How To Meet The Challenge Of Training Individual Employees

This was originally posted on eLearning Industry.

Technology has been growing more and more advanced, which has created a shift in how companies can train their employees. Instead of delivering cookie-cutter courses to everyone in the organization, there are new, powerful training technology tools to create customizable eLearning solutions for flexible audiences. People don’t all respond the same way to learning environments or instruction styles, so developing corporate training with a personalized touch is important. 

For example, say a handful of employees want to improve their ability to use programming languages. How can you best accommodate that without creating a company-wide learning initiative? Individualized education falls outside of the normal scale of corporate training, but it’s important to help employees develop their personal goals. 

But this is also an opportunity to address the massive need to upskill your workforce. With shifting technology and industry best-practices, employees need to learn new skills to be effective. So, allow your employees to choose how, when, and what they want to learn. Let’s take a look at how you can tackle the issue with the right tools and approaches. 

Discover Your Employees’ Skill Gaps 

The first step in any upskilling initiative is to figure out what your learners need to better perform in their roles, as well as the skills that will drive their career trajectory. Once you know where the gaps in your learners’ knowledge, skill, and training are, you can personalize your corporate training initiative to those goals. This will help the entire design to fit your learners, but don’t forget to consider team, department, or organizational business objectives. Your learners’ personal goals will have more value if their development is aligned with organizational needs.  

Involve the Right People 

To drive such a personalized project forward, you’ll need to get the right people on board. This is a great opportunity to involve your department heads and team leads. After all, they are the people with the best information regarding what their employees will need to drive performance. And of course, having expert leadership is always important for any large undertaking. Moreover, the effort to reskill the workforce may even lead to specialized positions at the executive level to ensure that employees can succeed. And when everyone works together to develop a plan, you are much more likely to meet with organizational success. 

Curate eLearning Content 

There may be some off-the-shelf content that serves specific training needs, but often custom eLearning is the best solution for more personalized training programs. So, your content library may end up being a combination of several asset types. By targeting your employees’ skill gaps with custom eLearning activities, you can meet them at their point of need and ensure that they understand the value of the training. 

Microlearning strategies, which uses bite-sized pieces of information, have proven to be particularly effective with this kind of personalized on-the-job learning. With the right html5 mobile learning design, it even works on whatever device is most handy. The personalized, learner-driven nature of microlearning increases engagement, improves training and job efficiency, and builds employee interest in seeking out additional training opportunities.  

Use the Right Systems to Develop Skills 

With differing learning paths and types of training methods, organizing your eLearning assets will require the use of a learning portal or learning management system (LMS). With careful user interface design, and search functions using metadata, content accessibility – and consequently, content consumption – will only increase. If possible, content sharing through social networking channels will also drive content consumption. If learners can’t find what they’re looking for right when they need it, they will be less likely to put in the effort to access and use short training pieces.  

However, you’re not limited to digital systems. Mentorship programs can provide new team members with expert advice and perspective from tenured employees. Moreover, this can help you to build a cohesive team and reduce turnover. 

Conclusion 

Giving your employees opportunities to grow and develop their own skills is important to reduce turnover and build a strong team. While there are challenges to face in a changing skills landscape, applying the right training technologies and learning strategies drive organizational success. Personalized learning for every employee is the next step in creating an amazing training program.