Introducing Strategic Learning Playbooks
As learning and development specialists, we’re invested in making sure you’re equipped to do exactly what you need to do. Providing a learning management system (LMS) that delivers high quality learning experiences is one part of that commitment. Teaching you how to use it in ways that clearly demonstrate the impact of learning on the business is equally important. To help you get the most out of your LMS and prove that value to company stakeholders and leadership, we’re launching a new series of Strategic Learning Playbooks (SLPs) in Absorb Academy.
SLPs are expert-led, structured eCourses that help you maximize your use of Absorb LMS as you design and launch essential learning programs for internal or external audiences. Our SLPs outline customer education best practices for tackling real business challenges, like upskilling to close skills gaps and onboarding to reduce employee turnover. Every step in the SLP curriculum is guided by principles and techniques for measuring and proving the value of learning investments at your company.
SLP eLearning modules speak directly to the concerns of stakeholders across the enterprise who need learning initiatives to impact their business. This includes L&D specialists and teams, HR professionals, and leaders from operations, engineering, technology, and customer relationship departments. You’ll learn how to implement learning programs for maximum effectiveness on Absorb LMS. Downloadable ROI calculators, interview and presentation templates, video demos, and skills checklists give you the concrete building blocks you need to put together real learning initiatives for your company as you proceed through SLP eLearning pathways that are most relevant for you.
Strategic Learning Playbooks represent a unique, upleveled shift from how learning initiatives are traditionally approached. The playbooks include rich resources and tools which teach guide leaders of various business functions (HR, learning and talent, sales, operations) how to employ the language of the business to obtain and sustain internal funding and advocacy for learning programs that benefit them. The playbooks focus on business and performance challenges or gaps using a business case builder that calculates forecasted value and metrics for specific types of learning initiatives. Decision-makers are interested in onboarding, new product or process training, and higher engagement. However, it’s better to start those conversations by talking about improvements in productivity, reduced support costs, reduced turnover and churn, and increased net-new revenue versus new revenue or a new revenue stream with a talent marketplace. SLPs set every leader up for higher impact, influence, and ongoing investment, with the right conversations for demonstrated and measurable value.
And you’re not alone on your learning journey. Every SLP is accompanied by live, instructor-led bootcamps you can sign up for at any time. You’ll have the opportunity to ask questions that are unique to your situation and get instant answers from Absorb specialists who deeply understand your use case and how to optimize it on an LMS.
Why did Absorb develop the Strategic Learning Playbooks?
We know that organizations struggle to fully activate their LMS. Whatever the tool, there’s always a learning curve. Sometimes, in our excitement to start using a new platform, we become familiar with one part of it and lose focus on other aspects. Sometimes life gets in the way and our intention of discovering more features simply gets postponed.
It’s vital to us that you maximize the impact of Absorb LMS for your learning initiative. We created the SLPs to help you overcome challenges and recognize missed opportunities by unlocking the full power of your LMS. The SLPs are a roadmap to help you optimize your use of your LMS platform to serve your training objectives—benefiting your team, your employees, and your company.
The Strategic Learning Playbooks are designed to take the guesswork out of the process. They encapsulate customer education best practices in upskilling and onboarding so you don’t have to do that research yourself. They present clear arguments in favor of strategic learning and put a rationale and supporting data at your fingertips. Where necessary, a presentation template helps you channel those details and arguments into a compelling presentation for decision-makers holding the purse strings.
The SLPs not only teach you why you need to calculate and forecast achievable ROI for your learning goals, they provide sample calculations to follow and the calculation tools needed to add up the actual numbers. Embedded in the learning is a comprehensive set of explainers, guides, and tools that makes your job infinitely easier and help you get your learning initiatives launched faster.
Why Strategic Learning Playbooks matter for your team and your company
By eliminating uncertainty from learning program design, configuration, setup, and the go-live process, we help your team maximize LMS impact. That’s essential whether you’re contemplating transitioning to an LMS for the first time or looking to do more with your current LMS.
With easy-to-follow steps to continuously improve or scale your program, SLPs help businesses derive more value from an LMS platform. The structured frameworks provide everything needed to build, measure, and demonstrate learning value. Use them to unlock time-saving LMS automations, add more cultural engagement opportunities to an existing program, or explore ways of reducing time-to-proficiency for employees entering new roles or taking on new skills.
That value equates to a stronger workplace culture, higher employee retention, and other benefits. All this is realized while optimizing resource allocation, saving your team time and energy spent on manual tasks. SLPs show you how to use your LMS better—not simply to lower the cost of learning, but to deliver more effective learning with fewer resources.
Absorb—your partner in strategic learning
With the Strategic Learning Playbooks, Absorb is more than a platform provider—it’s a committed and strategic partner. It’s making a deep and lasting commitment to your company’s learning initiatives and your employees’ professional advancement:
“We created our Strategic Learning Playbooks because we recognized that technology alone isn’t enough. Our customers need guidance to maximize their investment and drive measurable business outcomes. Each playbook provides a roadmap of eLearning courses, live boot camps, and implementation resources that turn complexity into clarity. By equipping customers with best practices, ROI calculators, and success metrics, we’re helping them demonstrate the strategic value of learning across their organization—whether for onboarding, compliance, customer education, or any other critical use case.”
—Leslie Kelley, Absorb LMS
What's inside the Strategic Learning Playbooks?
The SLPs take a “playbook approach” to onboarding training. With structured eCourses that guide program setup and optimization, the SLP provides a roadmap for learning program implementation. They’re also flexible enough to suit your needs and support you every step of the way. Whether you’re new to Absorb LMS or have used it for a long time, there’s an SLP pathway for you that lets you get the most out of Absorb.
Everyone benefits from live interactions, and SLP includes virtual bootcamps from any pathway. Having expert guidance and a chance to get your questions answered when it matters most ensures you can set up and launch a program with maximum impact.
SLP curriculums also include tested tools you need to get things done quickly. Materials such as stakeholder pitch decks, sample interview questions, and customizable templates take the mystery out of program development tasks and do the heavy lifting for you.
Absorb teams have worked through these steps ourselves to implement programs in house. We know what works. As learning development specialists, we’re delighted to share our methods and templates with you to get you to program launch as efficiently as possible.
After working through a Strategic Learning Playbook, you’ll know how to use your LMS to make your work easier and more efficient in ways that benefit company employees and the bottom line. The experience has the added benefit of raising the profile of L&D among company stakeholders and establishing learning as a competitive advantage at your organization.
Just launched: Our first two playbooks
Absorb’s SLPs are now available now in Absorb Academy for all our customers. Just click on Strategic Learning Playbooks to see what’s available. Click again to enroll in the pathway that meets your immediate needs.
Currently you’ll find two specially designed playbooks to maximize your use of Absorb LMS and Absorb products. One focuses on upskilling, the other on onboarding. Both are essential learning areas that enhance on-the-job performance, improve engagement, and boost employee retention.
1. The Upskilling Playbook: How to design, launch, and measure upskilling initiatives
As technology advances and employee demographics shift, employers are facing an onslaught of skills gaps and deficiencies. McKinsey research indicates that 87% of companies have skills gaps now or will have them within a few years. According to the World Economic Forum, 39% of employers anticipate they’ll need different set of skills in their workplaces by 2030. The SLP upskilling guide helps companies get a jumpstart on existing skills gaps and skills demands in the years ahead with a structured, actionable approach to upskilling that delivers measurable results. The SLP’s playbook approach to upskilling helps organizations close critical skill gaps efficiently and effectively. Learners can choose from three different learning paths—all designed to help you develop and launch a successful upskilling program on Absorb LMS. Pathway one is the Quick Start Guide, which reviews the whys, the whats, and the hows of upskilling in a single course. The second pathway is Building a successful skills program. It opens with the quick-start preview, then guides you through a 5-course program that covers every aspect of program development on you LMS, from conception to post-launch assessment and improvement.
You’ll identify upskilling needs, secure executive buy-in, design and setup upskilling pathways in Absorb, go live with your program, and measure success by comparing targeted ROI with actual results.
- Course 1: Strategic Skills overview
- Course 2: Identify stakeholder issues
- Course 3: Calculating the business value and ROI
- Course 4: Developing your Skills’ business case
- Course 5: Developing your project plan
The third pathway, called Design and Set-Up, focuses on the configuration and launch process, and offers the following courses:
- Course 6: Designing an effective upskilling program
- Course 7: Setting up and going live
2. The Corporate Onboarding Playbook: How to create an engaging and scalable onboarding experience in Absorb
The SLP onboarding curriculum offers three different learning pathways devoted to corporate onboarding. And for good reason: Employee turnover is a significant resource drain for modern companies.
Companies need onboarding programs that help new recruits feel welcome, build connections with other employees, familiarize themselves with company culture, and become proficient in their roles faster. Investments made in training now are costs saved down the road. Successfully onboarded new recruits were 58% more likely to remain in their roles for over three years.
Absorb’s onboarding SLP helps companies develop holistic onboarding programs that focus on compliance, clarity, culture, and connection. You’ll discover how to use your LMS to build engagement, reduce time-to-proficiency, and increase retention to meet company financial and performance objectives. Pathway one provides a comprehensive step-by-step walkthrough of Building a successful onboarding program. Its 6-course program starts at the very beginning, identifying onboarding needs and securing leadership support. After that, it includes a post-launch measurement and assessment eCourse that shows you how to improve and scale your program. It concludes with how to design, configure, and launch an onboarding program on your LMS to maximum effect.
- Course 1: The role of an LMS in onboarding
- Course 2: Garnering stakeholder input and buy-in
- Course 3: Calculating the business value of onboarding
- Course 4: Preparing and delivering your business case
- Course 5: Project planning
- Course 6: Evaluating and improving your onboarding program
The second pathway, Design and Set-Up, provides a structured, actionable, and direct route to course design, configuration and launch. It contains the following courses designed specifically for onboarding:
- Course 7: Designing a high-impact onboarding program
- Course 8: Setting up your onboarding program in Absorb LMS
We also offer a Quick Start Guide, which provides a capsule introduction of onboarding essentials. It’s perfect for newcomers to Absorb LMS or anyone needing an onboarding refresher. It’s ideal for users who already have resources and support for their onboarding initiative and want to deliver measurable results using Absorb LMS. In both of the pathways, you’ll dig into Absorb’s automation features, discover its suite of culture and connection capabilities (e.g. Billboards, gamification, and leaderboards), learn when to design custom courses and when to opt for ready-made courses in Amplify Max, and learn about powerful and time-saving generative AI course design tools, such as Absorb Create.
How Strategic Learning Playbooks drive business impact
Many companies continue to see learning through the narrow lens of compliance. Training in skills and performance does help companies manage risk and keep the business engine moving smoothly. But it’s capable of so much more.
A modern approach sees learning as a core part of career development that benefits employees and the business holistically. It moves beyond compliance tracking as a checkmark exercise and sees learning as an essential business driver.
The SLP curriculums show you how to drive these benefits using Absorb LMS. The platform itself eases this process step by tracking learner progress metrics automatically. You’ll learn how to leverage powerful, built-in data analytics and reporting tools to dig into quantitative and qualitative outcomes, use data-driven insights to evaluate program effectiveness, and share outcomes with key stakeholders.
By gauging your program’s culture, engagement, and performance impact, you’ll identify areas to realize additional ROI from seamless, scalable, and effective learning initiatives. With help from an SLP curriculum, you’ll be practiced in achieving those objectives using your LMS.
Explore a Strategic Learning Playbook curriculum today
Absorb’s Strategic Learning Playbooks are designed to help customers activate and optimize learning programs with absolute confidence. Whether you’re upskilling employees or onboarding new hires, the playbooks provide everything needed to execute, measure, and scale your strategy effectively.
And new playbooks will be added on an ongoing basis to enrich your Absorb experience and maximize success as you tackle learning and development areas pertaining to your workforce, partners, or customers. Playbooks will be released for the following five audience areas:
- Employee Development
- Customer Education
- Partner Enablement
- Supplier Optimization
- Member Engagement
Each area will offer five courses: (1) compliance (2) onboarding (3) upskilling/reskilling (4) product and process training, and (5) mentoring or training marketplace. That’s 25 playbooks in all, customized to respond to your specific enterprise learning and development needs. For a firsthand look at the SLP pathways for upskilling and onboarding, login to Absorb Academy here.
To discover how to leverage powerful Absorb optimizations to maximize learning for you employees and support investment in learning and development at your company, click here to enroll today and get started on your own strategic learning journey.
