Easy tips and tricks to start building learning culture for better learner outcomes.
We share a lot of tips on an array of L&D topics, but the thing we always reference is a learning culture.
So, it felt only right that we write how to create a strong learning culture.
After all, it’s an essential for employee engagement, retention, innovation, and long-term growth.
But here’s the challenge.
It can feel overwhelming to know where to start.
Creating a culture where learning is embedded in the day-to-day doesn’t always require big budgets or complex programmes.
In fact, it often comes down to small, intentional actions repeated over time.
So, we listed these actions out for whether you’re just getting started or looking to level up your current strategy.
We’ll cover:
- What learning culture is
- What a good learning culture looks like
- Key tips to build learning culture
Let’s dive in.
What is learning culture?
Workplace learning culture is an atmosphere that prioritises ongoing learning for employees.
It’s not just about offering learning and training. Where learning culture is concerned, ongoing training is embedded in the company’s values, daily operations, and leadership practices.
In a strong learning culture:
- Employees are encouraged to build new skills and expand their knowledge.
- Learning is seen as part of work, not separate from it.
- Managers support growth, offer feedback, and create space for development.
- Mistakes are viewed as learning opportunities, not failures.
- Knowledge flows freely, across teams and hierarchies.
The goal?
To create an environment where curiosity, adaptability, and growth are expected and rewarded.
Key characteristics of a strong learning culture
Want to know what a strong learning culture looks like in practical terms?
Well, put simply:
- Growth mindset is the norm
- Peer learning and collaboration is encouraged
- Learning aligns with organisational goals
- Development is integrated into the working day
- Feedback is constructive, and continuous
- Leaders are learning champions
This doesn’t sound too difficult or optimistic at face value, but it can be quite the change for most organisations.
And if you’re the only driving the charge forwards, it can be hard to get momentum, especially if you face any resistance.
Key tips for creating a learning culture
How do you actually create a strong learning culture?
Well, it doesn’t have to be as complicated as it sounds. We’ve rounded up some easy tips to get you started:
- Start with a skills assessment
- Create a clear learning vision
- Incorporate learning into onboarding
- Gamify learning
- Encourage learning goals in performance reviews
- Make leadership part of the learning culture
- Promote microlearning
- Offer learning pathways
- Enable social learning
- Use social proof
- Run internal learning campaigns
- Create a safe space to fail
1. Start with a skills assessment
Before you start creating content, or trying to change the current landscape of learning in your organisation, first think about what goals you’re trying to achieve.
A skills gap analysis is a really useful tool to help quantify what’s missing.
You could even go beyond that and survey employees to find out about their learning habits, barriers and preferences.
After all, you can’t improve something you haven’t measured.
2. Create a clear learning vision
What does learning culture mean, but more specifically what does it mean to you?
What does it look like and how are you going to achieve it?
Telling your organisation, you’re creating a learning vision sounds impressive, but if you want to get buy-in, you need to give actionable, measurable improvements.
Getting that alignment will help to give people a purpose and direction, plus, get them excited about learning, which is half the battle.
3. Incorporate learning into onboarding
The easiest way to build a learning culture, is to start with your new hires.
They’re fresh, engaged, and they don’t know what your learning culture is yet, so this is a great way to set the tone.
Once they’re set up and running, they’ll then be advocates, or torch-bearers for your learning culture, to help it spread.
Make sure you introduce your learning platforms, your expectations, and growth opportunities from Day 1.
4. Gamify learning
An easy way to incentivise your learners and get them integrated with your learning objectives, you can rely on competition.
Related: The importance of competition in learning
With gamification in learning, you can add badges, points or leaderboards to your learning initiatives and key dashboards.
5. Encourage learning goals in performance reviews
Build learning into your company goals, but beyond that, make learning a part of employee performance reviews.
All goals are important, and all employees want training. In fact, 94% of employees would stay longer with an employer who invested in their learning and development.
If you are creating learning content, then invest in content that matters to your learners, not just to your organisation.
Compliance is important, of course, but engaging users with content they care about is a sure fire way of boosting your learning culture.
💡 Pro Tip
In our LMS, you can directly connect learning to performance goals meaning a manager can assign set content to a user as part of their progression. This is an easy way to seamlessly link learning and development.
6. Make leadership part of the learning culture
Learning should take a top-down approach.
While you’ll be banging the drum of the importance of learning, you can’t be the only voice.
Ideally, your senior leadership team should be supporting you to create more impact by showing their own engagement.
They could talk openly about what learning they’re doing, or to share their learning goals. Learning shouldn’t feel like it’s only for those further down the career ladder, it’s useful at all stages.
7. Promote microlearning
Microlearning is less a tip about how to get learning culture going, than a way to kickstart a learning journey and embed the culture of learning on an individual level.
Short, snappy content (5-10 minutes) is an easy way to get learning content consumed, that fits in the flow of work.
You could share one quick learning resource each week e.g. a podcast, video, or article, to reengage learners.
8. Offer learning pathways
Once you’ve got learners on the LMS, a good way to keep them engaged is to make their learning personalised.
Now, thanks to Totara, this is pretty easy to do.
You can share recommended content via machine learning that will use a learner’s interests to show relevant training. And you can lock content, and build out interest, or role-based learning to make the path super specific.
This gives people a sense of achievement and progress, plus the content they’re engaging with is always super useful.
9. Enable social learning
eLearning isn’t easy to do when you’re always working solo, or in a silo.
Related: Why employees don’t finish your eLearning and how to fix it
You could create a community for learners to gather and engage, and hopefully, to share resources.
This could be a Slack group, a forum, or a discussions board.
No matter how it works, social learning can a have huge impact.
💡 Pro Tip
Using Totara means you get to access all of their Engage features which include forums, discussions and playlists. A Totara LMS is a learning hub where you can bring traditional learning content to the online working world.
Learn more about Totara Learn + Engage
10. Use social proof to build learning culture
When you’re looking at learning content, you’re probably wondering “what’s in it for me?”.
While the benefits of learning and development might seem obvious to you, they’re probably less clear to one of your learners.
Share stories of employees who developed skills, or who advanced in their career, as a result of your learning content.
These real outcomes can help to motivate others, and encourage more learning.
Make sure to celebrate learning milestones for employees where you can e.g. a ‘Learner of the Month’ spotlight, or shouting out key wins on work channels like Slack.
11. Run internal learning campaigns
LMS adoption can be a tricky beast.
Maybe you’ve created an all singing, all dancing LMS, but nobody is using it.
Well, it’s time to put your marketing hat on, and see how you can create an impactful learning campaign.
You could try themed weeks, or link in with ongoing public events or national days to keep learning front of mind.
Or you could check out some of our marketing tips for better LMS campaigns to approach learning more successfully.
Related: LMS marketing strategies you should try
12. Create safe spaces to learn and fail
People won’t get learning right the first time. And they likely won’t stick with it either.
That’s why you need to create a space where it’s ok to fail, as people can only grow when they feel safe to do so.
No punishment, or fear of rejection, just positive vibes. Think of the carrot, not the stick!
Training works better with BuildEmpire
Creating a strong learning culture doesn’t require sweeping changes overnight.
Get started with small, consistent actions that make learning part of the everyday experience at work.
From encouraging peer learning to aligning development with business goals, these practical tips can help you create a workplace where curiosity, growth, and innovation thrive.
And if you’re looking for the right tools to bring your learning culture to life, BuildEmpire can help.
Why BuildEmpire?
We are a powerful learning platform designed to make learning engaging, effective, and personalised.
Here are some key ways we can support your culture-building efforts:
- 🎮 Gamification: Motivate learners with points, badges, and leaderboards that make progress fun and rewarding.
- 🧱 Custom blocks: Create bespoke learning dashboards tailored to your organisation’s needs from personalised learning journeys to real-time performance metrics.
- 📊 Data-driven insights: Track learner engagement, skill growth, and impact, all in one place.
- Totara-led: We use Totara, which means you get access to Learn, Engage and Perform and all the suite of tools to create more engaging learning.
Whether you’re scaling L&D across teams or just getting started, BuildEmpire can help you to design experiences that employees actually want to engage with.