Most Common Barriers To Learning and How To Deal With Them
We are all different and react in our own way to one or another type of training. Your team may consist of people of varying age groups or with specific problems (for example, 10% of the population suffers from dyslexia or autism), which can hinder effective learning.
So, what are learning barriers, when your employees may face them in Corporate training, and what methods to overcome those?
Highlights:
- What Are Barriers To Learning?
- Where Do We Face Barriers To Learning?
- Common Learning Barriers and How They Work
What Are Barriers To Learning?
Any matter or aspect that prevents effective learning is a barrier
It discourages learners from perceiving and assimilating new knowledge, passing practice, and taking tests. Identifying such obstacles can be difficult, as they are often individual.
Overcoming barriers is essential for business owners who strive to communicate knowledge so that workers comprehend, absorb, retain and put it into practice. Establishing a convenient and pleasant learning culture becomes necessary to maintain employee engagement and productivity.
Where Do We Face Barriers To Learning?
The pandemic changed the world. Many companies have switched to remote or hybrid formats. Employees can constantly work from home and in offices when they feel like this. They can also take the online training at their workplace or home. At this stage, the first barriers to education arise caused of numerous reasons.
New workers may fear failing or making mistakes because of an uncomfortable environment. It can be excessive pressure from management or unhealthy relationships with colleagues.
Employees working online may have problems accessing the corporate academy, unstable internet, or outdated equipment.
Common Learning Barriers and How They Work
Let's look at educational barriers examples and discuss ways of overcoming them. For convenience purposes, I divided the education barriers into several categories. So you can quickly find how to overcome a specific barrier that damages your learning program.
Classroom Barriers
If training takes place in a classroom, auditorium, or your office, you may expect the following barriers to appear:
- inability to concentrate;
- too long classes;
- a lecturer shares the material too fast, and learners lack time to comprehend the information;
- a lecturer shares the material too slowly and can't hold learners' attention.
How To Overcome?
The existence of a learning barrier is not a problem by itself. One cannot control everything, and some education barriers may appear out of nowhere.
Classroom management is a combination of skills and methods that a lecturer should possess. For example, advanced public speaking skills and the ability to conduct multisensory learning are required to hold and manage students' attention. Overcoming such challenges requires utilizing different methods to meet learners' needs. As a company owner, your best shot is to analyze other lectures that the person you are willing to invite conducted. Thus, you will see their strengths and weaknesses.
Emotional Barriers
This is a rather tricky subject as those may be hidden and apparent. Both types of emotional barriers sabotage learning by stripping a learner from comfort. A person who is uncomfortable will do everything to avoid this discomfort. If your learning program or atmosphere is so, you can expect very low efficiency as learners try to prevent it.
Fear of failure
Most believe that trying and getting unknown results is worse than not trying. Such an approach keeps a person from profitable opportunities and doesn't allow them to learn new skills.
Beginners, trainees, professionals—everyone can be afraid of failure and reluctant to apply new knowledge in practice.
How To Overcome?
Overcoming this is crucial in every business or industry. This is especially true in sales training, as effective communication is the key to success for a salesperson. So, let learners make mistakes and don't punish them for it.
- Use motivational prompts
- Put new skills into practice
- Don't punish for mistakes when learning
- Help improve self-correction and self-control skills
An LMS with its functionality helps to reduce this fear significantly. For example, use a multiple-choice test. In AcademyOcean, you can leave encouraging comments on each answer. Phrases like "You're great!" "Next time, you'll succeed!" "You're doing great!" will support and stimulate them.
Motivational Barriers
These are one of the hardest to overcome. Let's take the inability to see the final goal as one. It can have a devastating effect on a person's performance. This can appear because they can't learn or understand the company's development strategies. As a result, they can't form a clear picture of their place in the company, resulting in a lack of motivation.
Additionally, troubles with concentration have become an absolute nightmare for modern employees, as they only have a little time for learning, considering their overwhelmed daily lives. Regarding education, the lack of concentration has a devastating effect.
How To Overcome?
In the first case, you can use SMART. Setting such goals shows employees your vision and path to success. The critical aspect is to make the goals achievable, measurable, precise, and set deadlines.
The concentration barrier of learning can be resolved by dedicating time to upskilling. For example, you can make 30 minutes of silence for your team to learn. During this half hour of silence, it is forbidden to do any work assignments and answer emails or text messages. Let your team relax and comfortably improve their skills.
Personal Barriers
Your team may consist of people of different age groups. For example, millennials love technology and structure. Interactive courses using various technologies will suit them. In turn, the baby boomer generation may prefer more traditional forms of education. In addition, people are divided into auditory, visual, kinesthetic, and discrete by the preferred information perception channel.
How To Overcome?
Avoid boring lessons by adding interactivity, and always pay attention to adding text versions of the material. Also, you can record a video, make a podcast, and create bright graphics.
Test several formats and collect your employee's or client's feedback. If most people prefer video, then focus on it, delivering materials conveniently for learners. Mix theory with practice to show learners that their new skills are helpful in real-life situations.
Different Learning Styles
Overcoming barriers to learning requires continuous improvement. Be attentive to the learners and carefully select trainers. Lectures solely cannot offer reliable learning. Educational content must become more visible, tangible, and accessible to everyone. Therefore, applying multisensory learning is a must. Deliver your training materials using as many channels as you can.
For example, AcademyOcean allows putting hotspots on pictures and captioning them to make it easier for students to understand what is shown.
Conclusion
When developing a training program, you should start with the most important thing—understanding who your audience is. Then ask yourself, "what are the barriers to learning that my audience may face?" The answers to these questions will help you build accessible, engaging, and efficient training programs, creating a memorable learning experience for the whole team.
