The Power of Personalized Learning in the Workplace

This is an edited extract from Learning Metrics.

There have certainly been moments in your life when someone tried to convince you to buy something. If you didn’t buy it, it was prob­ably because you didn’t see any value for it. This same applies to how employees see learning. Try this experiment: ask a few employ­ees about taking a training course. The response you may receive is indifference or, worse, the disapproving eye roll. Just like the item you didn’t buy at the store, employees are equally unconvinced that train­ing will add value to their roles.

Ensuring a learning effort that contributes to meeting key perfor­mance metric, requires first finding out what employees do on the job. Your objective is to discover and address areas of weaknesses, struggles and any other unknown elements where a learning inter­vention could add value. A focused assessment/analysis is not simply about comparing job descriptions with employee skills gaps. It is also about having direct conversations with the employees actually doing the work and who require additional support. For example, you could conduct informal observations, interview the employee on the required steps, get them to reveal some of the nuances and informal elements in completing the tasks. This allows you to fully appreciate individual needs and better identify and define the actual skills gaps, not the theoretical ones. Learning should be something people want to do, not something they have to do.

Personalize employee learning

When you can address a specific learning need, employees are more likely to engage and commit to the learning experience. They feel that you care and want to help them improve. Personalizing learning is about finding direct correlations with job performance metrics and where learning technology will add tangible value.

Learning and development is well positioned to do this using a variety of learning technologies. Available technologies are powerful and allow you to customize and/or personalize learning experiences, like how online streaming and shopping services do. Also, proposing the purchase of any technology implicitly says to stakeholders that you will make your learning processes and deliverables more effi­cient, effective or even innovative in some way. And if you’re successful in convincing them to make the investment, you’d better be ready to prove it.

The power of learning technologies is something that you use to benefit the employees who are learning and therefore applying the learning. Consider simple things like providing them with the ability to choose and organize their own learning needs or even allowing them the freedom to identify skills they want to learn. Offer learning opportunities through non-conventional means like on-demand learning interventions, help desks, individual coaching or even accessing subject matter experts.

Personalization also implies making learning engaging. Discover how employees are stimulated, how learning can be non-intrusive, what interests them and, most relevant, how the learning relates to their work and role.

Make learning concise and precise

Employees, along with your stakeholders, have little time for learning and have less tolerance if it doesn’t deliver performance value. It’s not that they don’t want to learn to improve themselves, but they are also under tremendous pressure to get work done. Your objective is to reconcile and resolve these two aspects.

Learning technologies, when wielded appropriately, ensure you deliver engaging learning while demonstrating performance value. Learning must use technology to become more stealthy in the approach within work applications. This is when e-learning is top in the minds of your stakeholders. Be careful, they have two interpreta­tions when it comes to what the “e” in e-learning means: your stakeholder’s interpretation and learning and development’s.

Stakeholders consider technological investments (long-term capital investments) as an integral part of improving operational efficiencies, and investment in e-learning is no exception. This is because technology, although an upfront cost, will lead to sustainable efficiencies over time. Learning and development practitioners, meanwhile, look to technology more to facilitate learning experiences.

E-learning for you implies how an organiza­tion acquires, develops, manages, deploys and iterates employee development over time. From your stakeholders’ perspective, then, the “e” in e-learning is all about making employee development more efficient and effective, resulting in organizational performance being more efficient and effective.

The use of learning technologies for learning and development is more than making employees more efficient and effective in their work. The technologies are also meant to make the learning and development process more efficient. Do this by applying the acronym T.R.A.In.E.R.S. when designing and deploying your learning and e-learning efforts to be more efficient and lean:

• Timely suggests making your learning effort readily available and convenient for employees to access.
• Relevance is confirming that employees consider any learning intervention you design and deploy is relevant to improving their job performance.
• Adaptive is about ensuring that any learning interventions you develop adapt to evolving operational and organizational demands.
• Integrative is about embedding learning opportunities and events within the context of the job rather than having it as a disruptive external event.
• Efficient speaks to making your learning concise, eliminating irrelevant information, and precise, focusing on addressing a specific requirement.
• Resourceful is about leveraging what you have to make your learning relevant, adaptive, and integrative before sourcing additional resources or investments.
• Seamless is pushing yourself and your expertise to make learning an embedded part of the internal process and help the organization foster a learning culture.

Here’s a quick self-reflection activity. Think back to a past training experience as a participant. What grabbed your interest and curiosity? What really engaged you? How did you feel having to invest time when work was piling up back at the office? Chances are you were frustrated and didn’t feel you received any lasting value. Consider your own experiences for the learners, or employees, you want to engage in what you’re offering and for what stakeholders expect in terms of efficiencies and effectiveness. Apply these princi­ples and you’ll get employees to feel the same about your learning.