Workforce education programs have often underperformed in the past, for adult learners and companies. But there’s a reason. Many of these programs were designed without taking into account the diverse needs of all learners.

InStride is changing that.

By connecting design innovation with workforce education, we have created a new approach that delivers a positive experience for users at every touch point and with every interaction. This has resulted in a significant leap in employee learner participation rates, from 1-2 percent for other programs, compared to 20 percent among employee learners taking part in InStride’s programs.

Join us for a Q&A with InStride’s Director of Design, Annette Neu, as she shares how rethinking the design of your workforce education program — with a focus on research and where users’ actual needs are at the heart of the design — opens up the way for successful, high-performing programs.

At InStride, we address one of the most important challenges of our time: How do we remove barriers to the highest-quality education for all?

How well we can solve this problem, for a large, often diverse audience, depends on design. And this is where research comes into play. To inform our design decisions, we lean heavily on ongoing user research and product analytics.

Here’s more on our methodology. To generate meaningful insights through research, InStride sets out to understand the “what” and “why” of the problem we’re solving. Both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies are leveraged to produce actionable, repeatable insights that drive our product and service design.

InStride is a user-centric solution that’s built to serve the needs of every employee learner.

At the same time, pursuing education as a working adult is very personal and emotional.

Here are three insights revealed through our research, and how InStride leveraged this information to design a workforce education program that empowers learners to navigate their often complex emotional education journeys.

There’s rarely this singular lightning-bolt moment that drives a working adult learner to go back to school. Each learner’s approach to education is unique, guided as much by their employer and manager as the nuances of their previous education experience, time commitments and work/school/life balance.

Approach: A critical component to our process when designing an inclusive education program is to anticipate the unique, nonlinear journeys of diverse groups of learners, and how those nonlinear journeys impact their ability to commit to a learning opportunity.

Deciding to go back to school generates a lot of questions for learners: What will it feel like? How will it work? Can I do it? Questions like these are often rooted in a fear of failure, work/school/life balance, and whether or not this is really going to help them advance their careers.

Approach: InStride prioritizes helping organizations design meaningful learner communities to overcome their fears and confidently pursue education. We help companies get their communities up and running, and provide them with the content they need to build out their resources.

For learners, the logical counterbalance to the emotional aspects of going back to school involves understanding the benefits before committing to education. They want to understand how their time commitments and hard work will meaningfully change their careers and lives.

Approach: InStride’s education experts partner with organizations to design curated career education paths with clear routes to success for both the learner and the organization.

Read more: Ready to access all of the original insights we uncovered from our research? Unlock the full report, What to know about the workforce education journey.

At InStride, accessibility as well as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are more than just a list of legally recognized standards. They are core to how we structure our teams, as well as everything we design at InStride.

Homogenous teams produce homogenous design solutions, which is why we focus on building teams with racial, national, gender, cognitive, inherent and acquired diversity to create innovative, meaningful design solutions for all learners.  As mentioned earlier, our mission is to remove barriers to the highest-quality education for all, so advocating for inclusivity and accessibility starts at the beginning of every project.

To that end, our design principles include:

InStride has a corporate-branded learner experience and a corporate partner experience that includes an all-in-one admin and KPI reporting tool. Both are developed with an approach that centers on the target audiences’ requirements, contexts and mindsets to drive the program design and features.

Includes a white-labeled, corporate-branded, public, searchable, and crawlable website that’s designed to address what research showed were major hurdles for learners — complicated processes, high-friction technology integrations and a general lack of program awareness.

For example, the platform allows employees to easily navigate through their learning options with seamless academic integrations and alerts them in real-time if they are eligible to enroll or need additional approvals.

Additionally, InStride helps with branding the education program across relevant digital touchpoints and marketing collateral — this greatly increases learners’ awareness of the program. The public site aspect helps with branding and awareness for existing employees and doubles as a talent acquisition tactic for attracting potential employees.

InStride focuses on providing a robust technology platform that serves as a single source of truth for companies to manage and understand the overall health, success and activity of their strategic enterprise education program. Our research shows that a corporate partner experience is significantly enhanced by providing these benefits (that InStride delivers):

The importance of frontline managers!

Frontline managers play critical roles in the success of employees pursuing education in multiple ways. Learners are more likely to pursue education when they have guidance and support from a human, not a system. An invested manager, leader or mentor builds trust by sharing experiences and helping an employee realize they are not alone in their anxiety or worry. By synthesizing and sharing the information most relevant to employee learners, frontline managers also simplify a complex process and show organizational commitment.

Overall, our research confirmed that supporting learners with experienced and engaged managers increases a learner’s confidence in taking the next step on their educational journey. So instead of pushing learners to an outside support system, InStride equips managers and leaders with the tools they need to help learners embark on their educational journey.

There’s a reason why design is not a siloed function at InStride. We believe the best solutions come from strong, inclusive, multidisciplinary teams driven by actionable, strategic insights that inspire, motivate and drive the organization forward.

This collaborative approach is key for connecting design innovation with workforce education in a way that transforms what’s possible.

The result? Strategically designed education programs with meaningful learning options — for large, often diverse groups — that will positively change the trajectory of an individual’s career, while fundamentally improving a business’ path to success.

Ready to learn more about how a strategic approach to education can transform your workforce? Talk to one of our education experts today.