Is Learner-Centric Technology the Way to Provide Personalized Learning?

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Nothing turns learners off more than irrelevant learning content. Most know that training is important for their career progression, but don’t end up completing—or applying—any of the training they receive. That’s pretty crazy, considering 53% of Gen Z workers want to receive training.

Enter: Learner-centered teaching, designed to make the learner experience fun and engaging. But is it really the best approach to delivering impactful, personalized learning? Let’s dive in.

What is the learner experience?

Learner experience refers to a learner’s overall journey during the learning process. It encompasses everything from how they interact and engage with learning platforms, content, and instructors, including how content is delivered, assessed, and supported. It goes beyond “quality” of just learning content and instead looks at the entire end-to-end experience a learner has.

The challenges of learning experience platforms

Learning experience platforms (LXPs) are specifically designed to improve and capture that learner experience. Their remit is a learner-centered approach to training, done by offering a personalized, engaging, and intuitive learning environment. But are learner-centered methods really the path to impactful L&D?

The LXP market likes to emphasize its catalog of curated content from internal and third-party sources. Learners can choose what they want to learn and their delivery method. In our experience, this leads to choice paralysis as learners just don’t know where to start. Not only that, but a whopping 40% of learners can’t even find the learning they need, let alone choose the right content.

It doesn’t help that learner experience platforms often push learners towards the self-paced approach to learning. This only further overwhelms them, given they aren’t provided any direction or development plans to guide them. An overwhelming experience is a bad one, reducing actual learner engagement (and that, in turn, is a slippery slope down to employee turnover).

A lot of this comes down to the fact that LXPs are doing just that: Focusing on learner experience. We won’t deny that learning engagement and content completions are important metrics to measure, but good learning experience alone doesn’t equate to improved performance. If anything, it’s harder to prove impact and return on investment (ROI) of learning on organizational outcomes because the completions data LXPs collect don’t actually link to tangible performance goals.

How to provide truly personalized learning

In our recent study on the state of L&D, 95.5% of companies agreed tying employee L&D to career growth improves employee satisfaction and retention. In other words: Personalized learning for professional development is the way forward. But if learner-centered approaches to corporate training aren’t the answer, how can we make learning personalized and impactful on broader organizational outcomes?

It’s a three-pronged approach.

1. Switch to a capability-led strategy
2. Use technology
3. Leverage data and analytics.

Introduce a capability-led learning strategy

Start by using capabilities to link learning and performance metrics. Capabilities are derived from business strategy and are the skills, knowledge, behaviors, processes, and tools that combine to deliver organizational outcomes. You may see them categorized as business capabilities, or the capabilities a business needs to perform to achieve its goals, and role-specific or human capabilities, which employees need to perform their roles effectively and contribute to organizational goals.

Role-specific capabilities outline the performance standard needed to succeed in a role. Because they can be measured in levels of competency, it’s easy to identify (through capability gap analyses) how employees are currently performing compared to where they should be performing.

For example, HR may need a change management integration capability to effectively deliver change programs. Let’s say a few team members only have a basic understanding of it, but the roles require them to have an advanced competency in the capability. This gives you the baseline to assign learning content that will develop a deeper understanding of change management and integration.

Capabilities allow you to map out:

1. In-depth job descriptions for each job role
2. Personalized development pathways to help learners succeed in those roles.

Remember when we talked earlier about learners not knowing where to start? Well, capabilities take care of that issue. They’re essentially a curriculum for learners to follow to target their specific performance development needs.

Utilize technology

No matter if you’re focus is on performance or learner experience, everything’s easier with the right technology—the operative word being right.

As we’ve noted, learner-centric technology doesn’t always provide a good learner experience. We built the performance learning management system (PLMS) for this reason. Compared to other learning tech, the PLMS starts by analyzing your business strategy and then derives the capabilities you need to develop to achieve business goals. From there, the system helps you map capabilities to job roles and learning content to capabilities, so that every learner gets a personalized development plan once they’ve done a performance assessment.

What that gets you is more time to work on the work that actually matters. You don’t need to worry about the minutia of content curation or ensuring every single individual learner has relevant content in front of them. A PLMS can even perform follow-up analyses of learner performance following course completion to determine training ROI—all you need to do is set it to. If needed, the PLMS can also assign more focused training to reinforce learning and application of knowledge.

And that brings us back to that business strategy you first input. With capabilities, successful learning drives performance improvement, and that, in turn, drives a return on investment.

Leverage performance data and analytics

As defined, the problem with LXPs is that they focus on experience over application. The problem with that problem is that without learning application, you don’t get anywhere near performance uplift. You can’t answer questions business leaders will have—like has turnover decreased? Can your organization respond to the market quicker? Has customer satisfaction improved? Are business processes more effective?—with learner experience or satisfaction.

Showing ROI goes beyond the classic metrics many LMS vendors would have you measure. We wouldn’t discount them entirely; for example, you need to create continuous feedback loops from learners in order to understand learning impact, as a start. But build on that with capability gap analyses to uncover strategic weaknesses, so you can a) better resource training and b) provide training when and where it’s needed.

This is especially important because your business will have to adapt and evolve to changes in your industry over time. Maybe your business is scaling and requires new roles and departments. Perhaps there are new technology solutions that require new capability sets. You need to assess both business and learner needs continuously to account for these changes and adjust learning accordingly. Without consistent reassessment, you’ll have no hope of providing a good learner experience, anyway.

Key takeaways

Learner-centric training goes beyond focusing on learner experience and engagement. Sure, learners are more likely to stick with learning if it’s engaging, but that engagement comes from relevancy, not entertainment factor.

You only get relevant content from implementing a capability-led strategy to outline and guide personalized development. It’s the only way to make sure employees are getting learning that helps them improve in their roles while also contributing to broader organizational outcomes.

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