What does an engaged learner look like? Someone who completes their compliance training on time? If so, that’s a low bar that some of us might not have always cleared. What about an engaging course? That’s even harder to put your finger on.

Engagement is often treated as an afterthought. Something you just sprinkle on at the end, and voilà. But like most of these illusive but essential ingredients, for it to work it’s got to be baked right into the experience.

How to take engagement from an annual survey to a pillar that improves performance.

Learner engagement is something you need to think about from the get-go. When you get it right, you can boost skill acquisition and product usage, build stronger cross-functional connections with your peers and increase a range of business outcomes including retention, productivity and revenue growth.

You can’t gamify every experience, and turning a PDF into a video alone won’t cut it. It’s a delicate balance of learner experience and relevant content, skillfully delivered via a platform that provides a great learning experience.

Here’s a blueprint our HR and Customer education teams worked on, based on their own personal and professional experience, along with best practices they see from customers.

 

Personalisation

What’s in it for me? We’re all busy wearing many hats, so you must be clear about what’s in it for them. Learners are unique and no matter what their motivations are, it’s a safe bet that they’ll care about their own career development. Provide content that’s aligned to their role, experience level as well as learning preferences, and you’ll enhance the transfer of learning to on-the-job performance.

 

Relevance

49% of employees say they don’t have time to spend learning and 33% of learners lack motivation to complete their training. So you need to make it worth the time they spend doing it. When learners understand how they can apply what they’ve learned to a specific task or their role, they’re more likely to engage with the content. This makes relevance the ultimate engagement tool. Embedding relevance at every stage is how you’ll encourage learners to continue to take the next course and the one after that. Plus, it’ll help you to measure performance and align with business objectives.

 

Feedback

Superficial questions like “Did you enjoy your training?” are a missed opportunity. To drive improvement and spark the creation of new learning resources, solicit specific feedback and analyse that input alongside quiz results and other learner data. By looking for patterns in the responses you can pinpoint any areas of improvement or particularly great content, so you can prioritise updates to enhance course clarity and effectiveness.

 

Community

Create a virtual learning space for informal networking opportunities as well as organised learning events. People might not want to organise a party, but they love to be invited — introverts will at least begrudgingly accept an invite. Having a tool that can incorporate gamification elements to encourage friendly competition, promote discussion, group projects, share knowledge and documents creates a sense of ownership and collaboration.

 

Recognition

Acknowledge and reward active participation, contributions, and engagement from your different audiences to motivate learners to stay involved. Recognising key completion milestones boosts confidence and instills a sense of accomplishment, while valuing each learner's efforts and achievements helps to personalise the overall learning experience too.

 

What’s next: Measure their journey

These different elements need to be integrated into the design, implementation, and delivery of all your learning programmes to ensure they resonate with internal and external learners alike.

But, you can’t do engagement and then sit back. The next step is to see how engagement stats can be linked with real business impacts like reduced customer churn, increased partner sales, and stronger employee retention.

80% of employees say that continuous learning gives their work more meaning. That’s not just a feel-good stat—it’s a strategic opportunity to boost retention, close skills gaps, and speed up AI adoption.

But here’s the big question: Are you making the most of your employees’ motivation to learn?

To truly harness that energy, you need a learner-led approach to connect the dots between individual engagement and business outcomes—making learning more personal, accessible, and social, while also driving efficiency and knowledge retention.

Want to spark real engagement? Try these strategies:

• Personalised learning paths tailored to roles and skill sets
• Just-in-time learning with quick, actionable content when it’s needed most
• Modern mentoring that matches peers and tracks progress
• LMS + HR data integration for mobile, micro, and embedded learning experiences
• Recognition programmes with rewards, badges, and career growth incentives

And remember: the fewer the barriers, the better the engagement. Employees are juggling more than ever—some are remote, some are mobile-only, and many face confidence challenges like imposter syndrome. Keeping learning simple, flexible, and accessible is key to making it stick.

 

Sophie Furnival 

Content Marketing Manager at Absorb