In today’s time, all aspects of your daily life are getting more personalized than ever. Your social media feed shows the content that you would most likely to engage. Entertainment has become on-demand as online streaming apps automatically suggest the content based on your personal preferences. Personalization is impacting the way we learn, interact with our employers, and develop work expectations.
This trend is also impacting corporate learning as personalized training programs are getting better traction than the traditional approach. Today, employees have become accustomed to personalization in everything; be it learning, shopping, and entertainment. So, when your learners are consuming information in a personalized way; then why not create a training program that connects with them personally?
You can use these five simple hacks to personalize your training program:
Perform Learners’ Analytics
Use the learning analytics to understand your employee’s learning behavior and categorize them to deliver the content that is personalized and relevant to their needs. Following are the methods to perform learners’ analytics:
- Surveys: It can make a significant impact on the direction of your training program. By using surveys, you can find out their opinions and determine what they expect from your training program.
- Age group/qualification analysis: Different employees have different levels of learning ability and proficiency. Analyse their personas and identify their demographics like their age, qualification, and learning history to design your training with a more personalized approach.
- Work function analysis: A sales manager will have different learning needs than a product manager. Outline your training by focusing on job-specific goals and success metrics for better personalization.
- Feedback: A regular feedback helps you to understand your learners’ needs and assists you define the effectiveness of your training. Instant feedback is the best way to continuously improve your training and create a personalized learning environment in your company.
Give Freedom To Choose Learning Path
Personalized learning is all about giving your learners an option to pick what works best for them, thus allowing them to learn at their own pace. Give your employees the freedom to decide their learning path and let them choose their preference for a course and its completion time. When you give them control over such training aspects, they learn faster, retain new knowledge longer, and perform better. In result, freedom of choice reduces their apathy and motivates them to engage with the training more frequently and personally.
Connect Learning Outcomes with Work Performance
The primary objective of any training program is creating a learning environment and helping your employees to improve their performance. Therefore, you need to align learning outcomes with the on-job performance of your learners. When you create a link between their performance and training outcomes, it makes them aware of their strong and weak points. This personalized approach helps them to improve regularly and establishes the relevance of your training concerning their job responsibilities and work performance.
Apply Mentor-Mentee Approach
Whatever your training goals are, creating a structured mentoring program is an effective way to reap better results and improve employee performance. You can assign a mentor to every employee to ensure their individual learning difficulties are handled at a personal level. By considering the training goals, you can match the mentor and mentee based upon the desired outcomes. For example, if the goal is management training, then assign a mentor who is the department head. The relationship between mentors and mentees takes place gradually, but the result is truly beneficial for your organization.
Leverage Technology
An effective training helps your employees to grow and remain competitive. Therefore, you need to adapt to their needs and provide them with a personalized learning experience by leveraging the right technology. Using technologies like LMS, gamification, and mobile learning app, you can drive the training in the right direction with the more personalized approach:
- Adaptive learning path: You can create individual learning paths in LMS using the content based on individual characteristics of a learner. It allows the learners to follow their own route within that pre-defined learning path. It is like adapting the learning path to their personal learning needs.
- Gamification: Game-based learning allows learners to control their own learning experience. It makes learning more fun, increases retention, and boosts competitiveness spirit among employees. With gamification elements like Leaderboard, badges, and game challenges, you can make your training more personalized and successful.
- Mobile apps for microlearning: A training with small learning nuggets typically witnesses double completion rates. As smartphones have become omnipresent, a mobile learning app can add many advantages to your training. You can push notifications for new courses, enable cloud distribution, and deliver microlearning content directly to their pockets.
The world is moving from traditional whole day training sessions to using technologies that deliver learning material to the individuals in a personalized way. For each job role, you need to map out all skills that an employee should possess and personalized learning helps you to do that more practically.
Produced this blog for Shezartech, a technology solutions and digital marketing company headquartered in Mumbai, India.
