Kick-start employee learning with Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways
At Gravity Union, we cannot stress enough how important it is to train and educate your employees on the tools they use to complete their day to day work.
For ages, a continued theme is to roll-out a new piece of software through IT and simply say ‘good luck’ to the employees who will be using it. Of course, we don’t actually send them a message saying good luck, but we might as well.
Once everything is said and done, we wonder why projects fail, adoption is poor, and users are frustrated with the new tool. Typically, they will go back to their old ways or old systems to accomplish tasks, leaving that new, expensive, shiny tool to gather dust.
While there is no replacement for great hands-on training, you can kick-start the learning experience… enter Learning Pathways from Microsoft.
Learning Pathways
Learning Pathways (LP) is a fantastic solution from Microsoft that administrators can provision into their SharePoint Online environment from the Microsoft Lookbook.
LP offers videos, write-ups, and links to a variety of Microsoft 365 (M365) products all in preconfigured playlists. Each video, write-up, and links page are called an asset and the assets are what make up each individual playlist.
Default Learning Pathway solution provisioned in SharePoint
Benefits of Learning Pathways
The content is created and updated by Microsoft so there is no need to constantly update your own training material as changes continue to rapidly occur in M365. These changes can be incredibly difficult to follow through many product lines, and requires continuously updating your training materials so employees are getting the most relevant content.
With LP, there is material available for almost every product in the ecosystem from Word, to SharePoint, to Microsoft Teams. Once you’ve deployed LP to your environment you can offer this training immediately to your employees.
Beyond product training, there are some preconfigured solution-based training. For example, “Work Remotely” focuses on how to efficiently work remotely from home. You don’t want a Work Remotely solution? You don’t use Sway or Access? That’s okay! You can hide the existing playlists and target only the important materials to your employees.
Customizing Playlists
While the pre-configured playlists are great, you may have additional training content to share. You can add your own assets to existing playlists, or create a new playlist with Microsoft content or your own assets.
For example, you may want to add an asset to the Work Remotely playlist for connecting remotely to your systems, thus customizing the existing content for your organization.
Learning Pathways playlists example
Custom assets for a playlist are created as pages. When creating your own asset, you have access to the full suite of Web Parts available in SharePoint pages. This means you can incorporate Stream videos, YouTube, Twitter feeds, Highlighted Content, Text and Images, and so much more, providing a very flexible solution for training.
Creating a custom playlist in Learning Pathways
Creating a new asset in Learning Pathways
Incorporate your existing Learning Centre
Since LP is a solution in SharePoint, you can build your existing Learning Centre or Resource Centre around LP. Incorporate that by simply linking to other sites or pages with additional material. For example:
Add your Training Courses here and let people register.
Link to a Microsoft Teams channel where people can ask for help or post questions.
Add your Help Desk service and an FAQ to the page.
It’s easy to extend the LP solution to fit your organizations needs. Here’s how I tweaked the existing solution for Gravity Union employees:
Customized Learning Pathways with existing resources
Summary
If you’ve already rolled out Microsoft 365 including SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams and adoption is low, try adding Learning Pathways as a starting point for training. It’s a great way to keep up-to-date with Microsoft 365 changes and communicate training to your organization.
Just like rolling out software or an application without training and guidance, simply rolling out Learning Pathways will likely not prove effective either. You need to communicate training, customize your playlists and assets to your organization, and begin to incorporate dynamic content into your training solution. Consider getting help to roll-out Learning Pathways effectively and efficiently for your organization.
