increasing learning uptake is to curate it and make it personalized for each employee. And through that learning, you can boost your employee retention. 

Learning as a Retention Tool 

It’s human nature to want to grow and learn and improve. It’s the same at work. 

Your workforce isn’t monolithic, but in general, employees want to get better at their jobs. And professional development (PD) is a big reason people leave their roles: Research shows that employees would leave their roles for better PD opportunities, while 77% said they’d stay with an employer who offered effective PD. 

But not all learning is created equally. To bring back the streaming analogy, simply offering a massive catalog of learning isn’t enough. The average uptake of a tuition reimbursement program sputters at around 2%, so if you’re looking to make a dent in retention, it goes beyond offering employees a library. 

“Trusted curation of content that makes that content meaningful is critical,” explains Kathleen Carr, VP, client and partner experience at SkillsWave, in a recent fireside chat. 

“Content libraries are just so massive, they become useless. And so, unless it’s pathed to my own career, my own job, and to open roles in my own company that I’m striving for, it just becomes this kind of wasteland of content.” 

A wasteland of content. Not exactly synonymous with helping employees stay and grow. 

Connecting Learning to the Person 

One of the ways that Popular Streaming Platforms try and help people make decisions is through recommendation. It’s done algorithmically: People who watch shows like the ones you watch also tend to like shows like these ones. It’s not a perfect solution—the analogy to start this article happens in spite of that personalization—but it’s a $320-billion company’s attempt at solving the problem. 

And it’s even more effective when applied to learning. 

“In all content consumption, we’ve seen over the past decade this real shift. There’s so much content, how do we lean on trusted curation?” Carr asks. 

Curated learning starts by acknowledging what role an employee is in now, inferring what skills come with that role, and understanding what goals they have moving forward. Together, those three pieces of info can help personalize recommendations so that employees only see the most relevant content to them, tuning out the noise in the meantime. 

Think about a construction foreperson: If they have to hunt for courses hidden between cybersecurity and graphic design courses, they’re more likely to think, “there’s nothing in here for me,” and move on without learning anything. 

Personalization is a Win-Win 

Personalizing learning is great for employees and employers alike.

For companies, curating options for an employee’s specific goals and role has myriad benefits. 

The employees see themselves in the learning and understand right away how it’s relevant. By going a step further and connecting learning outcomes to career progression, they can also see how learning can help them grow, making them more likely to actually engage in learning. 

“The employer needs certain outcomes out of their employees and they need to build talent pipelines from within, right?” Carr says. 

“We know it’s so much more valuable to upskill the employees you have toward jobs within your company versus trying to go out and find new talent.” 

And employees equally reap the benefits. They get some clear evidence that their employer cares about them, while also adding skills that will advance their career with or without that organization. 

“Employees, too, are looking to find meaning. In their life, in their work. And so, I think that points to a desire … to continue to grow in the careers that they have and with the companies they’re with.” 

Retention Pays 

Employee turnover costs companies billions. Between loss of productivity, cost of recruitment and time-to-ramp, losing a single high performer can cost a company tens of thousands. 

That’s not to mention the added benefits of upskilling that help companies become more competitive and productive.

Every dollar spent on learning can help retain your best staff. Not investing in them is more expensive than the opposite.