When something’s described as all-purpose, it’s often a misnomer. Whether it’s for flour, cleaning products or tools, we’ve all experienced a time that using all-purpose meant the final outcome was at best not what we expected, at worse, a little disastrous. The same goes for employee learning and development, and its direct impact the employee experience.
Everyone has unique learning preferences, styles, and motivations that contribute to effective knowledge acquisition, retention and skill development, making a one-size-fits-all approach to learning both unproductive and unprofitable. To help your employees reach their full potential and foster a successful business, it's crucial to adopt tailored, personalized learning experiences that cater to their specific needs and goals.
In this article, we’ll cover:
- The role personalized learning can play in supporting employee motivation, engagement, and knowledge retention.
- The impact personal learning can have on organizational success.
- How a learning management system (LMS) can help streamline the delivery of personalized learning and create an effective, learner-centric environment.
What is personalized learning?
Personalized learning is a training and development approach that tailors instruction, pace, and content to meet the individual needs of each learner. It involves using technology, data, and tailored instruction methods to customize the learning experience for learners. Allowing them to learn at their own pace and in ways that suit their unique learning style and preferences. This approach aims to promote learner engagement, motivation, and ultimately, improved learning outcomes.
What are some of the benefits of personalized learning?
Through personalized learning, employees can focus on developing specific skills and knowledge relevant to their roles and career aspirations, leading to improved skill development and expertise. Employees can access learning content and resources that align with their career aspirations, helping them to pursue personalized career development paths within the organization.
Equipped with personalized training, employees are likely to perform better, leading to increased productivity and improved business outcomes. Moreover, this approach can optimize training budgets by focusing resources on targeted skill development, making it a cost-effective solution for businesses.
Ultimately, personalized learning creates a more dynamic, adaptable, and skilled workforce, better positioned to adapt to industry changes and new technologies.
What impact can personalized learning have on employee motivation?
When it comes to adult learning, you can't rely on external motivators like a grade, or a gold star. To deliver effective L&D, you need to find a way to tap into your learners own intrinsic motivations. While all learners are unique, it's a safe bet that they all care about their own career path.
So, if you can create learning paths that are specific to each learner and aligned with their existing ‘why’, you don’t have to struggle to motivate them. You can just tap into what’s already there. By articulating how learning will help them get from A to B to C, you’ll boost motivation and enhance knowledge retention. Ultimately leading to improved employee experience and performance.
By addressing individual job motivators and preferences, L&D teams can help create highly effective learning and development programs.
Here are some actionable tips and examples for motivating employees with personalized learning:
- Set clear goals and objectives: Clearly defining learning goals helps employees understand the purpose of the training and the expected outcomes, making the experience more meaningful and relevant. For example, when introducing a new sales training module, clearly communicate how it will help improve sales techniques, resulting in better performance and potentially higher commissions for participants.
- Offer flexibility and choice: Allowing employees to choose their preferred learning methods and pacing fosters a sense of autonomy and self-direction. For instance, an organization can offer various eLearning formats, such as on-demand video lessons, interactive simulations, and live webinars, so learners can select the approach that suits them best.
- Recognize and reward achievements: Celebrating accomplishments, such as completing a course or earning a certification, can boost employee morale and motivation. Organizations can offer incentives like certificates, badges, or even monetary rewards to acknowledge employee efforts and learning achievements.
What impact can personalized learning have on employee engagement?
No one looks forward to the annual company-wide security training, and employees take it begrudgingly after the seventh reminder because it’s mandatory (even though we strongly believe that mandatory training doesn’t have to mean boring.) If your learners feel this way about your optional programs too, you’ll struggle to get them involved.
Even though many people will consider themselves lifelong learners, when it comes to learning in the workplace no one has the time to learn things just for the love of learning. You have to answer the question: ‘What’s in it for me?’ and provide an environment where they can choose when, where and how they learn. Putting learners in the driver’s seat when it comes to their own development.
With learning paths that are tailored to each learner’s development, you’re giving employees a sense of control and ownership over their learning, and this proactivity leads to increased commitment, connection and engagement.
Here are some tips for engaging your employees with personalized learning:
- Provide continuous feedback and support: Offering timely, constructive feedback and support can be an effective means to improve performance and increase motivation in employees. A manager can set up regular check-in sessions with employees to review their progress, provide feedback, and discuss any challenges or concerns. Touchpoints like these are great opportunities to give clarity around role expectations and build connections with an employer’s mission or purpose.
- Align learning with career growth: Aligning learning initiatives with individual career aspirations can significantly increase motivation and performance. For example, an employee aspiring to become a team leader may be more engaged in leadership and management courses that prepare them for a future role.
- Address skill gaps: Personalized learning can help employees address their specific skill gaps, boosting their confidence and self-esteem. Let's say your learner is a finance professional struggling with advanced data analysis software. A customized learning module designed to help hone-in on data analysis can create confidence in a once weak skill set. Equipping your team with skills to achieve their best work benefits the learners confidence, performance, and can positive impact business.
Leave them wanting more: Boost learner engagement
What impact can personalized learning have on knowledge acquisition and retention?
We’ve covered the way personalized learning helps solve the why, and the what elements of employee learning and development, and now we have the how.
Retention is a challenge for all L&D teams, after all if learners don’t retain what they’ve learned, the learning program can’t be considered a success. Relevance and repetition are the ultimate engagement combination, and ensuring that learners can put their learning to use is key to improving knowledge acquisition and retention in your learner base. If you’ve ever learned a new language, you’ll understand the merits of the 'little and often' approach, versus one that’s lengthy and ad-hoc.
Consistent practice of knowledge and skills that can then be applied in a professional setting is directly linked to knowledge retention. And the adaptive nature of personalized learning ensures that learners can revisit and reinforce key concepts as needed, promoting a deeper and more enduring understanding of the material.
Here are some tips for ways to optimize knowledge acquisition and retention with personalized learning:
- Encourage self-directed learning: Empower learners to take ownership of their learning by encouraging them to pursue topics of interest and explore resources beyond the standard curriculum.
- Adaptive assessments based on level and progress: Create learning programs that offer the right balance between challenging and attainable goals. If the learning content is too difficult, employees can feel overwhelmed or frustrated, if it's too easy, they can become unengaged. Strike the right balance, with adaptive assessments that dynamically adjust difficulty based on the learner's performance.
- Offer continuous assessments: A recommended best practice is to always offer a next step in the learning journey. Whether it’s a formative assessment, a bite sized video, peer-to-peer knowledge sharing or gamified elements, such as leaderboards, points, and badges, to create a learning environment that stimulates employee interest.
Scale personalized learning through AI
How can you cost-effectively create an adaptive learning environment for all employees to improve their professional skills in a way that drives performance and growth? Especially one that is learner-driven? As we’ve covered, the key to effective L&D strategies is tapping into your learners’ internal motivators, and AI-powered learning paths offer a solution to this challenge.
AI personalization: Closing the skills gaps with custom learning paths
Personalized learning like this is far from being a new concept. But for years organizations could only do it for their senior leadership team because it was so resource intensive. So, along with content creation, AI is helping to streamline the process; democratizing and scaling learning path development to bring it to the masses.
With AI you can adapt various aspects of the learning process—including the pace of learning, the selection and quality of training materials, the sequencing of topics, the technologies used for learning, and the instructional methods—to align with each learner’s preferences and objectives. This ensures the experience is customized to suit every learner’s specific needs and goals.
AI is quickly becoming essential in customizing the journey for every learner at scale, enabling L&D teams to modify learning experiences to cater to the unique goals and interests of each learner.
Those are just some of the reasons that AI in corporate training is on the rise. But there are many others, like:
- Support for adaptive learning styles: AI can monitor learner interactions with course materials and media to identify how they most effectively absorb information, and then customize how content is presented, to ensure it matches everyone’s preferred learning style.
- Personalized recommendations: By analyzing extensive data sets consisting of a learner’s previous coursework, levels and their professional interests and objectives, AI tools can create highly customized recommendations for learning resources.
- Revealing new insights: By examining how your learners learn, AI can highlight areas where additional support is needed or pinpoint topics that captivate their interests.
- Natural language processing: AI-powered intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants can engage in meaningful conversations with learners. From responding to inquiries, clarifying concepts, giving feedback, and even participating in discussions that enrich the development journey.
Drive business growth through personalized learning
Personalized learning plays a pivotal role in driving business growth by focusing on three key aspects. First, by tailoring learning experiences to individual employee needs, businesses can witness a significant boost in employee performance and productivity. This approach allows employees to develop skills and knowledge that are directly relevant to their roles, leading to improved job performance and enhanced productivity.
Second, using personalized learning programs demonstrates a commitment to employee development, which can be a powerful incentive for attracting and retaining top talent. Businesses that invest in personalized learning send a clear message to potential hires that they value the growth and progress of their employees. This, in turn, helps in attracting high-performing individuals and fosters a sense of loyalty and commitment among existing employees.
Finally, personalized learning aligns an individual learner’s objectives with the overarching goals and objectives of the organization. By customizing learning pathways to focus on the skills and competencies required to fulfill organizational objectives, businesses can ensure that the entire workforce is contributing to the realization of strategic goals. This targeted approach to learning facilitates the development of a workforce that is actively engaged in achieving organizational success.
Leverage an LMS to measure the impact of personalized learning
To evaluate the effectiveness of personalized learning strategies should continuously measure and analyze the outcomes. Key performance indicators, such as course completion rates, time spent on learning, and assessment scores, can provide valuable insights into employees' levels of engagement and motivation. Regularly reviewing employee feedback and considering relevant qualitative data can also help you fine-tune your learning strategies and better align them with employee motivations.
In the long term you should benchmark your progress with questions such as:
- Are you filling skills gaps across your organization?
- Has learner engagement increased across optional programs?
- Has overall learner sentiment improved?
- Are you seeing increased internal mobility with the development of tailored learning paths?
- Are you seeing improved retention rates?
Provide personalized learning experiences for all your learners with Absorb LMS
Absorb LMS plays a vital role in delivering personalized learning experiences by providing a centralized platform for organizing, delivering, and tracking personalized learning content.
- Absorb Skills facilitates the creation of personalized learning paths tailored to individual employees' needs. It offers a wide range of content types, including videos, interactive modules, and assessments, to curate personalized learning experiences based on specific learning objectives, job roles, and skill gaps.
- Absorb Amplify gives learners access to content libraries at their own pace and convenience, promoting self-directed learning. Learners can navigate through personalized learning modules, complete assessments, and track their progress, creating a flexible and adaptive learning environment.
- Absorb Analyze provides administrators with data and insights on individual learner performance and preferences, facilitating the refinement and adaptation of personalized learning plans.
By understanding and addressing employee motivations, leveraging job motivators, and creating a workplace environment conducive to learning and growth, organizations can harness the potential of all their workforce. Personalized learning via AI-powered learning paths offers effectively support employee motivations, drive engagement, and ultimately enhance organizational success.
We're ready to help you incorporate personalized learning experiences into your learning and development programs so you can experience peak performance. With powerful analytics, intuitive interface, and extensive customization capabilities, Absorb simplifies the process of creating tailored learning experiences that cater to your employees' motivations and preferences.
