Personalizing Professional Development: What You Need to Know

Learning and development (L&D) teams must ensure that employees are receiving essential workforce training, but one-size-fits-all learning programs can make L&D professionals feel like they’re the “learning police” within their organizations. While some employees will complete required compliance training courses as soon as they’re assigned, many will need to be reminded and encouraged to finish their learning modules. This leads managers, trainers, and other L&D professionals to spend more time tracking course completion statistics and less time developing high-quality training materials.

Fortunately, L&D teams have options that can help them meet their course completion goals without feeling like they’re policing their colleagues. Taking a personalized approach to professional learning empowers employees to develop their skills in a way that’s relevant and meaningful to them while still ensuring they’re staying compliant with organizational and industry standards. Giving your employees access to training materials with a direct connection to their job responsibilities can help them be more engaged with their learning.

This article, based on a previously published webinar, explains how personalizing corporate learning benefits both your employees as individuals and your organization as a whole.

What Is Personalized Professional Learning?

It’s easy to see the term “personalized learning” and assume that everyone gets to choose whichever courses they want, but personalizing professional development isn’t meant to be a free-for-all. It doesn’t mean giving your workforce unfettered access to content unrelated to their career pathways or your skills needs.

Instead, personalized professional learning is about giving your workforce meaningful and useful skills development journeys. In addition to your employees’ roles, you’re considering factors like prior knowledge, background, and current skill sets in order to give them the courses they need in order to do their jobs effectively. This could mean assigning more training content to entry-level staff while giving more experienced employees an opportunity to “opt out” of some courses based on their advanced skill level.

READ MORE ABOUT PERSONALIZED LEARNING | ‘How to Create & Track Customized Training Programs With Your Corporate LMS’

How Can Organizations Successfully Implement Personalized Professional Learning?

Moving to a personalized learning strategy is typically possible with your existing L&D toolkit, and one of the easiest things you can do is give your workforce more choices. For example, embracing microlearning in your content development strategy can help personalize your employees’ learning experiences, and this can be done with the L&D tools you already have.

Breaking down longer SCORMs into smaller topics can make training content more accessible and manageable for employees. Everyone is busy, and finding time for workforce training can be challenging. Presenting essential training content in easily digestible formats makes it easier for busy workers to find time to complete training at their own pace. They’re still getting the necessary information, but it’s happening without disrupting their daily workflows.

There’s also no reason to completely redesign or redevelop learning environments that currently work. It’s important to gradually add components of personalized learning into your training approach. Change management matters, and most learners wouldn’t react well to being faced with a completely redesigned learning environment overnight. Leave content that works alone (for now), and focus on adding personalized learning options to content that’s already scheduled for updating. As materials become outdated, continue to add more microlearning and other options to update your content library.

Redesigning learning incrementally also gives you the opportunity to perform A/B tests and gather feedback from employees after they’ve completed training courses. You can integrate that feedback into your content development strategy and keep making adjustments to best meet your organization’s learning needs.

Of course, there are learning technologies that organizations can leverage to help them adopt a more personalized training approach. A robust learning management system (LMS) will include features that L&D teams can use to curate training materials based on skills gaps within their organization. These platforms can often import your existing training content and allow you to create “content playlists” that require users to complete each module but let them finish courses in any order they choose. With the right corporate LMS, you can curate professional learning courses and ensure specific content reaches users based on their roles or the teams they’re a part of within your organization.

How Can You Use Personalized Learning to Contribute to Team and Individual Professional Development?

Personalized learning isn’t just about individual users. Employees often need to work together to solve problems and successfully do their jobs, meaning collaborative development is just as significant as individual learning. It’s also important to ensure that less experienced employees can benefit from the skills and expertise of their more seasoned peers. By embracing personalized professional learning, both individuals and entire teams can enhance their skills and work more together more efficiently.

Your senior leadership team can use personalized learning to help transfer knowledge and encourage collaboration by curating content in your LMS designed to fill skills gaps that exist within your organization. Senior staff can work together to identify where skills gaps exist in their departments and offer their expertise directly to less experienced employees who might be taking the skills courses that are added to the LMS. Empowering senior staff to add training topics to your content repository is another way to personalize learning for your entire team. Your employees are choosing what content to add to your LMS and what courses they want to complete (excluding mandatory compliance training).

A personalized learning designer (PLD) within your LMS can also be used to develop your teams while streamlining various processes for your trainers and managers. With a PLD, your administrators can create a workflow within your LMS that triggers automated communications to users when certain actions are performed. For example, a PLD would automatically send feedback to learners when they score below the passing threshold on course quizzes. This helps the learner quickly understand where they made mistakes and what concepts they need to review.

A PLD can also be used to answer common troubleshooting questions and send automated feedback to supervisors, making them aware of which employees might need additional training support. This helps with developing entire teams by ensuring that employees are getting the personal attention and support they need to be successful in their training courses.

LEARN MORE ABOUT PLD | ‘5 Ways Open LMS’s Personalized Learning Designer (PLD) Enhances Online Education’

Personalized Learning Benefits Employees and Organizations

Allowing employees to have options in your professional development strategy empowers them to take ownership of their learning journey, aligns training with their individual needs, and helps foster a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement at your organization. By gradually incorporating personalized learning options into your strategy, you can ensure that employees have the skills they need to successfully do their jobs and maintain compliance standards.

When your workforce has access to meaningful and relevant training materials, along with agency over their skills development, they’re bound to feel more engaged with their training. This gives your L&D teams the room they need to stop “policing” course completion and focus their efforts on refining your company’s training materials to best meet your organizational needs. With personalized professional learning, everybody wins.