Leveraging the right learning experience platforms can help you achieve your business goals by enabling you to address company skill gaps, create a skills inventory, and encourage learning and retention.
By Subbu Viswanathan, CEO of Disprz, an enterprise skills acceleration platform, 3-time tech entrepreneur, former McKinsey consultant, ITT and ISB alumni.
A learning program that simply ensures employees are compliant–with content that may or may not be relevant to their job role–is a common practice. This is especially true when the learning solution is bundled with your human capital management (HCM) platform. In my experience, an HCM solution usually provides no more than a simple administrative system that tracks learning adoption.
Today more than ever, I think it is vital to provide personalized, role-specific and relevant content for learning and skills-building for your employees.
Advantages of Personalized Learning
Personalized learning takes an employee-centric approach to learning and development. The idea is to create customized learning opportunities that align with a person’s job role, existing skills and interests.
As the leader of a learning experience platform, here are some of the benefits I’ve seen clients experience when they take advantage of personalized learning:
- Metrics to analyze employee skills and role readiness.
- A leadership pipeline based on hard and soft skills enhancements.
- Improved knowledge retention with personalized content.
- Increased employee engagement and retention.
Six Thing To Prioritize When Evaluating a Learning Platform
There are many learning platform options, but it is important to ensure that they are aligned with your business requirements. Below are the most important features and capabilities that your learning platform should have.
1. Role-Based Skilling
Look for a solution that enables you to access a skill directory that aligns with your L&D strategies. To do this effectively, you must have the capability to identify and map skills for every role in your organization.
2. Skill Assessment
Your employees will have varying levels of skills and knowledge. You don’t want to put all employees through the same learning experience, even if they share the same role.
Instead, you should evaluate current employee readiness and determine the skill gaps that each employee has. Once you’ve performed the skill assessment, you can tailor a personalized learning experience that will meet individual employee needs for learning and upskilling.
3. AI-Based Content Recommendations
These days, the best learning experience platforms leverage artificial intelligence to provide content and learning recommendations. This technology enables your platform to auto-generate a personalized learning path with even more quality content fetched from renowned and credible sources.
An employee’s learning experience may include AI-based recommendations for a variety of content formats like online articles, videos, etc. Any way that you can include these things can make for a more engaging experience.
4. Self-Paced Learning
One of the issues with many learning programs is the mistaken belief that every course should be taken at the same pace. It’s important to understand that each employee learns at a different pace. Some catch on to certain concepts quickly, while others need a bit more time to digest and truly understand them.
Therefore, I recommend prioritizing self-paced learning. Allow your employees to go through the training at their own pace. They will feel more comfortable and will likely retain more of what they learn.
5. In-Depth Analytics
I also recommend that the platform you choose provide in-depth learning analytics. You can then measure how effective your personalized learning initiatives are. The right analytics allow you to link personalized learning efforts to employee performance and optimize the impact on your business outcomes.
You’ll also be able to determine whether the courses being recommended are working as you planned, or whether you may need to make changes to provide more learning opportunities for some or all employees.
6. Third-Party Integrations
When choosing your learning platform also consider other software applications you are currently using in your business.
You should find a system that integrates well with third-party platforms, so it will be easier for you to adopt. Consider the HRMS, LMS, CMS, MOOCs, business apps and any other software you might be using and determine whether your platform will integrate with them.
A learning experience platform should not have a problem integrating with popular third-party platforms available on the market.
In conclusion, leveraging the right learning experience platforms can help you achieve your business goals by enabling you to address company skill gaps, create a skills inventory and encourage learning and retention on the part of your employees. By prioritizing the right elements of a platform, you can infuse your team with a mindset that makes them want to enhance their skills.
