If you’re reading this, you’re likely tasked with performance or learning and development for an organization. Someone might have told you to “check out Arist” or you’ve been hearing a lot about “bite-sized” or “workflow” learning.

In this article, we want to cut to the chase and tell you that this learning style isn’t for everyone.

Here are 7 reasons why you shouldn’t buy Arist:

• You don’t have trouble driving adoption and engagement with higher-fidelity content types

• You can create and adapt training quickly enough to keep up with the world

• You don’t need to support behavior change at scale

• Your training is highly collaborative, technical, or both

• You’re fine with learning metrics like “butts in seats”

• You don’t need a way to quickly update your entire workforce, nudge actions, or poll

• You don’t like to get sh*t done

You don’t have trouble driving adoption and engagement with higher-fidelity content types

Your videos and presentations are probably so engaging that it wouldn’t make sense to try and put them in something as ugly as a text-based message. Your last in-person training was so actionable that you can tell precisely how many learners left with the intention to change their behavior, how many changed their behavior, and how their confidence in specific skills increased.

If this is the case, then you’re lucky (or exceedingly good at what you do). Because most “traditional” corporate learning has adoption and engagement rates of <20%. This means significantly fewer learners actually remember and apply what they learned.

For the rest of us mere mortals, there are other ways to reach learners that actually reliably drive adoption and engagement. And they don’t have anything to do with adding even more gamification, or cameo appearances in videos.

Our at-scale studies of engagement and adoption have shown that around 90% of learners who are pushed an SMS-based course (or other messaging-app equivalent) adopt and engage with the learning.

In short, if your learning adoption and engagement rates are 5x of average, you may not need Arist.

You can create and adapt training quickly enough to keep up with the world

The world isn’t evolving fast enough, amirite?

Your learning team has to seek out requests for learning experiences just to pass the time.

As hard as it is to believe, some learning teams have built enough agility to get to this point. Or rather, they’ve carved out enough time to catch their breath, recharge, and focus on higher-order problems.

They can deliver new learning quickly and affordably. They can reliably get in front of learners, gain and keep their attention, and get feedback on how the application of knowledge is going.

The trick: they meet learners where they spend their time. Err towards only sending actionable content. And remove frictions. They do all of this in a way that provides quick feedback for learning teams and learners.

Netflix has a content budget of billions. And some nights they can’t craft enough relevant content to keep viewers around. You simply can’t compete on relevancy, personalization, and ability to induce action with high-fidelity learner-“pulled” content.

With Arist, teams can launch courses in as little as 4 hours, and receive feedback in minutes. This helps teams keep up with the times so they have time to think about what matters.

In short, if your learning content is more relevant and enticing than Netflix’s, Arist might not be the right choice for you.

Related:

▶️ See how much money your learning team can save with our ROI calculator

You don’t need to support behavior change at scale

Let me guess, your learners who need the least help getting better at their roles are the learners who attend the most training. They don’t need much course marketing and actually seek out learning on their own. They see the value in building skills. They’re intentional around practicing.

If this is the only cohort you care about teaching, then great. There are a million learning resources online that can step self-motivated learners from beginner through to mastery. And your in-person sessions are sure to be incredibly engaging!

It would be a shame to limit lessons to brief actionable bites when these learners want to dedicate even more time to learning.

But it’s often not your “A Team” who are most at risk for low job engagement, churn, and risky behavior. Your low performers are often just as impactful to your bottom line as your high performers.

So how do you reach people across the organization?

You remove friction and meet them where they spend their time. For many teams, these are messaging apps like MS Teams, Slack, SMS, or WhatsApp.

And we mean literally meet them there.

No redirects to another platform. No learner app downloads. Just minding your own business within a messaging app and getting a contextually-relevant nudge that 80% of learners respond to in less than 3 minutes.

With all that said, if all your learners are incredibly self motivated and seek out training on their own, you don’t need Arist.

Your training is highly collaborative, technical, or both

You wouldn’t want to learn to fly a fighter jet with SMS (we wouldn’t want you to either). In-depth specialist training benefits from closer to 1:1 attention, simulators, mentorship, and deep dives into topics. In-person and VILT trainings are well established here.

Chances are, deep specialists in a field won’t have a problem with the motivation to learn. Explicit benefits like more opportunity and opportunities for higher pay take care of that.

With that said, 80% of workplace learning isn’t specialist training. It’s fundamental, and benefits from small moments of repeated practice, spaced repetition, and having simple actionable takeaways at your fingertips. Additionally, many learners may have trouble finding motivation for such fundamental learning. So it should be as easy as possible to participate in, delivered directly to when and where you need it.

In short, workflow learning isn’t good at:

• Practicing surgery

• Learning to fly a plane

• Practicing operating heavy machinery

Workflow learning is great at:

• Building collaboration

• Building soft skills

• Helping practice leadership

• Onboarding

• Building product knowledge for customer service representatives

• Compliance (yes, you can now legally gain compliance hours by SMS)

• Preparing a rapidly growing startup for hyper-scale

• Bringing learning to areas that need it most

• Among many others…

If all of your learning is for specialists who have no need for fundamental, practice-based skill growth, Arist isn’t for you.

You’re fine with learning metrics like “butts in seats”

Back in the day, we learned by copying what a teacher wrote on the chalk board. We recited second language phrases and historical dates as a group, repeatedly. Science be damned, that was how we learned. And we turned out just fine.

But that was before there were better things to do with your time. Before social media. Before you could drive. Before your parents transferred you to a better school. Before you needed to be updated on new phishing scams every quarter. And before you were required to really “do” anything.

School based learning is about preparing for the test. At work, the test is reliably doing an action well. Actions that time spent learning gets in the way of. So why would the metrics for these two processes the same at all?

In short, if “it’s the way things have always been done” is a good enough reason for L&D, Arist might not be the right choice for you.

Related:

▶️ Check out the new metrics of L&D

You don’t need a way to quickly update your entire workforce, nudge actions, or poll

When you have a timely communication, is it easy to get everyone’s attention? Do you like the feeling of sending custom-crafted, sweated-over information into the ether at scale only to never know what becomes of it?

The fact is, there aren’t any other tools for verified 1:1 comms that also track behavior outcomes on the market. So it’s pretty simple:

If you like not knowing who received or acted on org-wide communications, Arist might not be for you.

You don’t like to get sh*t done

Workplace learning isn’t about what you know, it’s about what you can quickly look up and what you can reliably do. And the best way for learning teams to support doing sh..tuff is to give learners what they need to know (think, actionable) and get out of the way.

We don’t mean radio silence. Small-form factor comms, nudges, and confidence checks are some of the most scientifically-backed methods of behavior change. But you shouldn’t be cramming hours of video content down anyone’s throat. Learners won’t remember it.  And chances are the actionable takeaways can be boiled down to a handful of minutes.

If you like your learning to be viewed as an ineffective use of time — or simply another thing on a todo list — Arist probably isn’t for you.

Related:
▶️ Text a course to yourself in seconds, start getting sh*t done