Did you know that 74% of employees today are ready to retrain and learn new skills to remain employable?
Learning and development have always been important in the workplace. However, modern times call for more flexibility in these employee training programs. One reason is that the tough competition makes employability a challenge for those seeking work.
How does an employee training program cater to this demand? In addition to providing training that helps employees serve the organization better, you should consider personalized training to allow your employees to keep themselves relevant and learn on their own terms.
Let’s see how you can create a robust and effective personalized employee training program.
What is Personalization in Employee Training?
Employee training personalization is the practice of allowing employees to craft their own learning paths at your company. They allow employees to learn according to their unique needs and styles.
As opposed to taking a uniform, standardized training approach, personalized training is dynamic and adapts to the employee’s personal learning needs.
For example, say that a call agent at a contact center has an excellent understanding of CRM software. However, they struggle with communication skills, which inevitably causes them to fall short of their targets. Now, a traditional training program would have them undergo standard, all-rounded contact center training.
On the other hand, a personalized approach would adapt to the employee’s lack of communication skills and lay more emphasis on this particular module instead of wasting their time on the CRM course, which they are already good at.
Learning communication skills through this personalized training helps them perform better not only for this company but also everywhere else in their personal life where communication is required.
The way personalized training works is really simple. The training modules are organized logically, with each phase building on the previous one. Assessing the performance of an employee on each module, the next training is personalized to help them progress equally in all aspects of their skills and talents.
Why is Learning Personalization Important in the Workplace?
A PwC report highlights that it is impossible to predict the kind of skills and talent that would be needed at a company five years from now. For this reason, it is crucial to equip your workforce with the tools they need to make themselves as updated and relevant in terms of skills as possible.
Organizations need to step up and facilitate personalized training to prepare their workforce for the future.
Five other key reasons make personalized employee training a critical urgency today:
Customized learning: Personalized training focuses on the skills that employees lack to help them gain what they need from a training program.
Skill development: Employee progress, when it comes to competency and personal development, is enhanced.
Retention and application: Personalized training enables employees to learn the skills they lack. They can apply them to their work, which drives better retention and performance.
Motivation and engagement: Customized learning paths keep employees engaged and self-motivated throughout the program.
Flexibility and adaptability: Personalized programs are dynamic and adapt to the learner’s progress, enabling a more rewarding outcome.
Understanding the Components of Personalized Learning
According to a recent LinkedIn report, one of the top five areas of focus in L&D for 2024 is helping employees develop their careers. The same report also emphasizes that 90% of organizations are worried about employee turnover and that improving learning opportunities is the leading retention strategy.
Personalizing employee training helps with improving employee retention and providing your employees with an opportunity to grow on their own terms. Here are the five components you need to understand:
1. Learner Profiles
The most crucial aspect of creating a personalized learning path is first creating a learner profile. A learner profile consists of the learner’s details, including their learning background, strengths and weaknesses, preferences, growth goals, and all the relevant assessments and evaluations.
The information in these profiles helps trainers or AI-based training programs create the right learning journeys for employees. Without learner profiles, it isn’t easy to understand how an employee wishes to progress their skills or what their learning goals are.
2. Customized Learning Paths
A traditional employee training program has a standard learning path for all its participants. However, personalized training has individualized learning journeys. This individualization of each learning path empowers employees to take the training according to their own specific needs.
It saves them from having to attend the courses they are already good at and allows them to focus on the skills they lack and would like to polish.
A customized learning path lays out the entire roadmap for each employee, including the goals they have set and the milestones they have reached. It is a great way to enhance your employees’ time to proficiency.
3. Progression-Based Competency
A personalized training program uses competency models to mark progress. This means that the training will progress only when an employee has reached a desired level of competency in a skill. This is far more effective than the traditional approach, where a course progresses regardless of how many employees can get the basics right.
The progression is designed to be individual-focused, empowering the employees to keep practicing and learning until their competency has actually advanced.
4. Data-Driven Instruction
Data is the key component of all personalized employee training. Consider implementing AI-based data collation and analysis across your L&D to create a database of learner profiles.
This would help you get a bird’ s-eye view of the information regarding screening, reviews, learning assessments, training results, progress percentages, dropouts, and all the other key metrics that your L&D department tracks.
This data helps with understanding how your employees are personalizing their journeys and how it is impacting your company.
5. Flexibility
Personalization in learning also involves making the learning environment flexible for the employees. Today, you can utilize digital means to make training accessible on any device and from anywhere.
Consider a cloud-based personalized training that your employees can access even while they are at home or traveling. This way, they can make better use of their time.
A flexible learning environment helps create autonomy in the process, which is beneficial for engagement and retention.
Bonus: Did you know that in 2023, 40% of respondents admitted to increasing their training expenditures compared to 2022?
7 Simple Steps to Create Personalized Employee Training Paths
You can create a personalized learning path by careful consideration of seven distinct phases. However, even before that, you need to understand what personalized employee training looks like.
A great example of personalized training is providing your employees with options in the learning content. Instead of mandating static training, leverage L&D analytics to understand how each employee learns.
Based on these data, facilitate course content and options on your employees’ dashboards that allow them to choose what they wish to learn, when, and how (through video, slides, documentation, etc.).
Once you have an understanding of what personalized training is, you can start with the blueprint:
Step 1: Identify Learner Groups
The key component of any personalized employee training is the learner profile. Therefore, begin with identifying the learner profiles that exist at your organization. Begin by segregating the profiles based on roles and expertise. You can further categorize learners based on the levels of their expertise and the niche skill requirement.
In this way, create the key learner groups for which you would need to provide personalized training resources that target their niche and job role requirements. It helps you create tailored learning experiences that empower the workforce to perform better.
Step 2: Conduct an Assessment
You now need to understand the skill level of the learner groups you created in the previous phase. Assess each learner group on their skills, expertise, and talent to identify the knowledge and skill gaps that exist. These gaps are the problem you need to address through training personalization.
By focusing on the skill and knowledge gaps in each learner group, you can clearly identify the resources and guidance required to bridge them. It helps you create effective, impactful learning pathways that leave no stone unturned.
Step 3: Set Learning Objectives
No training progresses effectively without an end goal in mind. Set clear objectives from your personalization efforts that align with not only the business goals but the employee goals as well.
For example, the goal of a sales department is usually to make more sales. However, if a sales representative doesn’t know how to use the CRM properly, it is going to be a hindrance to themselves and to the company’s bottom line. Identify this gap and provide personalized CRM training to the sales representative to make progress.
Bonus: According to this CIPD report, in 2023, organizations’ top three workplace learning objectives were achieving growth targets, reducing costs, and increasing productivity.
Step 4: Review Existing Training
If you already have an existing L&D program at your company, you need to review the training materials available for their relevance to the learner groups. Thoroughly assess each training resource to identify whether it can be reused, updated, or needs to be discarded.
Once you have reviewed the existing materials, you need to gain access to the content that fills the gaps you identified in the needs assessment. You can either create your own content, outsource it to a professional agency, or acquire it in partnership with providers of employee training experience modules.
Bonus: According to Corndel insights, 33% of the employees have noticed a change in skill needs because of the Coronavirus pandemic.
Step 5: Choose the Modes
How will you disseminate the personalized employee training? Organizations today create dedicated employee portals from where they can access their learning journeys and pick up where they left off. This is a form of eLearning that the employees can access from their homes or during travel as well.
You can also explore the benefits of OTJ (On-the-Job training), which creates a more interactive, engaging learning environment for employees. Other methods you can explore are virtual meets or live training sessions.
Step 6: Design a Personalization Plan
To design a personalization plan, you need to have a bird’s eye view of all the learner groups, organizational goals, departmental objectives, learning needs, and skill gaps you have identified.
A personalization plan carefully maps each of these aspects to create a cohesive curriculum that is adaptable, dynamic, and considerate. You also need to identify specific metrics to track the effectiveness of this personalization plan so that it can be changed if the results are not up to par.
Step 7: Track, Evaluate, Review, Iterate
Not all the learner groups will benefit the same way from the personalized training. Identify the metrics to track the success of training for each group and pinpoint the problem areas of training through a thorough evaluation.
You then need to review the training materials and resources to adjust for better performance and outcomes. To achieve the desired outcomes from personalized employee training, you need to iterate on this process.
Consider gathering feedback on the personalized modules from your employees to understand how you can improve them. It also helps you gauge how your organization is benefitting from the personalization.
Benefits of Personalized Employee Training
Converting standard training into personalized experiences helps you create a stronger workforce that is adaptive and more committed to their work. There are five key benefits you can expect from personalized employee training:
1. Enhanced Engagement
Content personalization enhances employee engagement by providing them with the learning paths they require. It creates ownership of the learning path, helping employees stay self-motivated throughout the journey. This helps the employees feel like the time they spent on learning was worthwhile and they could learn something useful in return.
Since personalization also draws from contextual work, it helps employees stay engaged because they learn how to improve their day-to-day work.
2. Better Retention
It is no surprise that the human mind quickly forgets what is taught in class. The same applies to employee training, even more so if the courses provided are static and standard.
Personalized learning journeys help employees take accountability for their skill level and improvement, which enhances the amount of retention and recall they experience during learning sessions and after.
Personalization builds on the existing skillsets and levels, helping employees improve by considering their preferences and learning styles, naturally creating better retention.
3. Boosted Training ROI
Most employees treat mandatory training as something they have to do to keep their jobs. Traditional training modules do little to help employees truly grasp the skills being imparted.
However, with personalized training, the employees experience the benefits firsthand and in a tailored way, too. This enhances the takeaways from each training session, which in turn improves their skills and performance on the job. The overall ROI is better from personalized training than a standard one.
4. Targeted, Relevant Training
Personalization is ultimately done to improve the relevance of training for individual employees. This makes the training highly targeted and more relevant to the employee taking it.
Personalized training improves training participation and addresses individual skill gaps that affect employees’ work. It targets specific areas of weakness to strengthen the workforce.
5. Improved Employee Satisfaction
Personalized training is more rewarding for the employees. This is because they can pace their courses and choose what they learn, how they learn it, and when they learn it. The level of training is set at their own progress rate, which helps them retain better and find opportunities to apply the training to their work. This fosters better employee satisfaction from each training delivered.
Creating Adaptive, Personalized Learning Paths for The Workforce
According to the LinkedIn report, C-suite leaders today agree that L&D deserves dedicated investment. The learning culture at organizations now focuses on retention as the foremost aspect, with a 57% share. Internal mobility is the next priority, at 23%.
Personalization of employee training empowers employees to expand their skills, making them more employable. It reinforces their internal mobility where they become capable of filling in more roles or taking on new responsibilities.
Personalization thus strongly supports employee versatility. In the midst of all this, organizations are using AI to create adaptive, personalized courses by partnering with vendors like Engagedly.
Engagedly provides a full-width employee experience platform that AI powers and empowers you to connect L&D with analytics, rewards, and performance. Create more holistically personalized employee training with Engagedly today. Connect with us to explore more.
FAQs
1. How can technology help personalize employee training?
Technology can help with creating learner groups, data collation, and analysis to create a personalized learning plan for employees and learner groups.
2. What is the difference between personalized learning and traditional employee training?
Traditional employee training requires employees to go through a standardized course module that contains static learning contents. On the other hand, a personalized course adapts the learning content based on the employees’ skill levels and pace.
3. Is there any challenge to implementing personalized training?
Yes, you may face challenges with resource allocation and data privacy. You may also find it difficult to integrate new technologies. Your employees may not readily welcome the new training methodologies.
Srikant Chellappa is the Co-Founder and CEO at Engagedly and is a passionate entrepreneur and people leader. He is an author, producer/director of 6 feature films, a music album with his band Manchester Underground, and is the host of The People Strategy Leaders Podcast. He is currently working on his next book, Ikigai at the Workplace, which is slated for release in the fall of 2024.