The Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Truly Personalized Learning Plans

A lot of the time, L&D tends not to be relevant to employees, their careers, or their goals. This is where personalized development plans come in. When employees have their own personal learning plan, they have the secret recipe to achieve both their own and their organization’s goals.

But that leads to another problem: not all personal learning plans are created equal. Largely because, and historically speaking, giving every employee a learning plan tailored to their specific needs is time-consuming and resource-intensive. But that was the past. We’re here to show you the future.

What makes an effective learning plan?

Learning plans (or development plans) are structured roadmaps designed to guide a learner’s capability development. Done right, learners get the resources and support to improve performance and drive strategy.

Of course, the right term there is “done right”. In this sense “right” means “effective:, and an effective learning plan should:

1. Align employee development with business objectives
2. Provide a personal learning plan tailored to specific roles and development needs
3. Incorporate multiple learning methods
4. Outline clear learning objectives and milestones
5. Provide opportunities for feedback and support.

The challenges of creating learning plans

We always say that learning and performance should be linked, otherwise both end up being kind of useless. Learning paths should be informed by performance management and vice versa. That is, performance reviews should identify which capabilities learners need to develop, and employee development should also have a clear, positive impact on business (and employee) performance.

The problem is that old habits die hard, which means a lot of development plans are generic templates that aren’t aligned with business priorities. The up-and-coming Gen Z workforce want and need purposeful development, or they’ll look for opportunities elsewhere.

Using a one-size-fits-all approach in lieu of customized learning paths (whether it’s your own learning plan template or a generic one from your LMS) isn’t going to cut it. It can’t cater to different learning styles, job roles, or job levels. Entry-level marketers don’t need the same type or depth of development as a senior content marketer, and senior content marketers certainly don’t need the same development plan as a salesperson.

And we get it. Creating plans for every individual learner is difficult, especially as your business scales. Customization takes time, effort, and resources, which just gets harder if you’re handling it manually, as business needs inevitably change over time, due to new technology, processes, or standards.

How to create personalized learning plans

Technology goes a long way toward tailoring a learning plan. Technology like our Capabilities feature is specifically built to create plans tied to learners’ specific roles, proficiency levels, and goals, while also allowing leaders to guide and track learner progress.

Capabilities manages most of the grunt work when it comes to building learning plans, within four steps.

1. Define job roles and capabilities
2. Perform a capability assessment
3. Create personalized development plans
4. Track capability performance.

Step one: Define job roles and capabilities

There’s no point defining a learning path if you don’t know where—or what—you’re starting with. Every role has different requirements in terms of capabilities and the competency level needed. After all, your entry-level marketer doesn’t need to be an expert at marketing strategy like a senior marketer.

The first step here is to define each employee’s role and responsibilities and assign relevant capabilities to that role. Capabilities can do that by building out job descriptions and their attached capabilities with AI—you just need to define what the role is and Capabilities can extrapolate what capabilities are required to perform that job at that particular level. You can customize those capabilities further (such as tweaking the competency level requirements of each capability) to ensure they align with your organization’s nuanced goals and needs. It makes L&D impactful on both employee development and specific business outcomes.

This step builds out the basis of the rest of the learning plan. Without it, you have no way to assess employees’ capabilities or determine where their capabilities could stand to improve.

P.S., if you have trouble trying to decide what capabilities you should assign to each role, we have a whole Capability Library of capability examples that you can download for free.

Step 2: Perform a capability assessment

Once you’ve got your job roles and their assigned capabilities defined, it’s time for you to assess them. This is a two-pronged approach.

1. First, you need to perform a capability assessment to see individual employees’ competency levels in their assigned capabilities.
2. Second, you need to do a capability gap analysis to find where the “gaps” are between employees’ current competency levels and their required competency levels.

Let’s look at capability assessments first. They’re a leveled scale designed to assess and measure employees’ competency (aka proficiency) in specific capabilities. Some capability assessments can be run as self-assessments, where a learner evaluates how well they think they’re performing. Others are manager assessments, where learners’ capabilities are assessed by their manager.

Generally, we advocate for doing more than one capability assessment. It’s just a good rule of thumb to make sure you get the most holistic overview of an employee’s performance. Self-assessments are great because employees generally have a good idea of what they are and aren’t capable of, but data can skew towards overly forgiving or critical.

At the same time, while managers are more in tune with business strategy and how an employee’s roles fit into that, they can be biased by:

• Most recent events, also known as recency bias
• Unconscious leniency toward performance
• Unrealistically negative or harsh evaluations, called severity bias
• Allowing good performance to affect how overall performance is rated
• Allowing employee weaknesses to affect how overall performance is rated
• Unconscious discrimination based on gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.

Capabilities tracks both self- and manager assessments within the system and also automates them so that they’re triggered to occur at certain milestones. It means you can compare current assessments with previous results to identify trends and improvements.

It also allows you to run a gap analysis within the system—“gaps” being the discrepancy between employees’ current capability levels and the levels they need to succeed in their roles. As they develop over time (and their role advances or evolves) they will need to master more of their capabilities. The idea here is that a gap analysis highlights where there may be a targeted opportunity for improvement.

Step 3: Create the development plans

Capabilities maps and assigns capabilities to content, which is crucial because up to 40% of learners say they can’t find learning relevant to their needs. That means learners are instantly given content that addresses their specific capability gaps, without the hassle of finding and vetting it themselves.

We don’t recommend addressing every gap all at once—that’s way too resource-intensive to do effectively for every learner. Instead, prioritize which capabilities should be developed based on the risk those gaps pose for the organization. Capability heat maps let you organize capabilities into a visual map of those at pose the greatest risk to business strategy if left undeveloped.

Development plans should also take employee goals into consideration as well, particularly because goals are often centered around professional development. Just remember that they should be SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound), so that employees and their managers are on the same page about what they’re setting out to achieve (and Capabilities can build a development plan to match). SMART goals provide a guide for Capabilities to assign learning and deadlines for employee development.

Step 4: Track capability performance

Learning can’t truly be effective without tying it to performance—so this is the point where we say to go back and track the effectiveness of your learning plans by re-assessing capabilities. If learning is effective (meaning learners retain and apply training), you’ll see increased productivity, revenue, and improved competency.

Managers can also access dashboards within Capabilities to track learners’ progress through their development plans and help determine the best way to guide them. It keeps employees’ full training and performance history so that there’s no chance of proximity or recency bias in performance evaluations—which means learners are always getting the most accurate evaluations and receiving the most relevant development opportunities.

Once training is completed, another performance evaluation or capability assessment is triggered within the system. And, based on the results of the performance evaluation, more learning can be assigned to address any continuing capability gaps (or address different capability gaps entirely). The reasoning behind this feature is simple: continuously building capabilities means your business can meet its goals and maintain a competitive advantage.

Key takeaways

Personalized learning plans should be just that: personalized. The important thing to understand with learning plans is that they shouldn’t just be aligned with learners’ job roles—they should be tailored to their specific capability and learning needs. Not all learners in the same role have the same capability gaps, after all.

Tailoring learning plans is more effective in the long run for both the business and the individual learner—it’s just equipping your employees with all the tools and support they need to succeed and advance in their roles.