Is There a Way to Personalize Technical Training?

All job roles come with a mix of required technical and soft skills. They’re specific to individual roles, but for whatever reason, technical training is often less personalized to learners and learning needs.

In this blog we’ll dive into the challenges of traditional technical training and what you can do to make customized learning pathways using technical training content.

What is technical training?

Technical training is a structured learning process that focuses on developing the practical capabilities that employees need to perform specific tasks related to technology or specialized processes within an organization. This is different to general training programs that cover soft skills (i.e., behavioral and interpersonal attributes).

The challenge of compliance and technical training

A lot of organizations provide a more traditional or “formal education” approach to technical training. That may be because technical expertise is necessary for employees to perform their jobs, and traditional learning seems apt to address that. Perhaps it saves money to provide a one-size-fits-all approach. Or maybe it’s because technical training is often viewed as “compliance training”—i.e., making sure employees are meeting current standards and regulations.

But just because compliance is the goal does not mean traditional one-size-fits-all training is always the answer.

Not all learners have the same needs—even when they’re trying to meet compliance expectations—so it’s crazy to think that so many people get “cookie-cutter” learning. That’s what companies think employees need to learn, not what employees actually needto learn. As a result, training focuses on compliance but isn’t aligned with job-specific capabilities or the specific nuances of that position in your company. That means:

• You can’t keep learners engaged because they don’t have a training plan relevant to their development needs.
• Specific capability gaps go unaddressed, meaning employees won’t have a deep understanding of how to perform their jobs or keep up with the latest industry standards.

Without more role-specific training, people will feel their employers aren’t investing in their development enough and may look elsewhere for opportunities (seriously, 53% of Gen Z workers value learning to progress their careers).

Focusing on compliance alone or viewing technical training as a separate entity to other capability building efforts reduces the opportunities for your people to have an impact. But if we follow our own definition of technical training—developing practical capabilities that employees need to perform specific tasks—it stands to reason that:

1. You need technical training to execute on business strategy, given it’s what keeps your processes and systems running smoothly; and
2. You need to give learners a personal reason to engage with it, so it should be more personalized than your standard compliance fare.

How to implement an effective technical training program

Some studies have found only 12% of employees apply what they’ve learned from training in their day-to-day jobs. That’s a pretty clear indicator that training hasn’t been effective if we’ve ever seen one. And it’s no wonder when a lot of employees—especially self-directed learners—don’t know what training they should be doing, are overwhelmed by the variety of content, or are given content that doesn’t align with their goals.

The good news is we’ve identified three best practices for implementing effective technical training programs:

1. Use technology to enhance learning
2. Create custom learning pathways
3. Continuously measure progress

Use technology to enhance learning

Most companies use some kind of learning management system (LMS) or performance learning management system (PLMS) to manage, track, and deliver training courses to their learners.

But let’s be real; technology can do so much more than house and manage learning. Specifically, a PLMS cuts out the issue of having to manually sync separate data sets by tracking all learning and performance metrics in the one system. It also helps to identify and assess technical capabilities and use that data to assign relevant content to learners. And you can do all these much faster with automated processes (we recommend Momentum for this) which can run L&D actions like course enrolment, goal setting, and prompt assessments based on your set triggers.

This is all useful for providing learners with personalized learning paths and materials that will help them:

1. Develop the technical capabilities they need for their roles, so that they can perform their responsibilities
2. Connect compliance training with role-specific capabilities so that learners meet standards and regulations, and
3. Build out personalized learning paths so they can learn relevant content at their own pace (but we’ll go into more detail about this below).

Create custom learning pathways

The reason one-size-fits-all training programs aren’t effective is that they aren’t customized to address your learners’ needs. Consider that:

• Different job roles require different technical skills and capabilities
• Employees in more junior roles don’t need as advanced an understanding of technical skills and capabilities as senior employees
• Individual employees will have different gaps in their knowledge and experience, and therefore, different training needs.

First, carry out capability assessment for individual learners to find out how they’re currently performing (with technology, or course). A capability assessment evaluates competency, so higher competency means a deeper understanding and stronger performance of the capability. Note: Emerging competency may not be unusual or cause for concern if the employee in question is at a junior level.

Next, do a gap analysis to identify the gaps between current capabilities and the capabilities your organization needs to meet future goals. These capabilities are derived from business strategy and form the basis of employee learning goals and their measurable outcomes. It’s just a matter of working out what capabilities you need to develop to get there.

The next step is to assign relevant learning mapped to those specific capability needs to make it easier for employees to self-pace and actually retain and apply training in their day-to-day work.

Part of this is also assigning different training methods depending on the job role. Some positions can be developed with online courses or on-the-job-training, but more creative roles might benefit from more hands-on mentoring or coaching.

Continuously measure progress

Of course, there’s no point doing all this if you aren’t going to measure training effectiveness. It’s the only way to ensure continuous learning happens in your organization—and that it has a meaningful impact on technical capabilities and business goals.

This has a bit of two-pronged approach:

1. Continuous assessments and feedback to evaluate compliance with technical standards.
2. Evaluating learning effectiveness to understand how (and if) employees apply technical training in their day-to-day work.

The first prong is about embedding performance management with learning. Traditional performance management processes have evaluations at the end of a performance period. But those reviews often don’t result in actionable development plans for employees to improve their capabilities, and the fact the review comes after the performance period is over means employees don’t have a chance to improve in the moment of need. That’s a big problem when it comes to crucial technical skills and knowledge, because without the right development paths, employees may become non-compliant with industry standards.

The best way to embed performance and learning is through continuousassessments and feedback throughout the performance period. Not only does it help improve knowledge retention, but it also helps to keep employees engaged and reduce turnover. Make sure you carry out continuous capability assessments to see how employees have improved since doing technical training.

The second prong is about understanding the ROI of your technical training initiatives. By this we mean effective technical training should have a tangible, positive impact on a company’s return, to the point where the monetary benefit from the application of training outweighs the total cost of training. It’s usually portrayed in a percentage to show how much of a return training brought, i.e., a 300% return on investment.

As a rule of thumb, ROI is calculated by finding the difference between the total training cost and the revenue generated from L&D activities, dividing the score by the total cost of training, and multiplying the answer by 100 to get your ROI percentage.

The better developed your capabilities are, the bigger the increase in performance, productivity, and revenue generated for the business, which increases the ROI.

Both of these factors should be used for future planning. For one, performance management should lead to personalized development plans for employees. But from a business perspective, learning effectiveness should be used to help plan L&D initiatives as the business scales to ensure more impactful learning for employees in the future.

Key takeaways

Technical training doesn’t have to be a stuffy one-size-fits-all experience for learners. Just because they’re the practical capabilities employees require to drive business objectives doesn’t mean you have to stick to “traditional” methods of learning.

At the end of the day, technical training is the same as any other—it’s developing capabilities. Personalizing technical training is a guaranteed way to make sure learners apply knowledge in their day-to-day work, and there are only three major strategies you need to remember to get it right:

1. Use technology to improve the delivery, management, and assessment of learning
2. Create custom learning pathways through capability gap analyses and performance management
3. Continuously measure progress at an employee and business level.