Corporate training for developing social media literacy skills: personalized approach

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Introduction

Nowadays the forms of mass media are becoming more complex and sophisticated, as news consumption moves from print to pixels. Journalists have had to learn completely new skills, techniques, and approaches to their craft to attract and retain audience attention. But not only journalists need to have adequate digital capacities and social media literacy skills but also today's workers. Therefore, L&D department is in charge of creating reskilling programs that fill skill gaps and create opportunities for internal mobility by allowing employees greater freedom of movement within the organization. However, while the majority of companies know that talent mobility is essential, a Deloitte survey shows that just 6% of them believe their organization is “excellent” at enabling it. Unfortunately, employees generally tend to find new and more lucrative opportunities in another company than climbing the career ladder at their current employers. One of the obstacles to internal mobility is the lack of learning technologies and platforms,^[1] and practices through hands-on growth opportunities like projects, and mentorships.^[2]

The only providers of this educational content for L&D divisions are established media outlets that could force positive changes to the way companies learn. For instance, The Guardian media team offers standalone seminars and hands-on workshops to teach companies the skills behind cutting-edge digital journalism – from online reporting to social media skills, live-blogging and video.^[3] Course from Buzzfeed teaches how to make viral videos for social media.^[4] Agency France-Presse launches a digital skill training that includes search techniques to verify images, finding archived material, and tracking down the origin of social media posts.^[5]

In the context of corporate training, we define social media literacy as a broad set of skills and competences based on knowledge about people's interaction by accessing, analyzing, evaluating, and creating messages presented in different forms and spread in different media. Some researchers point to the importance of social media literacy skills for employees as organizational scandals on social media evolve as a social drama. The study proposes that organizations facing scandals on social media should consider that workers and other highly engaged stakeholders experience organizational scandals not from the point of view of occasional spectators but as long-term active participants (Lazar, 2022).

Moreover, it is crucial to note that media outlets tailor training to specific needs of companies, by conducting them anywhere around the globe and taking into account the professional interests. Hence media experts serve as providers of personalized learning for many business industries.

According to a recent Brandon Hall Group report, 82% of companies are working on improving their personalized learning (PL) approach (Allal-Chérif et al., 2022). Why is the implementation of personalization a crucial capability? The research found that companies that excel at personalization improve employee individual and organizational performance (93%), employee engagement (89%) and organization’s competitive advantages (73%) (Allal-Chérif et al., 2022; Armstrong, Landers, 2018)

Methods

In the current study we raise two primary research questions: 1) what are the characteristics of the PL environment that impact on learning outcomes? 2) what are the personalized learning tools? We systematically identified contemporary empirical studies associated with the implementation of PL in corporate learning that were conducted between 2018 and 2022. The literature was gathered by searching Google Scholar database.

Results and discussions

In this section we present the results to address the three research questions.

Q1. What are the characteristics of the PL environment that impact on learning outcomes?

Nowadays, learning is more effective when it is relevant for students and applies to personal goals. It is the biggest priority and challenge in corporate education as the learning process can be motivated and get high results. However, it requires the HR manager to identify an individual's ambitions and find correlations between them and the strategic interests of the company. Two studies identify the effectiveness of combining corporate development plans with individual development plans of employees (Chunaev, Shikov, 2018; Dekoulou, Trivellas, 2015). Papers have proved that such a strategy creates career growth opportunities for staff and meets company business goals.

Considering PL as a teaching and learning approach that aims to customize learning for each student in accordance with their background, needs, potential, interests and learning habits, we have identified several specific contexts that impact on learning outcomes:

1. Collective learning processes. It includes teams, organizations, communities, and societies, and highlights such characteristics as relationships, shared vision, mental models, cognitive and behavioral learning. It would be appropriate to create a new discipline called “Collective learning” by analogy with pedagogy (teaching children) and andragogy (teaching adults).
2. High adaptivity of the curriculum. This applies to the use of AI in detecting employee's educational needs and professional gaps, but also high-quality learning materials. It means that educators cannot rely on permanent curricula anymore; they need to create new learning pathways for highly competitive and fast changing environment (modular education, microlearning, micro-certifications).
3. Various technologies, tools and platforms that provide learners with relevant knowledge.
4. Modes of learning (online, offline, hybrid).
5. Corporate mentoring is the form of communication when a more experienced person helps a less experienced person develop some specified capacity and guide him on the professional journey. The mentor helps the mentee to set career goals, develop and refine plans, and create a professional network. It is an effective approach to build human connections at the organization.^[6]
6. Safe work environment. Companies used to focus on employee’s productivity tools (Microsoft Office, Slack, Teams, Sharepoint etc.), and IT equipment (computers, laptops, smartphones etc.), but nowadays workplace safety has become one of the core priorities for organizations across the world. When the work itself is safe, it means that employees are well-managed. That is also resulted in more motivated and mindful employees who are satisfied and happy with their job. According to the Gartner report, the “we space” concept has a positive influence on the sense of community and helps team members to establish and share common values of the company (Hromada, 2022; Pavlát, Knihová, 2019; Kesson, 2021).

Q2. What are the effects of digital systems and tools in PL implementation?

The employee-centric culture and new educational ecosystems are modern requirements that make corporate trainings relevant for individual learning or group learning.^[7] To make a shift from process-based approach to employee-based training we need to consider employee’s experience and create microservices. Microservices is a software development architecture where an application is made up of multiple independent services, and each service runs a unique process and usually manages its own database. Since the microservice performs a specific task, employees of a team can focus on that task alone. According to Bersin,^[8] earlier all service systems were provided by the IT department whereas today there is a transition to the digital HR paradigm. Modern HR tech solutions include analytics, VR technologies, and contemporary learning platforms.

The study found the key tools that impact on the effectiveness of PL implementation:

1. Educational games. There is a great number of studies examining the impact of gamification on learning outcomes of employees. But there are a few papers devoted to game elements that promote personalization. Some papers identify that adaptive gamification supports HR managers in defining and monitoring learning paths for employees. Another paper presents a concept of using digital twins for gamified support and training systems that generate individualized work environments. There are studies that measure the positive value created by the games on work enjoyment, productivity (Gerdenitsch et al., 2020) and the company profitability (Allal-Chérif et al., 2022). Other authors analyze how a company’s gamification strategy influences corporate learning by embedding gamification techniques in mobile social learning platforms (Kim, 2021).
2. Mobile learning. Authors analyze a positive impact of a mobile learning system, name WoBaLearn, that provides personalized and adaptive learning support in a real work environment (Zhang et al., 2016; Pavlát, Knihová, 2019).
3. Intelligent learning systems. Five studies report on how artificial intelligence can change the way in which companies recruit, train, educate and manage employees (Haque et al., 2021; Larkin, 2017; Maity, 2019; Patki et al., 2021). In another study researchers discuss the salient factors in designing transparent intelligent systems using machine learning. These systems assist users by evaluating multiple courses of action and recommending the right action at the right time (Vorm, 2018). Two studies examine how AI helps to identify employees’ skill sets and develop a training programme based on the market demands (Gambhir et al., 2022; Tambe et al., 2019).
4. Web-based adaptive learning systems. Three studies investigate how to design an employee experience platform for raising their productivity, engagement, and collaboration (Lengnick-Hall et al., 2018; Shivakumar, 2020; Saxena et al., 2021).

Conclusion

Most media outlets getting into education have to learn tough lessons: education is a very different business from media and succeeding takes a lot more efforts than having a prominent brand and built-in audience. It is common knowledge that publishers are struggling to find new ways to make money beyond subscriptions and advertising. One increasingly common way is by launching social media skills training and workshops for companies that crave for employee development programs.

This paper has proved the demand in personalized learning that creates a unique working style for each person in cross-functional teams. PL is an effective approach to retain top talent, identify areas for development, apply strengths and reach personal and company goals by discussing them with senior executives. Moreover, PL promotes employee competitive attitude and competitive behavior that result in enhancing job crafting and performance.

Use of PL in corporate training programs creates win-win scenarios for all stakeholders. Personalized training in an organization provides customized and highly relevant employee learning experience considering their needs, abilities and goals. However, PL is not standing still, there are more new approaches are keep showing up in corporate training that requires new responses from HR department: 1) design philosophy (enhancing user experience through customization of UI design); 2) new tools and cutting-edge teaching and learning techniques (microlearning, fast education methodology, human-AI tandems etc.); 3) multimodal learning (podcasts, business games, shortand long-term corporate programs).

It is crucial to note that personalized learning in corporate training has pushed companies to formulate their educational strategies by answering the following questions: What to teach employees? How to train them effectively? Who are the providers of knowledge and what formats are the most effective and efficient? It is also recommended that further research should be undertaken in the following areas: comparison of PL strategies and learning outcomes in universities and business corporations.

 

^{1 Schwartz, J., Roy, I., Hauptmann, M., Van Durme Y., & Denny, B. (2019, 11 April). Talent mobility: Winning the war on the home front. 2019 Global Human Capital Trends. Deloitte. Retrieved December 12, 2022, from https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/human-capital-trends/2019/internal-talent-mobility.html}

^{2 Gregerson, A. (2022, October 4). What is internal mobility and why do you need it? Gloat. Retrieved December 12, 2022, from https://gloat.com/blog/what-is-internal-mobility-and-why-you-need-it/}

^{3 Corporate journalism training. (2014, December 12). The Guardian. Retrieved December 12, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-masterclasses/2014/dec/12/bespoke-journalism-training}

^{4 Brown, N. (2020, March 20). This course from BuzzFeed and the new school actually teaches you how to make successful videos for social media. BuzzFeed. Retrieved December 12, 2022, from https://www.buzzfeed.com/amphtml/nataliebrown/buzzfeed-new-school-social-video-pro}

^{5 Bale, P. (2022, June 28). AFP launches free and open digital skills training tool kit for journalists. INMA. Retrieved December 12, 2022, from https://www.inma.org/blogs/newsroom-initiative/post.cfm/afp-launches-free-and-open-digital-skills-training-tool-kit-for-journalists}

^{6 Wentworth D., Klein I., Cooke M., Rochelle M., Pachter R., Bui E. (2021). Changing the learning paradigm to serve the future workforce. Hemsleyfraser. Retrieved December 12, 2022, from https://www.hemsleyfraser.com/sites/default/files/2021-12/Future%20Workforce_eBook_Brandon_Hall_UK.pdf}

^{7 Bersin, J. (2021). HR technology 2021: The definitive guide. Retrieved December 12, 2022, from https://joshbersin.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/HR_TechMarket_2021_v7.pdf?utm_medium=email&_hsmi=139234685&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--sveGA2TM6bPHjYn-h5LuT_xwGkMiwIO7eWfwhAliRdqES6azclzoARQNffRTkefQB1ICZTCqBXOe3xr7sJN90SsSdbA&utm_content=139234685&utm_source=hs_automation}

^{8 Bersin, J. (2021, November 2). Cornerstone Xplor launches a new era in corporate learning. Retrieved December 12, 2022, from https://joshbersin.com/2021/11/cornerstone-xplor-launches-a-new-era-in-corporate-learning/}

About the authors

Elizaveta A. Osipovskaya

Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University)

Author for correspondence.
Email: osipovskaya-ea@rudn.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-4192-511X

PhD in Philology, Associate Professor, Mass Communication Department

10 Miklukho-Maklaya St, bldg 2, Moscow, 117198, Russian Federation

Anastasiia A. Savelyeva

University of Tyumen

Email: an.a.saveleva@utmn.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7727-9850

Assistant, School of Education

6 Volodarskogo St, Tyumen, 625003, Russian Federation

References