Consistency is critical for organisations. While output quality will always have its place as a performance indicator, consistency is an undervalued representer of an employee’s ability to provide the same (or ever increasing) quality of work over a period of time.  
 
Perception is key to making a learning and development program seem attractive as opposed to a work-related chore. A successful program helps employees subconsciously learn how to be consistent through coursework. If an organisation is inconsistent with their stance on and delivery of training, employees will be conditioned to not take it seriously. 
 
Learning consistency matters because it: 

• Improves the quality of an employee’s experience
• Translates to lifelong learning over time
• Creates more consistent feedback
• Builds credibility for the learning experience.

The best way to help employees become more consistent is through learning itself. Consider the following tips to help achieve this: 

• Identify the problem learning is addressing: You first need to make sure training is the right solution for the issues you’re addressing. Training should never just be for the sake of training; it needs to provide a unique value for your organisation and employees alike. Failure to consider this will often result in wasted time, money, morale and/or opportunity.
• Help employees create personal goals: Finding the right skills off the bat can be a hard ask. Instead, focus on finding employees with the right attitudes and foundation of skills, which will it turn make it easier to fill in their skills gaps. A learning pathway represents a map of the personal learning journey you want an individual to go on.
• Focus on small milestones: Microproductivity refers to achieving a large goal through smaller tasks. It’s the best friend of an eLearning staple called microlearning. Breaking down learning into small digestible chunks makes content more enticing, enables instant information processing and gives learners the power to schedule training when it suits them.
• Contextualise training: Employees need a reason to start and maintain learning, and that reason is context. This can be achieved by providing opportunities for on-the-job learning and encouraging knowledge sharing. Without being given the chance to apply learning instantly in the workplace, employees will simply forget what they’ve learned or how it can apply to their role.

It’s becoming increasingly common for organisations to have a workforce spread across the globe. This can throw a spanner in the works of large-scale training and development programs. This issue is best resolved through online learning platforms, such as the learning management system, which allows for: 

• Personalised learning pathways: Achievable learning steps tailored to an individual’s career and knowledge needs demonstrate care and investment in their development.
• Curated content: Employees are individuals, so treat them as such. Assign coursework to learners that is entirely relevant to them. Many LMSs even utilise AI to learn what employees are consuming and what new content might help them most.
• Accessibility: This covers making content accessible to those with disabilities and more easily accessible and usable in general. Content should cater both to an individual’s learning needs and style.

If there’s one area that needs consistency, it’s compliance training. Being mandatory, time-intensive and filled with dry content means it usually gets a bad rap. To ensure employees are consistently engaged, ensure your organisation is consistent with delivering certain standards of training:  

• Tracking and reporting: For a large organisation, ensuring consistent tracking of individual compliance can be daunting. If your organisation lets compliance fall by the wayside, employees will follow suit. An LMS is an effective tool to monitor the performance and progress of employees and make sure they’re up to date.
• Align learning with business outcomes: It’s key to train the right people to learn the right thing for the right reasons. Employees need to understand how their work, ethos and attitudes affect their workplace’s bottom line, which in turn helps them understand how that bottom line impacts their career growth.

For a more in-depth look at how to develop, track and maintain learning consistency, have a read of the full article.