The year 2020 has been a year of a paradigm shift in the working environments, leading to the rise of remote work across organizations globally. This shift has also led to the need for employees to learn faster and without much oversight in order to meet business goals and adapt to a rapidly changing work environment. However, in this age of remote work, traditional e-learning methods with non-interactive and impersonal interfaces have lost their relevance. These also suffer from poor completion rates, waning user interest, and are highly passive in nature.

What’s needed now are learning interventions that are self-propelled requiring minimum interference, are interactive and can engage users, and can be implemented at scale. It is with this motive of driving experiential learning at scale that Enparadigm recently launched CatalyX- a self-learning suite with experiential digital simulations covering the essential competencies. CatalyX brings highly engaging, immersive, and experiential simulations to cover the essentials like-delegation, feedback, finance basics, customer centricity, ownership, collaboration, team management, and improving sales pitch.

The CatalyX suite encompasses a host of simulation modules that boil down competencies to the essentials with each module covering atomic topics with ready to apply insights. The modules are self-paced, of short duration, and leverage storytelling and experiential format wherein users go through a number of scenarios in order to understand where their skills and behaviors fall on the spectrum of ideal vs practical. 

Speaking on the launch, John Cherian, Co-founder of Enparadigm stated, “One of the major pitfalls of traditional e-learning is the rampant netflixing of the platforms. Hours and hours of video lectures, life-time subscriptions, loads of generic content, limited user interaction, and not a whole lot of experience that learners can take back and apply in the real world. I guess the intention is to make people binge on learning. Except that people don't binge on learning, they binge on entertainment."

"CatalyX was conceptualized to fill these gaps. We have been doing simulations for years. But with CatalyX we bring the best of simulations, while accommodating the modern workforce’s expectations about the experience, learning by doing, and immediacy. Quality experiential learning at scale - this has long been L&D’s unfulfilled promise. CatalyX is a step in that direction," he added.

Real-time experiential learning with real-time analytics

Learning simulations have been in vogue for quite some time now and their primary benefits include a user-friendly interface, the ability to make the learner feel at home by mimicking a real-world environment, and the ability to enable the user to learn through trial and error.

CatalyX with its modern intuitive UI and thoughtful storylines that ingeniously balance narrative with learning takeaways brings the best of simulations to L&D. The real-world scenarios bring learners closer to their challenges in the real world, giving them an ample scope of making mistakes and learning from them in the process, thus facilitating truly experiential learning. 

But in addition to its inventive deployment of Scenario-based learning, CatalyX distinguishes itself by acing the two foremost demands of L&D for learning platforms - scale and data. 

CatalyX can be deployed independently in minutes on scale. Companies have the option to choose from an array of simulation modules or go for the entire set. Even better CatalyX has been built to allow for seamless and quick integration with the native LMS/LXP, if the need arose. Learners have the freedom of single window login from anywhere and anytime, so they can choose the when and where of their learning according to their convenience.

On the data front, CatalyX comes with a comprehensive dashboard so managers have easy access to real-time user analytics to understand various metrics of engagement, learner interest, and behavior change. Data points captured in CatalyX give managers a bird’s eye view of employee engagement, learner progress and behaviors while gathering user metrics to identify skill gaps for making crucial decisions about learning strategy within their organizations.

 Notable features include-

• A single window login from a user’s device anytime, anywhere
• Simulation scenarios that mimic real-life business situations
• A real-time comprehensive scenario-wise synopsis of user’s decisions during simulations
• Feedback after every scenario enabling quick, flexible, and contextualized learning
• Nifty dashboards for crucial data insights about learner engagement, progress, and behavior
• Easy integration with an organization’s existing LMS/LXP platforms.

From skilling a distributed workforce to rolling out a new competency framework

When it comes to use cases for CatalyX, they enable the L&D function of any organization to address everything from skilling to engagement to driving learning at scale to cutting costs to future planning.

Take for instance the challenge of skilling a highly distributed workforce-a result of the pandemic. Consequently, people needed to work with more autonomy, mastery, and purpose, and they needed to quickly imbibe crucial learning inputs and become fit to deliver. CatalyX’s quick integration to native LMS/LXP can help boost these critical competencies like ownership, collaboration, delegation, and customer-centricity for a large workforce spread out geographically.

In addition,  L&D functions in general struggle with the abysmally low completion rates on traditional e-learning platforms amongst employees. By banking on competency specific simulation modules, straight to the point concepts, instant application to real-life work scenarios, and real-time feedback, CatalyX aims to tackle the problem of engagement, consumption, and application.

The Road Ahead

The recently launched modules which focus on soft skills include Verve for demonstrating ownership at work, Eureka for customer centricity, Nurture for efficient delegation, to name a few. Over the next 12 months, the self-learning platform will be adding 15 new modules addressing crucial workplace competencies, enabling the L&D function to cover a wider and deeper gamut of employee learning. 

In addition, as part of the Catalyx roadmap, other than building simulations and interactive learning elements at scale, the focus would be on three key areas over the next few months :

● Advanced Analytics - This helps HR’s drive learning consumption and engagement and in the process, achieve better RoI.

● Adaptive Learning - Enhancing AI capabilities and personalization of feedback reports for effective learning and its application at work

● Accessibility - This involves quick integrations for ease of access and deployment

As part of this three-pronged focus, CatalyX has already taken up initiatives like integrating the platform with client systems using single sign-on, making the platform compliant with GDPR and other standards, updating the dashboards, and so on. 

As we step into the second year of the pandemic there is a realization that organizations increasingly need to explore newer approaches to make learning not only relevant but also much more engaging. It will be interesting to see how this refreshing take on deploying simulations for learning would fare amidst the rising competition between players offering alternatives to overcome the common platitudes of the e-learning space.

For more details on CatalyX, click here.