Learning for the Employee
A consistent struggle for employees regarding workplace-related learning and training courses is that these courses are often to fulfill requirements, and don’t have apparent career or personal development value.
As a result, there is quite often a feeling that there is little value in spending time beyond what is required on learning management systems, when progress could be made towards workplace deliverables.
Both we and MARi envision a future where learning management systems can provide both immediate and long-term value for employees by providing the resources and suggestions they need to improve their skill sets and determine their career trajectory in an readily apparent manner.
Summary of Work
We’ve worked to create an employee-focused workflow that addresses common pain points we identified in many of the interviews we conducted. This vision for employee-facing work is aimed at implementing more collaborative, data-driven, and long-term focused training, customized to the context of the individual employee.
Reaching the current design state involved a lot of exploratory work in the previous prototypes to understand the breadth of the issues employees face.
Final Design
The goal of this prototype is to provide a look into how we might solve many of the fundamental and practical woes people have regarding learning in the workplace in a way that encourages systematic changes in the ways organizations and individuals handle purposeful career growth and development.
Like the trainer workflow, this prototype is empowered by AI as a supporting tool for decision making regarding learning directions and goals.
Design Dive
Action-Focused Learning
This kanban-board-style homepage aims to help employers, their supervisors, and training managers align learning goals and training materials by visualizing the learning journey and making it accessible to all three.
In doing so, more learning can be assigned and completed within the context of the employee and team’s needs.
Employee Initiative
Employees will ultimately be the primary factor in pushing personal learning journeys forward- so our team believes the best way to support this is to provide them the resources they need to make decisions.
Our workflow is to operate using a recommendation model that is based on the employee’s attribute profile, learning history, and ideal role that predicts and recommends courses and certificate next steps with the assistance of AI.
People are more naturally wary of AI, especially if they don’t know why it makes the decisions it does- by focusing on explainable AI in the design stage with contextual descriptions and visual aid, employees should better be able to plan personal learning journeys.
Specific Documentation Searching
One issue that exists for employees, especially those that work with enterprises with vast private databases, is that searching through internal documentation for specific content can be difficult and inefficient.
With the utilization of attributes to more readily identify training contents, employees should be able to much more find what they need when the majority of necessary documentation is available in MARi.
MARi could likewise suggest and direct employees to excerpts of training content it thinks is relevant to the employee’s current problem, saving them from needing to parse lengthy, unsearchable content.
Attribute Profile
With a personal attribute profile that contains personal strengths and weaknesses, visualized training foci, and a graph of incremental attribute changes, employees should be able to more strategically make decisions on their training and career development journey with the assistance of MARi and their supervisors.
Archetype Needs
From our employee archetypes that we researched and created, we learned that most people in the workplace are often in a state of trying to figure out personal goals and navigating career paths. As this group of people is a significant portion of the workforce, MARi has the potential and opportunity to help them along that journey more effectively.
As such, we believe that in order to address these needs, MARi should visualize potential skill growth opportunities, make career growth/upward mobility opportunities more transparent, improve access to relevant information resources, and help employees, especially juniors, feel more prepared and confident about their decisions and path.