Motivate Employees to Learn: How to Do It Better

Most Leaders Would Like to Better Motivate Employees to Learn
While organizational culture assessment data confirms that employees appreciate investments in their skills, knowledge, and career development, the day-to-day demands of the business often make learning a challenge.  How can we better motivate employees to learn and make better learning motivation a reality?

It is all about relevance to:

• The learner.
• Their boss.
• The company as a whole.

When training matters and learning occurs within the flow of work, employees, bosses, and organizations:

• Make the time.
• Reinforce the concepts.
• Encourage practice and career growth.

Focus on the Transfer of Training to Drive Real Impact
In the corporate world, learning that rarely makes it into day-to-day work adds minimal value. Effective training  strategies focus on the adoption of relevant skills and behaviors that improve performance, not attendance or completion. Prioritizing the transfer of training ensures employees can immediately apply what they’ve learned—making their work easier, faster, or more impactful. When learning is clearly useful in the near term, it naturally motivates employees to engage, creating a bridge between knowledge and measurable business results.

Training Content Needs Context to Stick
Project postmortem data reveals that to truly motivate employees to learn, content — the “what” and the “how” — must be paired with meaningful context — the “why.” Learners, their managers, and the business all need a compelling reason to invest time and effort in developing new skills and behaviors. Change takes time, and even small shifts in behavior are challenging. Providing context makes learning relevant, purposeful, and more likely to translate into real-world impact.

Three Questions You Should Answer to Better Motivate Employees to Learn

To better motivate  employees to learn, there has to be a clear “what’s in it for them” rationale.  Why is the learning important for:

1. Their personal success now and in the future?
2. The short- and long-term goals of their team?
3. The company as a whole?

If training participants (and their bosses) don’t understand how the learning will directly benefit them, the proverbial carrot has little allure.  Once employees understand and accept the value of the training, you can add other rewards and consequences to reinforce their successful completion of the program and application of skills on the job.

How You Will Know You Are Headed in the Right Direction
The goal is for:

• Your employees to be self-motivated to learn because it is in their personal and professional best interests to enhance their skills, knowledge, and on-the-job performance.
• Their boss and the company as a whole to be self-motivated to model, reinforce, and support the learning because it is in their personal best interests and in the best interests of the organization for their employees to improve the related skills, knowledge, and performance.
• Learning in the flow of work ensures that capability building is part of learning while moving real work forward, not a side event that adds irrelevant overhead.

The Bottom Line
For training to truly make an impact, it must be highly relevant — not just to participants or HR, but to their managers and executive leadership — competing effectively against every other priority on their plates. Ask yourself: Is your training relevant enough to drive real change?

To learn more about creating meaningful training with impact, download How to Increase the Adoption & Impact of Training

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.