How learning personalization helps enterprises develop and retain their workforce

We all know exactly what a bad training experience feels like. Fluorescent lighting, bad coffee, a disinterested presenter, and PowerPoints with templates that explore the full spectrum of beige. We’ve been there, hunched over a laptop, clicking through slide decks and listening to audio from an in-person training that doesn’t quite translate to a remote audience. It’s painful, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

The sad reality is that studies have shown most enterprise training fails to meet the only objective that matters: preparing people for their work.

Only 12% of learners say that they apply the skills from their job training. This means that 88% of the material or experiences in the average enterprise training isn’t hitting the mark.

Underdeveloped and undertrained employees aren’t just ineffective; they’re less likely to stick around. In a long-term research project focused on work-based learning, researchers found that 74% of workers felt that they weren’t achieving their full potential at work due to a lack of development opportunities.

Furthermore, bad training doesn’t just hurt employees; it costs your company. The total financial loss to organizations from ineffective training is $13,500 per employee.

So, how do we make enterprise training better?

There are two key ways we can improve training: creating better content, and organizing that content thoughtfully within an effective delivery system.

While moving your existing training into a learning management system (referred to as an LMS from here on out) is a good start, it’s not enough to just digitize your training. Your LMS needs to be more than a library.

The real value of any basic LMS is the ability these learning systems give companies to track user progress, assess skill improvement and growth, and utilize administrative metrics to ensure that the content being offered actually serves and develops the learning audience.

The basic reporting functions of a standard LMS will immediately improve your training efforts, but that’s only the first step. It’s easy and common for companies to fall back into a one-size fits all learning mentality. Your training can look great and still miss the mark. What separates a good LMS from a great one is the ability to personalize training content in a way that best suits the learners’ needs.

Learning personalization helps maximize your workforce

Learning personalization prioritizes a clear understanding of the needs and goals of each learner, and emphasizes the customization of instruction and content to address those needs and goals.

When learning personalization happens in an LMS, the result is dynamic training that allows the learner to travel through content at their own pace and receive critical information in a way that accelerates the learning and skill acquisition process.

Learning personalization brings in a variety of learning and content options, whether it’s audio, video, hands-on, social learning, or anything else you can dream up, and connects them to the right person, at the right time, in the right way. In other words, enterprise training no longer has to feel like “enterprise training.”

For an LMS, learning personalization happens at three levels: platform, content, and role.

Platform: At the platform level, your LMS should integrate seamlessly into your brand identity and web ecosystem. Any LMS that fails to offer a white-label experience is selling you short. Your online learning experience should feel exactly like you, not the software company you’re paying.

Content: The ability to offer a wide variety of content styles in a range of formats is key to learning personalization. Connecting the right content to your learners based on preference and need should be non-negotiable.

Role: You don’t have to create entirely different courses based on roles and levels within your organization. Your LMS should offer the ability to dynamically change specific elements of your content that is relevant to the role that a person holds in your organization. Role and level personalization not only helps learners; it saves time and money since you no longer need to create totally different content to meet different role needs.

By focusing on learning personalization, the key areas of improved enterprise training are covered: quality content and a dynamic delivery system.

When all three elements of learning personalization are utilized in enterprise training, the result is more engaged, more skilled, and more committed employees.

Want to level-up your online training with learning personalization?

Call us old fashioned, but we believe that one-size learning does not fit all. And fortunately, it doesn’t have to. Meet Journeyage, the LMS platform bringing learning personalization to the forefront of enterprise training.

The stakes are too high to settle for mediocre training. Companies that can unlock the potential of their workforce through dynamic development and training are the ones who will succeed in the workplace of the future. People want to grow, develop, and achieve, and through learning personalization, we can help them get there.

Want to geek out about training? Reach out to us at [email protected] or request a demo through our website.

This post was originally posted on Medium by Geoff Gentry.