No two employees learn alike.
That’s a daily dilemma for Learning & Development (L&D) leaders looking to increase engagement with training.
You don’t want your learning path to bore the more knowledgeable employees or overwhelm the less advanced.
And learning preferences vary. For example, some people favor audio content; others prefer visual support, while a number learn best when using their hands. Some may also prefer learning at their own pace, while others may prefer in-person training.
Furthermore, the stakes are high.
The C-suite expects you to expand workforce skills so your company can react quickly to valuable opportunities.
The good news is there’s one big factor in your favor:
Your employees’ no.1 motivation for learning is progress toward career goals.
By tapping into that drive, you can effectively respond to the needs of both your employees and executives. How?
With personalized training.
What is personalized training?
Every experience is better when it’s personalized.
When training is personalized, the employee is more engaged, retains the content better, and feels more satisfaction about their learning path.
To personalize training, adapt the following components of the learning path to the needs of the employee:
- Training content
- Learning environment
- Delivery method
Here are five ways you can do all of the above.
1. Perform a pre-training evaluation
Just like a tailor customizing your outfit, you need to take the “measurements” of the employee’s range of knowledge:
- What do they know?
- How do they learn best?
- What do they need to learn?
To get these answers efficiently, use the questionnaire tool of your learning management system (LMS) to create a pre-training test.
With test results in hand, enhance this portrait of the employee with the insights from your LMS’ analytics tool. From your employee’s history of training, you can extract hidden patterns and correlations in their learning behavior by tracking test results, course-completion rates, and so on.
Once you have a fuller portrait of the employee’s learning needs, you can begin to personalize their training path to respond to these needs.
2. Set the right balance of blended learning
With so many workplaces adopting hybrid work, it’s very likely your personalized training will be a blend of two modes of instruction: asynchronous (e-learning) and synchronous (in-person or online in real-time).
To get the blend right, your L&D team needs to answer certain questions:
- Given the demands of the training, what balance will best serve its objectives?
- What type of content can the instructor effectively deliver?
- What blend of learning accommodates the trainee best, given their location, availability, and needs?
Let’s say your team decides that it’s appropriate to be somewhat flexible in setting the blend. Giving your trainee a say in the blend will add to their sense of ownership of the training and help make them feel that their opinion is valued.
Keep in mind that some trainees may mistakenly believe that personalized training is purely self-directed. So it’s important that your team clarifies at the beginning of the personalized program which aspects are self-directed and which are not.
3. Include micro-learning in personalized training
By definition, personalized training covers only the knowledge or skills that a particular employee needs to learn: nothing more, nothing less. That’s why micro-learning could be particularly beneficial in personalizing training.
In micro-learning, a small learning module (often between two and seven minutes) focuses on teaching a concept to help the learner retain or review previously acquired knowledge.
Micro-learning is a great fit with personalized training because it’s:
- Customized to the employee’s needs
- Readily accessible with a click
- Intensely focused on the learning objective
- Easily repeatable if a concept needs more time to be acquired
The instant availability of micro-learning makes it handy for workers in the middle of a task or on the go (e.g., in the field). This quick access also helps counter the “forgetting curve,” which trainees typically experience when training is not reinforced in a thoughtful way.
4. Take advantage of social learning
One of the ways we learn is by watching and imitating others, i.e., social learning. Learning this way, trainees retain information better because they associate all the particularities of the real-life situation (e.g., voice pitch, images, memories) with the learning acquired.
To benefit from the engagement potential of social learning, design your course to take full advantage of your LMS tools, such as easy access to live video-conferencing with chat, Q&A, polls, and whiteboard features.
For example, live video-conferencing empowers the instructor to interact instantly in audio-visual form with the trainees and provide personalized feedback, answers, and support.
Your trainees can also interact instantly with the instructor and their peers through a voice channel, break-out room, or group chat.
Breakout rooms are particularly valuable for grouping trainees according to their learning objectives and current knowledge.
In addition, the instructor can vary the interaction by using quizzes and polls to connect with the employees.
5. Personalize the learning environment and delivery method
Full-fledged personalized training also includes customizing the learning environment and content delivery.
More and more employees are accessing their training on mobile devices. As a result, the design of online training is evolving toward a mobile-first presentation.
Since your trainees will access their training anytime, anywhere, your LMS needs to present this mobile content effectively, no matter what medium it comes in (e.g., audio, video, PowerPoint, SCORM, and so on).
Furthermore, your LMS should not create barriers to learning. So your LMS interface should please the eye, be intuitive to use, easy to learn, and eliminate any obstacle to learning.
To tap into all the engagement potential of personalized training, you’ll need an LMS with a multi-faceted functionality that enables you to do the following:
- Develop and manage personalized training paths.
- Benefit from powerful analytics.
- Offer a flexible test tool.
- Integrate seamlessly a live video-conferencing application with a group chat.
- Present an intuitive, easy-to-learn, mobile-first interface, readily accessible from any Internet connection.
If you’d like to explore further the possibilities of personalized training with the right LMS, we’d be happy to help.
