The Power and Possibilities of Personalized Learning

Educators and other learning and development professionals have long known that different individuals learn differently. Some learners do better learning on their own, while doing while others are more suited to a classroom setting. Some are visual learners, while others are auditory learners. Some thrive on group work, while others benefit more from individual study.

Given these well-known differences in learning styles, why is it that so many organizations take a one-size-fits-all approach to training their staff members?

Resource constraints are perhaps the most obvious answer to this riddle. Many organizations feel it is simply cost-prohibitive to develop and execute customized training and development pathways for each individual employee.

While it certainly requires more thought and planning to individualize employee training efforts, it’s not necessarily the case that this is beyond the capabilities of most employers. By leveraging efficient and personalized strategies for employee development, most companies can at least customize training pathways for certain key staff, if not for the organization at large.

Key Elements of Personalized Training

While many employers’ assumptions about the feasibility of personalized training programs are exaggerated or even entirely unfounded, it is true that there are challenges to personalizing training to individual employees, and organizations that embark on such efforts without understanding those challenges and taking steps to mitigate them will run a high risk of failure.

Dave McCool is CEO of Muzzy Lane, a technology company specializing in game-based learning and development solutions. He cites four key requirements for personalized training programs:

• They must be cost effective for L&D organizations to author and maintain.
• They must include authentic, automated assessments of employees. Manual grading doesn’t scale, McCool notes.   
• They must generate meaningful and actionable data based on the assessments.
• They must be equitable and accessible for all employees.

Personalized training that meets these criteria are more likely to be engaging and meaningful for the individual trainees and to be flexible enough to make outcomes-based adjustments that help ensure their effectiveness and justify the increased resources needed to support individualized programs.

Technology and Content to the Rescue

Just thirty years ago, it very likely was cost-prohibitive for most organizations to develop effective and meaningful individualized training programs for most of their staff. Today, such programs are well within reach for many companies. So, what has changed? Two factors in particular have fundamentally changed the learning and development landscape in recent years:

• Growth of learning technologies. New technologies like streaming media and advances in telecommunications technologies mean that individuals can easily access on-demand and live training content from anywhere they have an internet connection. Modern training technologies have also increased the ability of trainees to interact with training content, for example by asking questions to presenters or testing their knowledge with short quizzes and games.
• Explosion in content. The increased ability to access a wealth of training and development content would be relatively meaningless without a wealth of content to access. Fortunately, there is an incredible amount of training and development content available in a variety of formats across a wide range of industries and topics. This availability of quality content means training and development professionals can develop custom training courses for individual employees without having to develop every bit of training content themselves. In fact, they don’t really need to create any new content in many cases and can simply arrange a schedule according to which trainees proceed to the next batch of material selected based on that trainee’s job function, learning and development goals and preferred learning style.

Mentorships and Job Shadowing

While it can be a daunting prospect to move from a generalized, one-size-fits-all approach to training to  custom approach based on individual team members, some time-tested training strategies are inherently individualized.

Mentorships and job shadowing activities are intended to pair junior individuals with more experience individuals for in-depth, one-on-one interaction and real-world experience. These opportunities should continue to be top of mind for any efforts to increase the personalization of training efforts.

Leveraging Data

It may sound counterintuitive to hear that leveraging objective measures of training effectiveness is a key element of a personalized training approach, but that’s absolutely true, particularly in the context of efficiently using limited resources.

It can be prohibitively time-consuming to regularly take a subjective, personal determination of employee learning and development progress. Instead, objective metrics can be used to help training and development leaders keep track of large numbers of learners at once.

We emphasize “help,” because personalized training will always require some level of subjective evaluation. But using some consistent metrics as benchmarks can provide some insights into which trainees may be struggling to grasp certain concepts or contents and which trainees could be getting bored with material they’ve already mastered and are ready to move on.

Rethinking the Supposed Cost-Effectiveness of Mass Training

As we’ve noted, there is a widespread perception that individualized training is simply too costly for most organizations. But often organizations make such assumptions without a thorough analysis of the all the relevant factors.

For example, creating mass training content is also quite expensive. It’s costly to hire speakers to present to large groups or purchase large numbers of user-seats to online training content. And it’s not cheap to have an entire organization take several hours away from their day-to-day activities to participate in training.

And while the costs of generalized training is not insignificant, its impacts can be surprisingly insignificant on many employees. Again, not everyone learns in the same way, and training content and delivery strategies that don’t take individual learning styles and preferences into account may not be a great return on investment considering how many trainees simply aren’t learning the material. Corporate training has traditionally taken a one-size-fits-all approach. But training and development professionals have long known that not all individuals respond the same way to the same training methods. While some organizations may assume that they simply don’t have the resources to support individualized training, such an approach may actually be more achievable than many realize.

Lin Grensing-Pophal is a Contributing Editor at HR Daily Advisor.

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