Personalized learning is an effective way to provide need-based learning and essential training to your employees. Modern learners want personalized, targeted training in their time of need. In training and development, personalized learning enables the L&D professionals to provide conceptual content and skills development content based on the learner’s needs and interests, while also keeping business goals in mind. It empowers and motivates employees to embrace continuous learning and gives them an idea of their learning requirements.
Personalized learning offers relevant content to learners that enables them to accomplish their career goals. A personalized learning path is the customization and adaptation of instructional methods, materials and techniques. Personalized learning paths are better suited for individual learners than a one-size-fits-all solution, as they consider learner preferences, background knowledge, previous work experience and requirements for their current job role.
Mobile learning has become a popular — and effective — training delivery method. By combining personalized learning paths and mobile training delivery, you can better train, reskill and upskill your employees at scale.
Let’s consider four ways to create personalized learning paths for your employees using mobile learning.
1. Understand Learner Preferences
Learners have unique preferences regarding when, how and where they learn. Some learners may prefer infographics, videos and scenario-based training to understand new information and imbibe new skills. Others may prefer to listen to podcasts or watch instructional videos led by industry experts. Some employees may prefer to learn new skills through quizzes and assessments.
It’s important to consider learner preferences when delivering training. Use a self-assessment tool, techniques and questionnaire to help you gauge your learners’ preferences so that you can create a personalized mobile learning path for each employee using their preferred delivery methods.
2. Use a Learning Experience Platform
Organizations increasingly use learning experience platforms (LXPs) to deliver effective personalized learning experiences. LXPs are increasingly seen as a strong alternative to traditional learning management systems (LMSs). You can utilize LXPs to provide just-in-time and experiential learning to employees on the go, in their flow of work. Modern LXPs help deliver structural course content instead of static learning content and help control learners’ progress toward their goals. Many modern LXPs also provide improved real-time tracking and reporting data. These analytical reports help L&D professionals identify learners’ skills gaps so they can provide content that addresses them.
With an LXP, you can bring both in-house and external training materials together to create comprehensive learning paths. These learning paths can be customized based on the learner’s needs and background knowledge, thus providing personalized learning paths. LXPs are bound to grow with many more learner-friendly features in the future.
3. Use Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) can help you create personalized learning strategies that address learners’ needs. AI helps you to accurately identify employee skill gaps and suggest ways to address them. It can also help you collect more reliable data on how learning is impacting individual performance: AI can collect useful data on which courses learners are taking, how much time they are taking to complete them, which training delivery method they prefer, their performance in assessments and evaluations, their feedback and comments on the modules’ overall efficiency.
Ultimately, AI can help L&D professionals provide curated content based on their learners’ needs and individual preferences, increasing the courses’ relevance to their job. By using AI-generated data and analyzing it, you can create an effective personalized learning path for your learners.
4. Obtain Feedback From Your Learners — And Use It
For mobile learning paths to be effective, L&D professionals must know how to align the learning content with employees’ specific needs. There is no doubt that self-assessment tool and AI systems help get an idea of an employee’s preferred learning style, interests and needs. However, obtaining direct feedback from your learners is equally as important. Therefore, L&D professionals should always seek learners’ feedback after they complete a course, and make updates to your programs as needed.
Personalized mobile learning paths help provide training based on learners’ unique competencies, proficiencies and needs. By adopting the strategies outlined above, you can leverage mobile learning paths for improved performance, and learner engagement, over time.
