Is Learner-Centric Technology the Way to Provide Personalized Learning?
Nothing turns off learners more than irrelevant learning content. Too many employees know that training is important for their career progression, but don’t end up completing—or applying—any of the training they receive. That’s pretty crazy, considering 53% of Gen Z workers want to receive training.
Enter: Learner-centered teaching, designed to make the learner experience fun and engaging. But is it really the best approach to delivering impactful, personalized learning? Let’s dive in.
What is the learner experience?
Learner experience is a learner’s overall journey during the learning process. It encompasses everything from how they interact and engage with content, learning platforms, and instructors, including how content is delivered, assessed, and supported. The idea is that it goes beyond “quality” of learning content and instead looks at the entire experience.
The challenges of learning experience platforms
Learning experience platforms (LXPs) are designed specifically to improve and capture that learner experience. They’re designed to have a learner-centered approach to training by offering a personalized, engaging, and intuitive learning environment. But are learner-centered methods really the best for impactful L&D?
The LXP market likes to emphasize its catalog of curated content from internal and third-party sources. Learners can choose what they want to learn and their delivery method. In our experience, we noticed that often leads to choice paralysis because learners just don’t know where to start. Not only that, but a whopping 40% of learners can’t even find the learning they need.
It doesn’t help that learner experience-focused platforms often push learners towards the self-paced approach to learning, which is overwhelming because they have no direction or development plan to guide them. That just provides a bad learning experience and reduces learner engagement (and that, in turn, is a slippery slope to employee turnover).
A lot of this comes down to the fact that LXPs are doing just that: Focusing on learner experience. And we won’t deny that learning engagement and content completions are important metrics to measure, but good learning experiences alone don’t equate to performance improvement. It makes it harder to prove the actual impact and return on investment (ROI) of learning on organizational outcomes because the data LXPs collect doesn’t actually link to tangible performance goals.
How to provide truly personalized learning
In our recent study, 95.5% of companies responded that tying employee L&D to career growth improves employee satisfaction and retention. In other words: Personalized learning for professional development is the way forward. But if learner-centered approaches to corporate training aren’t the answer, how can we make learning personalized and impactful on broader organizational outcomes? We’ve identified three best practice strategies to providing personalized training:
- Switch to a capability-led strategy
- Use technology
- Leverage data and analytics.
Introduce a capability-led learning strategy
Use capabilities to link learning and performance metrics. Capabilities are derived from business strategy and are the skills, knowledge, behaviors, processes, and tools that combine to deliver organizational outcomes. They’re categorized into business capabilities, which are the capabilities the business needs to perform to achieve its goals, and human capabilities, which are the capabilities employees need to perform their roles effectively and contribute to organizational goals.
Role-specific capabilities outline the performance standard employees need to meet to succeed in their roles. And, because they can be measured in levels of competency, it’s easy to identify (through capability gap analyses) how employees are currently performing compared to where they should be performing.
For example, HR will need to have a change management integration capability to effectively deliver change programs, but they may only have a basic understanding of it. You might need them to have a proficient competency in the capability—so now you know to assign learning content to them that will develop a deeper understanding of change management and integration.
Capabilities allow you to map out:
- In-depth job description for each role within the business, and
- The personalized development pathways employees need to succeed in their specific roles.
Remember the issue we mentioned earlier about learners not knowing where to start? Well, capabilities remove that issue. They’re essentially creating a curriculum for learners to follow in order to target their specific performance development needs.
Utilize technology
No matter what learning you’re looking to provide, it’s a lot easier to implement it with technology. We recommend a performance learning management system (PLMS) over a learning experience platform, though. The main reason is that PLMSs offer learning with connected performance management via built in support for capabilities. A PLMS can handle all the basics of a learning management system (LMS), but tailors learning based on individual employees’ capability needs.
PLMSs can automate learning and performance processes. They’re AI-powered tools that can assess capability gaps and assign relevant training content to learners based on their unique needs. It does away with the need to manually manage training programs, content curation, and data analytics yourself, freeing up HR’s time to focus on more complex strategic tasks. It can also perform follow-up analyses of learner performance following training completions to determine training ROI. Successful learning drives performance improvement, and that, in turn, drives a return on investment. For marketing it could be more leads coming in, and for sales it may be a monetary ROI, such as more deals closed. If needed, PLMSs can also assign more focused training to reinforce learning and enable long-term retention and application of knowledge.
Leverage performance data and analytics
We already said that the problem with learning experience platforms is that they focus too much on the learning experience rather than learning application. When we talk “learning application” we really mean “performance uplift”. Has employee performance improved since training was completed? Learner experience won’t tell you that, but the right metrics like ROI will.
Conducting training and measuring ROI isn’t a one-and-done thing, either. You need to regularly provide and measure learning impact to create a continuous learning culture. It creates an immediate feedback loop so learners can get the feedback and development they need in the moment. If your capability assessments still show capability gaps after training has been done, you can assign more training tailored to meet learning objectives.
This is especially important because your business will have to adapt and evolve to changes in your industry over time. Maybe your business is scaling and needs new roles and departments. Maybe there’s new technology solutions that require new capability sets. You need to continuously assess business and learner needs to account for these changes and adjust learning accordingly.
Key takeaways
Personalized training goes beyond focusing on learner experience and engagement. Sure, learners are more likely to stick with learning if it’s engaging, but that engagement comes from relevancy, not the entertainment factor. And you can only get relevant content from implementing a capability-led strategy to outline and guide personalized development plans for learners. It’s the only way to make sure employees are getting learning that helps them improve in their roles while also contributing to broader organizational outcomes.
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