What is
Continuous Learning?
Importance & Benefits

If we learn something once, it soon becomes forgotten. If we don’t use it regularly in our lives, it usually isn’t even remembered by our brains. The brain fairly considers valuable only those skills it can use for something to achieve goals and fulfill desires. No wonder many of us learned only those subjects we liked in school. And much of this stuff is forgotten now, freeing space for something new.

To forget something essential is wrong. But freeing the mind is actually good. We can use these qualities of the brain to make work education much more useful.

Continuous learning and development is the approach that enables us to learn constantly and consistently, from one aspect of a skill to another, and transitioning to new skills when appropriate. However, everything you learn should be interesting and relevant for you; in other cases, your brain won’t accept it, even if it is objectively necessary. Even such an essential subject as safety instructions can be boring, and even the risk of injuries may not be a sufficient factor for learners’ brains. That’s why learning must be engaging and consistent, penetrating the learner’s mind and storing there.

We’ll dive into the process of establishing a continuous development base at your workplace. It means creating a strategy and developing a learning culture where everyone is focused on self-improvement and happy with that. The learning management system (LMS) serves as a digital nexus, uniting all processes in a single digital environment where all your learning materials and employee data are stored and applied.

But, let everything be in due course. We’ll start with the term explanation and exploration.

So, when you learn something once, you remember it — for some time. When you learn something for a long time, you’ll make yourself remember it for more, but your brain doesn’t like coercion. It’ll forget it as soon as it can, and will “reward” you with demotivation and headache. Stress is the first reason for headaches, according to the Harvard Medical School review. One of your greatest interests is to prevent it.

Only when you learn something regularly, refreshing your memory, and apply these skills in practice with pleasure and tangible results, your brain is satisfied. All these components need to be present: regular learning activities, practice sessions, motivation, and result tracking. And that’s the continuous learning definition: enable learners to comprehend information for a long time with successful results and without coercion for their brains. That’s not the whimsy of your brain: it’s just the phenomenology of your dopamine system that has evolved to motivate you to do everything for your survival and thriving.

So, we’ll take some time and explore how this system works.

We’ll see more about creating and applying learning strategies, but here is an exhaustive checklist of what you’ll need to start.

As you see, the human brain has several inherent features that are better to be counted and used. The importance of continuous learning in the workplace is that it is highly consistent with the brain’s motivation and execution system, enabling learners to refresh skills regularly and apply them with enthusiasm. You’ll make the dopamine system your friend, not an adversary who’ll block all your efforts and motivate an employee only on watching cat videos or distracting otherwise.

By organizing continuous learning for employees, you ensure not only their competence but their loyalty. It’s natural for people to be social and eager both to compete and cooperate. Friendly competition enables them to become better and more motivated, while cooperation is the way to reach much larger results than alone. This learning approach combines two processes, as employees cooperate during learning while working together to generate new ideas and apply their skills in practice.

It is also important to ensure the competence grow of every employee and the company in general. The continuous professional learning consists of a series of carefully chosen learning materials dedicated to a specific skillset of each of your employee. People want to become better, and this motivation is even larger than the desire to earn more money. If you’ll propose them the ability to learn something new and important, they’ll reward you with loyalty and increased efficiency.

The lifelong learning and continuous improvement is similar to how athletes use regular training to support their muscles. This approach has many advantages, and the most important is the stability of its results. Athletes who train regularly, in certain periods of time, refreshing their muscles, have much lower injury chances and much higher results. Training the brain and muscles is similar in many ways: both of them require motivation, regularity, and feedback while rewarding with stable growth.

Many successful organizations value corporate education highly, so we have many examples of continuous learning in the workplace. Let’s review shortly three well-known companies and see their training centers that contribute to their market leadership.

It’s the best to learn from the best. Let’s see, how!

OK, you decided to turn your company into the workplace education hub. You want your employees to refresh their skills regularly and practice them, so their power is maintained. You have the important points of where to start, see its benefits and aims, and become familiar with implementation examples. Now, the next stage. How to build your continuous learning strategy? Where to start and where you’re supposed to end?

While we’re planning to end this article with a comprehensive guide, here we’ll go with prerequisites for everything you’ll build in your organization.

Continuous lifelong learning consists of a series of repetitive tasks that employees repeat regularly, and practice in work activities right after that.

No wonder that you’ll collect many advantages with this approach. Let’s overview them.

However, the continuous learning core value is determined by the fruitful bonuses your organization will obtain in its earnings and power. According to Forbes, an astonishing 70% of employees are more likely to stay in a company that offers continuous training. Companies that adopted it are 46% more likely to become the first in their market segment. You’ll certainly win a bunch of benefits by establishing this approach at work.

So don’t waste your time — let’s see how to do that!

We’ll end this article with a guide on how to implement this approach in your company, bringing together everything we’ve discussed here. The continuous learning platform is what you need to establish in the company. It means choosing an LMS that will correspond to your needs and purposes. It should provide

Choose LMS by analyzing your needs using this four-point checklist. Connect with the platform’s support team and communicate all these factors thoroughly. Bear that in mind, and we’ll proceed to our second step.

It is the continuous learning culture that should be nurtured among the company’s staff. The culture is the social code that is considered normal by the majority of your employees, so all newcomers will stick to it. The culture consists of habits adopted by employees, and to adopt a habit voluntarily, it should be pleasurable for them. Forbes proposes to focus attention on the learning process formalization when senior employees educate the younger ones and obtain rewards for that. Ensure the user-friendliness of all learning materials and communicate with employees personally to evaluate how they perceive these materials. Use these tips, and your staff will eventually

Last, you need an executive strategy: a continuous learning program specifically for your case. Here, you should integrate all your knowledge with your company’s internal specifics and prepare a plan that will be realized. Remember: regularity, practice, motivation, and feedback are four pillars on which you’ll build your learning flows. See the tips for building a learning strategy and combine them with your company’s workflow map. That’s how you’ll create the program that will center all education activity, ensuring self-organization and ideation in the company.

A good learning management system for continuing education, a well-established culture, and a clear executive program are three components for lifelong workplace-based education, enriching and upskilling your company. That’s how you transform your company into an innovation hub, opening the door of the future. The worthy goal — with the best rewards!