Let’s face it, learning is personal. In a world where you can customize almost anything to your individual wants or needs, doesn’t it follow that learning should also be personalized?
Personalization within the context of learning is not just a nice to have these days, it’s an expectation. Adult learners want content that is accurate, relevant, and specific to their needs, role, and goals – more specifically, they want learning that is customized to who they are and who they want to become. And if possible, they even want a say in what, where, and how they learn.
In the same way, our clients want to develop and deliver personalized training programs for their learners, targeted by role, experience level, learning gaps, interests, and aspirations, as this often leads to the effective and efficient achievement of desired learning outcomes.
So how does an off-the-shelf content provider meet the personalization needs of clients and learners? How do we provide content that has utility to the learner, regardless of their role, experience, interests, and goals? The answer lies in program design.
To accomplish CMR’s, our clients’ and our learners’ goals, we set-out to apply personalization practices to every step of our program design process for both clients and learners. How learning content is discovered, constructed, and delivered, all played a key role in producing truly innovative and personalized learning programs from start to finish.
Find & Explore with AI
Utilizing search functionality enabled with Artificial Intelligence (AI), our website helps visitors find exactly what they came for, as well as explore additional related resources. Clients can begin to build out their ideal grouping of content, based on what they know about their particular learner audience – their roles, experience level, aspirations, and overall learning gaps and needs. Visitors can build a “Learning List,” which is an initial scope of content for a learning program. Intelligent search featuring content recommendations, Learning List outlines, and preliminary client communications set the foundation for a personalized learning program.
Targeted Curation & Custom Pathways
What content and learning objectives are paramount to the learners? What skills will they need in their current and future roles? What is their experience level? Answering these types of questions help us to fully unlock the potential of our existing off-the-shelf modules, curating and organizing the right content to get a particular group of learners to a specific outcome. By limiting the overall amount of content and providing a guided pathway for how to achieve the end goal, we respect the limited time that learners have to dedicate to training, while also providing a blueprint for success. With variables such as content topic area, client-desired outcomes, audience-specific characteristics, and learner preferences, we curate and organize our existing content to fit the program requirements. This provides a unique learning pathway for our clients and learners that offers relevant, up-to-date content and supports specific learner needs and preferences.
Self-Directed & Application-Based Resources
In addition to relevant microlearning content that allows learners to explore within assigned pathway modules, we also provide optional modules and resources so that learners can take a deeper dive in areas of specific interest or needed improvement. Required modules with an “unlocked” design work in conjunction with elective content to cover program necessities, while allowing for learner freedom and self-personalization. A custom program guide for learners and coaches keeps participants on track within the provided pathway of learning and promotes further individualization by offering reflection questions and application-based activities to help personalize general concepts to their real-life situation as well as other custom supplementary resources to explore.
Our personalized approach to learning design has been transformational for our learners. Adult learners expect personalization. They don’t see themselves as cookie-cutter employees, and thus, believe their training programs should be as unique as their background, knowledge, and skills.
Programs that incorporate personalization ensure learners see content, topics, and activities that resonate with who they are and who they want to become – and content that resonates leads to learner engagement.
Learners that can see how a training program will help them be a more successful, knowledgeable, and skillful version of themselves, are more engaged in the learning process, willingly giving their limited time to learn formally and finding value in program offerings. All of these factors lead to a more fervent commitment to the overall program, increased learning transfer and retention, as well as successful attainment of desired program outcomes across the learner group.
For instance, in one of our personalized Emerging Leader programs, we’ve seen significant participant reported increases in executive presence, confidence in leading, and ability to engage in relationship-building conversations.
- 97% of program participants increased their value to their customers, colleagues, and organization
- Their executive presence increased from 37% to 71% in pre- vs post-evaluations and their diligence in achieving organizational goals improved by nearly 20% (from 68% to 87%)
- We’ve also seen an 89% participant retention rate and a 23% promotion rate among participants in our curated and personalized learning programs.
