Digital Learning Excellence Awards : the trends of this 12th edition!

At the end of the Learning, Talent and Development Congress, the Cegos Group, a European and international leader in learning and development, revealed the winners of the 12th Digital Learning Excellence Awards.

Created by Cegos and organized in partnership with AEF.Info, these awards aim to promote programs that reflect the richness and diversity of distance and blended learning today: they are therefore a good indicator of the Digital Learning trends within companies and organizations.

This year, the jury was chaired by Thierry BOUILLON, Deputy Director General of HRRS in charge of talent and skills development at POLE EMPLOI.

The Digital Learning trends of this 2022 edition

After two years marked by the indispensable digital acceleration, the L&D function continues its transformation to adapt in depth to a volatile and complex environment. Four major trends emerge from this 12th edition.

First major trend: the L&D function in the front line to accompany the major changes at work

This year, more than half of the entries aim to support the development of skills impacted by the transformations. Societal and environmental responsibility is one of the recurring themes of the projects presented (climate change, inclusion and gender diversity in particular).

The L&D function is fully involved in supporting managers and employees in the adoption of new practices compatible with a hybrid work organization.

Second major trend: revisited management and design practices to enrich the learner's experience

A dozen candidate projects adopted co-design or design thinking approaches to develop their learning systems. This shows the increased willingness to encourage collective intelligence and co-design of training courses for greater creativity in the service of the learner experience.

This approach, which encourages involvement, openness and collaboration, mobilizes different skills, internally and/or externally, and encourages empathy with the target audience in order to meet the growing need for personalization.

Third major trend: devices embedded in the workflow, closer to operational needs

Learning as part of the workflow is about fostering a culture of experimentation, "learning by doing". Many candidate programs expose participants to professional challenges or new experiences that are fully integrated into their daily work.

This is achieved through participation in projects or the provision of personalized support, on request. These learning paths, thought out globally, are often distributed and accompanied locally by ambassadors, occasional trainers, coaches, tutors, mentors or even the managers themselves. This makes it possible to combine standardization and differentiation, strategic alignment and proximity to needs on the ground.

Fourth major trend: the implementation of learner engagement strategies

Creating a desire to learn, sharing meaning and offering visibility: communication and marketing are now fully integrated into candidate programs. The L&D function is paying increased attention to promoting its offer to make people want to learn in a proactive way, without imposing it. This also involves carefully scripting the pedagogical aspects of the programs and alternating innovative, synchronous and asynchronous, short, accessible and "gamified" learning formats. For example, the emergence of podcasts and escape games, which have been used several times this year.

Grégory Gallic, Digital Learning Excellence Awards Project Manager, shares with us the 10 best practices favored by the candidates of this edition:

1 - Build multidisciplinary project teams to provide a variety of skills and integrate the target's point of view.

2 - Combine strategic vision and operational agility by implementing a glocal organization that relies both on a corporate dimension and common learning practices, but also on a local dimension to offer more flexibility in deployment.

3 - Apply collaborative, learner-centered design approaches, such as design thinking or co-design.

4 - Nurture a sense of belonging through embodied programs that are meaningful to all stakeholders.

5 - Empowering learners by giving them more autonomy and proactivity in their learning process.

6 - Personalize the devices according to the needs and desires of the learners and by integrating the training into the work flow (participation in projects).

7 - Alternate pedagogical formats within hybrid, digital and human devices, embedded in the workflow.

8 - Create commitment through surprise: careful scripting, new formats (podcasts) and fun (escape game).

9 - Set up relays in the field to facilitate the transposition into the work situation: ambassadors, occasional trainers, mentors, coaches, etc.

10 - Use learning and performance data, personal dashboards to communicate, act on motivation and emulation around the program.