What is lifelong learning?

If you are committed to lifelong learning, you are continuously upskilling and reskilling, and uncovering opportunities to learn new skills or gain a deeper knowledge in a field of interest. As a training provider, you can play a key role in motivating participants and future customers to engage with lifelong learning. Not to mention, this is a good business opportunity to attract those who are looking to develop personally or professionally within a field. In this article, you can explore how to consider lifelong learning as a training provider. 

What is lifelong learning? 

Lifelong learning is an active, voluntary, and intentional form for learning that occurs throughout your life, with an aim of improving knowledge or gaining skills for personal or professional development. The key to understanding lifelong learning – and what sets it apart from other types of learning, is that the learning process is led by the individual and motivated by personal or professional reasons.

Also read: Different teaching styles and learning methods 

People are actively seeking knowledge or skills

Lifelong learning is an active and intentional process, meaning that people are seeking and engaging with activities that will improve their skillset. It occurs or becomes relevant after formal childhood education. When this foundation is laid, people have the opportunity to discover what they want to expand their knowledge in. This also happens naturally through other life experiences, like travelling, gaining new friends or romantic connections, or entering the job market. Through these experiences, people find their own way to motivate themselves to learn and do so on their own terms for personal or professional growth. 

Explore valuable information 

As a provider of learning management systems, we have many years of experience collaborating with training providers. Through this, we have gained much insights into the world of learning and how you as a training provider can customise your training programmes after various learning and teaching styles. Continue to explore our collection of articles that explore this further. 

• Bite-sized learning
• Online learning 
• Blended learning
• Informal learning 

Interested in a LMS? Explore our new features in the Learning Management System 

Formal and informal ways of learning 

There are formal and informal types of lifelong learning. Many opt for informal lifelong learning without even realising it. It is when you are delving into a subject of interest, for instance researching World War II or preparing how to sew your first pair of trousers from scratch. Even reading a book just for the fun of it, can be considered lifelong learning. Regardless of what you want to pursue, it is an active choice. 

Learning a new language is perhaps the most characteristic form of informal lifelong learning, where the motivation can come from anywhere from general interest or wanting to communicate with your partner in their native language.  

If you were not to learn French or Italian on your own, you could also sign up for a language course. Then learning language becomes a formal type of lifelong learning. Formal lifelong learning occurs in the training programmes, perhaps associated with a job or education, but also because of personal motivation. As a training provider, this is old news to you. But if you have not considered it in this perspective, you can implement sales strategies to attract those who want to expand their skill sets actively and consciously. We will circle back to this later in the article.

Why is lifelong learning important? 

As the name suggests, lifelong learning is relevant throughout your life and it often happens organically by itself. If not, it is as mentioned an active choice, for which both younger and older people can choose to do. Anyone can motivate themselves to learn something new or gain a new skill. Firstly, this is essential to your own personal development, and secondly, it is important for the competitiveness and employability of yourself among others. 

The root of it is the realisation that formal education is not enough to feel satisfied or accomplished in the modern world we are living in today. Most people have a diverse list of interests and dream of accomplishing various personal and professional goals. They also want to succeed in everything they put their mind to – which is in some cases also expected of them. We can discuss the challenges or negative effects of these expectations endlessly, but for the sake of staying on topic, we will not delve into these here. However, lifelong learning, where people attack a new hobby, learn a new software, or take up more responsibility in their job, can help facilitate this feeling of professional accomplishment or personal fulfilment that we all crave. 

Benefits for personal and professional development 

For the individual in its personal life

• Personal fulfilment: By successfully learning something new, people build confidence.
• Self-discovery: People get the opportunity to discover new sides of themselves and see strengths that they did not know they had.  
• Cognitive health: By effect, these accomplishments can boost mental health.  

For the individual in the workplace 

• Renewed motivation: Lifelong learning provides a focus and works as a productive framework for development.  
  
• Greater confidence: In a rapidly changing business environment, people can demonstrate their ability to adapt to new technologies or other changes
  
• Personal network: By expanding the horizon, people can be catapulted into new environments where they can meet new people or attract meaningful relationships. 

For the organisation

• Learning culture: It stimulates a learning culture in the workplace, which is a sign of a healthy working environment.   
• Employee retention: By demonstrating the company’s commitment to learning, they signal the value of investing in your employees. This is important for retention and recruitmen
• Profitability and productivity: The business is staying ahead of the curve, by making sure that all employees are up to date on the latest market developments. Additionally, a boosted morale and a higher degree of fulfilment will increase the chances for better employee performance – and thereby business success. 

Note on your role as a training provider

To remain relevant in a competitive job market and ensure job security and career progression, is perhaps the number one incentive for you as a training provider to offer targeted training programmes to people. Rapid changes in technology impact all of us, and it is important to identify opportunities for development that will keep us productive and remain a valuable team member. By offering courses that target these shifts, you can fill a necessary gap between the desire to accomplish a goal and the actual realisation of said goal. 

How to encourage lifelong learning as a training provider? 

The most important element to enable as a training provider, is to ensure that the lifelong learning is proactive rather than reactive and passive. Consider the concrete elements of any course or training programme, including which methodologies you rely on and the techniques that you and the instructors carry out in the course. 

The learning methodologies are heavily linked to the format of the training programme and how the content is executed in practice. You can choose from a variety of formats, ranging from a mini course to a masterclass. Decide how in-depth you want to go on the topic, which is dependent on your target audience. Design a roadmap, a step-by-step for creating and executing the course, which will operate as the guideline for implementing the actual modules of the course.  

Furthermore, you should consider the tools and techniques you use to boost the learning outcomes. This includes utilising the various learning modes, like social or blended learning, which we mentioned earlier. You should also ensure that your content is engaging, which is helped by using different content formats like video content, downloadable content, and text content.   

In addition to considering the course design, you must do your part from a business perspective as well. You should market your course as something that will help them achieve their goals. The marketing strategy you choose depends on the target audience and well your own course catalogue aligns with their goals. Your own resources and business KPIs are also important to consider.  

If you consider these elements, and focus on offering high quality courses, you can provide a valuable role in people’s quest to lifelong learning. 

Lifelong learning through learning management

If you work with upskilling internally in your organisation, you can engage a professional course provider or organise your own upskilling training sessions. For the latter, you can use a learning management system (LMS). You can use the FrontCore LMS to simplify and boost e-learning efforts. This is a tool you can use for in-house training, which allows you to build online courses that can be organised however you like.

For training or courses you can use the training management system (TMS) to administrate courses and integrate it with LMS to facilitate online and physical-based courses.

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