Personalized corporate training has much value. According to eLearning Industry,1 benefits of personalized employee training include (but are not limited to):
- The needs of learners are met and training isn’t wasted. “That means that not all your employees need to take the same course on a specific topic. Each employee will have their own unique pace of learning.” This results in less money spent on training.
- Better learner engagement is easily achievable. “(With personalized training, employees) choose their learning path based on their personal preference…. Since they are getting what they want, they have a higher engagement level.”
- Training and the learner experience becomes easier to customize. “You can tweak the content as you wish, in order to make a better connection with your employees. Also, you can make updates faster and at a smaller cost.”
- Administrators can offer personalized feedback. “When your learners go through their chosen path, they get customized feedback. They can work on the necessary skills and improve their productivity. Since they receive instant feedback for their actions, their ‘wrong moves’ are not committed to their long-term memory.”
Despite the benefits of personalized corporate training, employee training isn’t always individualized to learners’ specific needs. This is reflected in corporate training statistics. For example, per the Harvard Business Review,2 70% of workers say they haven’t mastered the skills they need to do their jobs well, and just 12% of employees apply new skills gleaned from corporate training programs to their jobs. Obviously, corporate training isn’t as effective as it needs to be. Lack of personalization could be one of the reasons for this.
Relevant, personalized training content is key to best-in-class learning experiences that keep employees upskilled and consistently engaged with training. Therefore, it’s important that organizational leaders personalize corporate training.
Personalization Elevates Corporate Training from a Necessary Evil to a Strategic Powerhouse
Personalized corporate training clarifies learning for today’s multi-generational and multi-cultural workforce. As workplaces embrace diversity to a greater degree, personalized learning will become even more important because it will help to ensure employees learn in ways that are unique to their background.
Personalizing corporate training takes effort, but a company’s investment of time and energy will pay off in strengthened brand image and values, increased worker motivation, a better ROI for training, and a more innovative company culture.3 The Society for Human Resource Management stated,
“Taking a personalized approach and adapting lessons based on an employee’s retention and performance can elevate training ‘from a necessary evil that CEOs would love to minimize’ to ‘a strategic powerhouse.’”4
LMS software helps L&D teams and corporate training administrators personalize corporate training.
3 Ways to Personalize Corporate Training Using LMS Software
If you want to make personalized employee training part of your company’s learning culture, LMS software is a must. LMS software makes personalized corporate training possible through various LMS features, including:
- Personal Learning Paths
- Mobile Learning
- Real Time Job Aids
- Blended Learning
- Social Learning Communities
Also, LMS software offers a variety of training mediums, such as webinars, forums, and online games, quizzes, knowledge checks, and simulations. This gives administrators more options for personalizing training and appealing to a wide variety of learners.
Here are a few ways to make corporate training more engaging and effective using LMS software:
1) Let employees lead their own training - Many employees prefer to lead their own learning experience, as long as they are provided with all the resources they need to successfully learn. Allowing workers the freedom and responsibility to direct their own professional growth is a great way to engage them and promote upskilling, according to the article Employee-Led Learning: Allowing Workers to Stray from the Beaten Path.5 It also gives employees a sense of ownership over their professional development, which can lead to greater motivation and pride in their accomplishments as they succeed in training.
LMS software makes it easy for just about any employee to govern their own training. For example, individual online learning paths, an LMS feature, keep workers on-track with training. With online learning path functionality offered by TOPYX LMS software, you can create a sequential order of delivery for courses and materials. The course/material sequence can also be allocated to select users or user groups. You can set eligibility requirements for more advanced courses. More advanced courses become available only after users finish previous courses or materials, and users can only access content assigned to their online learning path.
Discover more about TOPYX learning paths, and request a free LMS demo.
LMS learning paths are particularly helpful in situations where there are required learning trees involved with a training program, certifications and training requirements are complicated, or training requirements are challenging for users to process. TOPYX LMS can help you organize and clarify corporate training requirements and get better training outcomes.
2) Make training as flexible as possible - Would you agree that an online learning course that can be completed from any place, at any time is more personal than a training course or module that must be completed in a set timeframe, at a certain location? The majority of learners prefer for corporate training courses to be flexible. They want to have access to them 24/7 and be able to interact with them on any device. LMS software makes this possible and thus increases the personalization of corporate training.
A corporate training program delivered using LMS software is available on-demand and accessible on most, if not all, mobile devices via mobile learning. In addition to increased personalization of training, a few benefits of mobile learning include:
- Greater training accessibility for all users - Learning paths and online courses can be accessed from anywhere with mobile learning. This gives users the flexibility to learn at their own pace and on their schedule.
- Lower training costs - Mobile learning tends to lower training costs for organizations. This is because there are no added hardware or connectivity charges associated with mobile learning as most employees already own smartphones or tablets.
- Increased productivity - Mobile learning provides flexibility and freedom outside of office hours, giving employees the ability to increase productivity in other areas of their work.
Mobile learning is just one aspect of LMS software that promotes flexible, personalized corporate training. “An e-learning solution that provides several tiers of content, connection with other learners or independent learning offers individuals the opportunity to choose the training modality that is most suited to their educational needs, learning style and personal schedules,” explained Training Industry.6
3) Encourage user-generated content (UGC) - User-generated training content is personalized training content. When an employee creates their own training, it perfectly meets their needs, as well as the needs of others with a similar learning style as theirs. User-generated content (UGC) is beneficial not just because it is personalized, but because it promotes informal, engaging learning, drives collaboration, and causes learners to take an active role in their training experience.
Interested in having employees create some of their own training content? “Ask online learners to create their own eLearning blogs or virtual presentations based on the subject matter,” suggested eLearning Industry.7 “They must use their pre-existing knowledge and newfound tech skills to develop learner-generated eLearning content.”
UGC doesn’t have to be complex. It can be as simple as an employee creating a short video describing a couple of hacks for learning a new skill, such as using mnemonic devices. The video could be uploaded to the proper LMS social forum, and LMS administrators could preview it to ensure it is relevant. Administrators could also determine what audience would be allowed to view it. This would not only benefit the training creator, but would also benefit other employees who are currently learning the skill mentioned in the video.
By encouraging learners to generate some of their own training content, organizational leaders can actively create a culture of knowledge sharing.
Personalize Corporate Training the Easy Way With TOPYX LMS
Your employees are more likely to consistently engage in training that is personalized to their preferences and needs. Create personalized learning experiences with TOPYX LMS. Request a free LMS demo of TOPYX to discover its many features and find out why it is the best LMS for your organization.
References:
1) eLearning Industry. https://elearningindustry.com/personalizing-corporate-online-training-4-benefits.
2) Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/10/where-companies-go-wrong-with-learning-and-development.
3) eLearning Industry. https://elearningindustry.com/6-major-advantages-custom-elearning-corporate-training.
4) Society for Human Resource Management. https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/0517/pages/a-personalized-approach-to-corporate-learning.aspx.
5) HR Dive. https://www.hrdive.com/news/employee-led-learning-allowing-workers-to-stray-from-the-beaten-path/526475/.
6) Training Industry. https://trainingindustry.com/articles/e-learning/how-flexible-e-learning-works-in-an-on-demand-world/.
7) eLearning Industry. https://elearningindustry.com/tips-promote-digital-literacy-tech-skills-elearning.
