Top 5 Best Practices L&D Must Incorporate Into Their Strategy To Offer A Personalized Learning Experience To Learners

A Personalized Learning Experience Is The Norm
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Summary: Employees are now increasingly looking at a more personalized learning experience that is tailored to their needs, interests, and goals. It’s time for L&D to incorporate personalized learning in their L&D strategy, especially at this time when remote working is the new norm.

A Personalized Learning Experience Is The Norm Today

It’s a known fact that personalization is now an intrinsic part of routine life. Whether it is looking for movie or music recommendations, food options, or shopping choices, instant and personalized search results are the norm for everything. But this type of recommendation is not limited to just the consumer world.

When it comes to L&D too, personalization driven by advances in machine learning is bringing a revolution. Employees want learning that is specifically tailored to their needs, interests, and goals.

In fact, personalized learning is a critical mission for organizations to incorporate into their L&D strategy, especially at this time when remote working (or hybrid working in some cases) is the way for most. As per a Monster survey, 69% of employees are experiencing burnout while working from home. The more burnout employees experience, the less likely they are to be engaged, and thus, be less productive as well.

Providing a personalized learning experience through an LMS or LXP is a great way to re-engage workers, irrespective of their locations. Employees look forward to this kind of learning, with 80% of Gen Z-ers, 79% of millennials, and 77% of boomers saying they value personalized learning based on their career goals and skills gaps.

Best Practices For Personalized Learning

Here are some best practices that L&D teams can follow to bring personalized learning into learning programs:

1. Filter Through Learning And Provide Only What’s Best

There’s so much learning content out there, but the question is: Is all of it useful to every employee? Of course not! L&D teams should know how to cut through the noise by filtering through learning content and curating a learning experience based on employees’ roles and requirements.

It is also important to consult employees and consider their opinions, feedback, and suggestions. This will help you understand whether the chosen pool of content is what target learners need in their respective jobs. You need to also ensure that learning is in the flow of work so that engagement doesn’t end after learners have finished their required courses.

2. Leverage The Paybacks Of Social Learning

Managing learning schedules along with work schedules can surely get stressful. Giving employees the chance to interact with their peers and colleagues in an informal environment is a great way to reduce stress. Even as you introduce personalized learning, you can encourage collaborative learning by giving forums and platforms to learners where they can interact with others.

Communities of interest, discussion boards, etc., can be useful ways to implement social learning. Through such avenues, learners can share their key learnings from courses, interesting articles they’ve read, or recommend other online courses they’re assigned with.

3. Create Specific Training Paths

Another effective way of ensuring personalization in your training initiatives is by providing learners with specific training paths that focus on their roles, industry, business requirement, etc. Learners find this more relevant and useful. It also enhances their interest (and engages them better) when they realize that the courses they are investing time in will improve their daily work experiences.

By creating specific personalized learning paths, you can craft learning content based on the department that the learner belongs to. This means an employee from the sales department will be able to take training related to sales while an HR employee will be able to view training related to that field.

4. Utilize The Power Of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI works in a very effective manner in personalized training because it gives learners more control over their own learning. It helps learners ascertain the direction of learning they wish to take instead of having to follow pre-determined pathways.

It integrates employees’ training into the workflow and starts tracking their workplace behavior to create personalized training content. It also puts together data to determine the knowledge that learners have about specific skills upon which it develops a constantly evolving learning path for them.

5. Allow Self-Paced Learning 

Learners have a better learning experience when they are in control of the pace of their learning. So, while you as L&D will offer the general direction toward the learning, it is best to hand over the steering wheel to learners so that they get the much-needed focus.

An LMS is a great platform to help automate courses as well as personalize learning through technologies such as AI and machine learning. You can also introduce microlearning formats to deliver similar training.

Conclusion

At a time when upskilling and reskilling employees is a top priority for every organization, personalized learning is extremely beneficial to achieve this. It is vital in creating a relevant and more engaging learning experience for your learners. And the best time to make it a permanent part of your learning strategy is now!