How to personalise a digital learning experience to the individual learner

Learning and development functions have seen significant changes to workplace learning over the past few years. Today, it has become a fundamental requirement for organisations to align their learning strategy with the demands of the modern workforce.

An important point for leaders to consider is how they can maximise the engagement of their people through any new or existing learning solutions, whilst supporting and building not only the capabilities of their people and teams, but also those of the organisation as a whole.

Now let’s take a moment to reflect upon your existing digital learning strategy. What steps are you currently taking to ensure that the experience is personalised and meets the unique learning needs of your people?

If your initiatives are mandatory, lacking in personalisation and don’t take prior learning and experience into account then your people will eventually treat learning as a tick-box exercise, rather than something that is experienced, enjoyed and shared with their peers.

Mandatory learning can quite often be a monotonous and repetitive task which must be completed every year and records kept for compliance evidence and audits. Think about what your people may experience each time that reminder drops into their inbox. Most employees are filled with dread – cue the eye-roll – but what if you could transform the learning into something immersive and memorable? At the very least you need to ensure that the content isn’t the same year after year, but how can you really maximise the engagement of your people and make the experience personal to each learner?

Does this statement sound familiar? “I remember this from my last job”.

We’ve perhaps all heard this being said by our learners at some point, and it usually boils over from the frustration of the same things being done in equally linear ways and sometimes even the same systems and software being used. How great would it be if you could banish the one-size-fits-all approach to learning and target the specific development needs of your people as individuals?

This can be achieved by utilising “adaptive learning”, which is a customised digital learning experience that assesses the knowledge gaps of the individual learner. Algorithms identify what your people already know and where their knowledge gaps are. Which allows learning paths to be tailored to their specific needs.

This method of digital learning would have the additional benefit of:

• Uniqueness – The module adapts to every individual thus avoiding ‘sheep dip learning’
• Efficiency – 20+ minutes saved per module each year
• Realises ROI (Return on Investment) – eliminated time spent on repeated learning and maximised productivity.

By adopting this simple approach, you can:

• Provide a strategy that solves the problems you have identified,
• Adapt the solution and strategy by identifying the needs of the audience,
• Give the individual a sense of belonging and demonstrate that the learning has been created with them in mind

For more information on adaptive learning complete the short form here.