A common hallmark of ineffective learning and development is one-size-fits-all content that doesn’t account for different skill levels and learning styles. At a time when employees are increasingly requesting professional development opportunities and flexibility, this approach to workplace learning won’t meet either demand. Instead of giving employees the individual instruction and reinforcement they need, many companies continue to rely on outdated and impersonal methodologies for learning.
Beyond the fact that this content won’t help employees retain vital information, it also tells them that the company they work for doesn’t value their time. This can lead to significant cultural problems across the company, such as disengagement and even turnover. Leaders should always remember that their employees are busy adults with many obligations and demands for their attention, which is why the most successful companies are the ones that provide practical, relevant learning in a concise and engaging format.
We can’t afford to rely on superficial and outmoded approaches to learning that treat employees like numbers and fail to drive sustainable behavioral change. Instead, they should view the demand for L&D as an opportunity to improve retention, increase productivity and ultimately build a more educated workforce. In order for this to work, it’s time to invest in and develop personalized learning plans that focus on employees’ specific strengths and weaknesses, generate individual performance metrics and accommodate unique learning styles.
Employees are demanding learning opportunities
Despite concerns over macroeconomic headwinds, we’re still in a tight labor market and the quit rate remains high, indicating that employees aren’t in a “hold and see” pattern when it comes to their careers. A recent PwC survey found that over three-quarters of employees are “ready to learn new skills or completely retrain,” while 74 percent view training as a matter of personal responsibility. This is particularly encouraging for an area like cybersecurity education, which requires employees to take responsibility for the defense of their entire organization.
Of course, employees are also interested in workplace education for the sake of professional advancement. According to a 2022 LinkedIn report, companies that excel at internal mobility retain employees for an average of 5.4 years — a number that falls to 2.9 for companies in which it’s more difficult for employees to be promoted or switch positions. A key element of talent mobility is providing employees with the individual educational resources they need to explore new career paths, learn new positions and build their skill sets.
Every employee has distinct skills, temperaments and priorities, and these differences should be reflected in the learning they receive. This doesn’t just apply to L&D for specific positions — it also applies to the strategies used to educate employees about issues that affect everyone, such as cybersecurity and workplace conduct. Employees want these programs to be successful too, as they can prevent costly mistakes and reinforce valuable skills.
Understanding how busy adults learn
L&D shouldn’t feel like a chore or an imposition — companies should have enough respect for employees to provide learning content they’ll actually be able to use in their daily lives. This means identifying the best learning strategy for each employee and implementing it in a way that won’t disrupt their work. Creating personalized learning plans won’t just keep employees engaged, they also ensure these plans help accomplish their goals by tracking individual performance indicators.
There are several basic elements of effective L&D programs:
- Relevance: Learning content needs to have clear and direct implications for learners’ daily lives, and it should draw upon real-world lessons that are digestible and immediately applicable (how actual data breaches happened and the ways they could have been prevented, for instance).
- Engagement: Content also has to keep viewers’ attention with an engrossing narrative, gamification or other forms of interactivity that can be customized based on the individual user.
- Frequency: Finally, employees will only retain the information they learn if it’s provided frequently and updated as circumstances change.
All these elements can be adjusted for different individuals — relevance depends on each employee’s responsibilities and knowledge base, companies can experiment with a range of engagement strategies, and some employees will need more reinforcement than others.
How companies benefit from personalized learning
One of the most pressing challenges companies face today is a lack of employee engagement. Gallup reports that just over one-fifth of employees are engaged at work, which can lead to higher turnover and lost productivity. Gallup has found that employees are more engaged at work when companies give them opportunities to do what they do best, listen to their opinions, discuss their progress, and enable their professional and personal development. In other words, employees want to be treated and valued as individuals.
Engagement isn’t just the key to maintaining employee productivity, loyalty and a healthy company culture — it’s also the only way companies can make their L&D programs work. There’s no more reliable way to teach employees than by engaging them on an individual level. Doing so will help employees retain the information they learn and put it into practice, while providing critical information about their strengths and weaknesses. When you know where employees are struggling, you will be able to provide learning content that focuses on these areas and continually measure improvement (or a lack thereof) against this baseline.
An area of workforce development that suffers from a lack of personalization today, for example, is the cybersecurity awareness training space. One-size-fits-all approaches don’t produce the learning results that the workforce and their companies need because people don’t feel engaged. L&D programs like these need to be tailored directly to the individual in order to engage them effectively.
The ability to assess each employee’s initial knowledge is as important to personalized learning as is the actual learning content. The assess-educate-evaluate paradigm has proven to be very successful across all areas of adult education.
When companies provide personalized learning, they’ll address their employees’ demands for flexibility, engagement and professional development while ensuring that their workforce is acquiring essential knowledge and skills. There aren’t many initiatives that pay such substantial dividends across so many areas of the business, which is why personalized learning is only becoming more important.
