Many organizations have made the shift to self-directed learning. We can see the appeal: It gives employees the independence to develop at their own pace–but it doesn’t always lead to long-lasting behavioral change. So, without further ado, let’s dive into how you can build an effective self-paced learning strategy.
What is self-paced learning?
Self-paced learning is an approach to education and training that allows learners to control the speed and timing of learning.
It’s different from traditional classrooms and learning environments (which provide learners with a structured schedule set by an instructor) and guided learning (which provides some direction for learners without a formal structure). Self-paced learning puts learners in the driver’s seat so they can decide when, where, and how quickly they progress through training materials.
Common self-paced learning disadvantages and challenges
Self-paced learning is perfect for learners who want flexibility, but it also comes with its own set of challenges and disadvantages. Studies have shown that the completion rate for self-paced learning courses is anything between 5% and 15%—in other words, self-pacing fails more often than not.
There are a lot of factors that contribute to failed self-paced learning initiatives. The four biggest ones are:
- Lack of time
- Lack of support
- Lack of motivation
- Not knowing where to start.
Self-paced learning is a bit of a double-edged sword—the flexibility to learn at your own pace is great, but self-paced learners don’t have a formal structure to get through course materials. Learners are often sill employees, which means they may struggle to find the time to fit learning into their schedules and build effective study habits.
It’s also pretty isolating to learn on your own and not get any interactions with managers or supervisors like you would during a traditional learning course. There’s always a chance learners could be choosing content that’s irrelevant to their capability needs. If there aren’t opportunities for support, learners might only find out after they’ve already invested time and effort.
And let’s not forget that self-directed learning asks a lot of learners in terms of self-discipline. Being able to stay focused is difficult without any external pressure or accountability measures to keep them on track. This is why regular check-ins are so crucial: Frequent one-on-ones result in more effective feedback that increases engagement (and improves performance).
There’s the problem of learners’ selection paralysis, especially when the catalog is huge and they have no guidance on where to start. This can make the learning experience stressful for employees who don’t know what training is aligned with their specific role-based capabilities. They might pick irrelevant content (which would waste time and resources), or it might become an obstacle to them picking a self-paced course at all.
This isn’t to say that self-paced learning is a write-off, though—because it’s not. It’s just a process that needs to be used and implemented wisely.
Best practice implementation of effective self-paced learning
Given that part of the reason so many learners get overwhelmed due to a lack of clear direction on what they’re meant to be learning and why, it’s important that you mitigate that. We recommend five crucial best practice strategies to build a self-paced learning that sticks.
- Set individual development plans
- Utilize learning technology
- Provide relevant learning
- Provide support
- Monitor and refine the learning experience.
Set individual development plans
Individual development plans are the backbone of any successful L&D initiative, even self-paced learning. They create clear, tailored goals and expectations for learners to meet in the form of desired learning outcomes. Personalized development plans also set out the learning process into an outline of clear milestones and assessment criteria, making tracking learner progress easier.
The first step here is to actually assess your employees’ capabilities (these are the skills, knowledge, behaviors, tools, and processes that combine to meet organizational objectives). You can do this by analysing the capability gaps between the current competency that each capability is performed at, and your organization’s future capability needs.
For example, a sales team member might “meet expectations” in account management and customer retention now. But with inevitable industry changes in the next three years shifting the way customers behave, your organization may need that same employee to “exceed expectations” instead.
If you do this with all relevant capabilities to individual learners, then you can build personalized development plans aimed at closing specific capability gaps. Side note: It’s a good idea to build some kind of capability heat map to determine which capability gaps should be prioritized in terms of development. This way, you’re directing resources to the most important development opportunities. From there, learners can pick training materials assigned to their specific capabilities.
Utilize learning technology
Just as important as tailored, individual development plans is a learning management system (LMS) or similar. Learning management software streamlines the learning process in several ways, the first being that it manages and facilitates learning content from one central location that learners can access. LMS software allows learners to take initiative in tracking their own learning journey, as well as help with accountability through reminders and notifications about learning content.
We recommend a performance learning management system (PLMS) for that, simply because it’s the only system that makes it so much simpler for learners to track their progress, see what they’ve accomplished, and identify what still needs to be done.
PLMSs in particular make it easier to select the right learning to begin with. They utilize AI to identify the specific business and role-based capabilities an employee needs, link those capabilities to relevant training, and then assign tailored training based on an individual employees’ development needs. Say goodbye to selection paralysis, because a PLMS can do the heavy lifting for you.
It makes it a lot easier for learners to action their own development plans, because they’ll be able to select learning relevant to developing their specific capabilities.
Provide relevant learning
The problem with having a huge content catalog is that a lot of that content is:
- Out of date
- Irrelevant to learners’ specific needs, or
- Poorly designed for learners’ needs.
That’s why it’s best to keep a smaller catalog of relevant and succinct learning content. We always say “learn less”, because too often L&D initiatives focus on consuming more content rather than more impactful content. What makes the content impactful are the capabilities assigned to them, because those capabilities are the learning needs self-paced learners are looking to develop.
Make sure you regularly audit the contents of your catalog to identify and remove any content that is out of date, or generally unusable for your employee’s needs. So, there’s no point having learning content for building sales capabilities if your organization doesn’t have a sales team—all learning content should be relevant to your organization in some way.
If there are fewer learning materials to sift through, it’s a lot easier for self-paced learners to find learning that will actually help them improve in line with their development plans. And when content is clearly relevant to a learner’s situation, they’re far more likely to engage and retain knowledge.
Provide support
Having access to instructors, mentors, or peers is important, even in a self-paced learning environment. Having supplementary resources like tutorials, practice exercises or instructional videos is always helpful as an extra resource for learners to access if they need help, but nothing beats real-time feedback from an actual person.
If an employee is learning the wrong content or doesn’t understand the course material, well-timed feedback can nudge them back in the right direction. Just because an individual development plan is personalized doesn’t mean learners can’t get support in actually meeting their development goals. Like performance review cycles, it’s better to get feedback as the need arises, rather than waiting until learning is complete. Waiting could mean incorrect behaviors become ingrained by then, or the learner has strayed far off their development path.
The best way to provide feedback and support to learners is through:
- Regular check-ins between learners and their managers to share progress on development goals, discuss challenges, and adjust goals
- Scheduled office hours with a subject matter expert, one-on-one meetings, or a discussion board where questions can be asked and answered
- Peer interactions that allow employees to collaborate with other learners through group work, or online forums.
Monitor and refine the learning experience
Again, a PLMS is really useful here. The data analytics collected on learning programs and employee performance can highlight learning patterns and trends. For example, maybe there is one piece of learning content that a lot of self-paced learners started, but never completed. That could be an indication that the content is unengaging for learners and doesn’t motivate them to see it through to the end.
Or maybe some learning content doesn’t have the ROI that was expected, because the capabilities it was designed to develop don’t match the development needs of your learners or business. The L&D data you collect on self-paced learning can be used to refine your learning catalog (and specific content within it) to ensure it has the most up-to-date and relevant information. That way you can be sure that self-paced learners in your organization have the resources and materials they need to effectively meet their learning objectives and development goals.
Key takeaways
Self-paced learning is a great way to give learners the freedom to learn at their own pace, but it can easily become a nightmare for self-discipline. The best way to enable an effective self-paced strategy is to provide employees with all the tools they need to succeed first, from personalized learning pathways and development plans to a robust learning management system that streamlines the process of selecting and tracking learning.
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