Corporate learning and personalization: the key to success

The days of chalk and board are well gone. Technology has offered a new and brilliant future for learning, one where students can be tracked with ease and progress clearly mapped. Rather than learning by rote in a “one size fits all” approach, personalization grants the possibility to change our approach to learning that considers a person’s background, expertise, interests, and position. And corporations are looking to make the most of it.

Personalization is simply the name that’s been given to the increased focus of education for each individual employee. It’s not rocket science to see that ensuring individuals have their needs addressed is a more positive approach. Through online courses and eLearning programs, organizations can tailor learning to each individual within their company to enjoy some massive benefits.

In this article, we’ll look at those benefits that personalization brings to both employees and employers, and explain how online learning helps ease the process.

Break Down Barriers

Our ease with technology is a double-edged sword. While we can communicate easily, find vital information in seconds and keep up-to-date with goings on through only our mobile phones, we are also inundated with an awful lot of unnecessary and time-wasting garbage.

Information Overload (also known as Information Fatigue) is a rising problem for employees and one that costs countless hours of productivity. The workplace, and modern life is simply overloaded with technology and sorting through what is important and what is not can prove overwhelming.

Personalization allows organizations to cut out the nonsense so that employees receive only what is necessary for them in their learning process. With laser-like focus, we can personalize learning for the individual by looking at uses data collected from the educational resources, like eLearning courses, to offer only what is useful to that particular individual. Just like online advertisers use cookies to suggest products for you to buy, personalization delivers topics that interest the learner only.

The personalization process saves time and energy for employees and businesses and helps to avoid continuing to overload employees with non-vital information.

Put the Learner in the Passenger Seat

Personalization in learning is so successful because it gives the learner the power to control what they learn which in turn makes them feel valued as a member of an organization and ensures they’re much more involved in their learning process.

If an employee is given access to a learning resource like an eLearning platform, they’re free to pick and choose whatever catches their attention.

Rather than be given a list of what they must work through, personalization gifts learners the choice to proactively search out their desired topics, to find videos or how-tos on what it is that takes their attention.

Personalized resources can be more detailed and therefore more valuable because of this. They no longer have to be general enough to keep the attention of everyone. Now they’re only for the people who want to learn.

Be Truly Mobile

eLearning platforms can make learning a pleasure rather than a chore, granting learners the freedom to work wherever and whenever they like. Thanks to mobile technology, an employee no longer needs to sit in the education suite at the office to go through a dull slide show - learning can actually be fun.

Sure, employees will be encouraged to put some time into their learning but as they can do this on the bus or train into work and use downtime to be productive, it is no longer such a headache.

The personalized approach leverages technology to its full advantage so that learners can improve their skills and understanding on a basis that suits them. As an approach, it is far more flexible and true to life than traditional models and is more successful as a result.

Understanding Difference

Organizations that use personalized learning also gain one very important but underappreciated benefit. In deciding upon a personalized platform, a business is, in fact, acknowledging the individuality of everybody who works in their ranks.

There is a trickle-down effect to this. On top of the higher staff retention statistics, increased customer satisfaction and improved productivity as a direct result of personalization, there’s also the benefit of employees knowing they work somewhere where they’re valued.

For a large company, this is particularly relevant as a reflection of company culture and the standards that the company carries. Company culture is the human side of a business and because of this means everything.

Make it Social

The 70/20/10 Model for Learning and Development is probably the most famous approach to education in the business world.

This approach outlines the ways that learning is best achieved when it happens socially and collaboratively. And when learning is student-led, as personalization allows, then happy students are more likely to engage with others.

Online learning platforms offer the ability to interact socially with others so that students can assist one another in their learning outcomes. As the 70/20/10 model suggests, this social engagement with other learners generally leads to improved outcomes, benefitting each learner along the way.

Personalization for Improved Results

So what are you waiting for? Corporate learning is enhanced when delivered in a personalized way. Indeed, it’s so effective that the approach is becoming popular outside of corporations too.

And the good news is it really isn’t very hard to implement. Using the services of eLearning companies ensures that personalization is implemented quickly and effectively so that you and your workforce can enjoy the results sooner, rather than later.