At a recent conference I attended, the opening speaker stated “We are living in a world of blur.” I reflected on this statement and wondered to myself, how do we as learning and development practitioners make an impact in this rapidly, ever-changing environment? Taking into account the importance of human capital in our organizations, we need to figure out how to successfully incorporate technology into our curriculum to personalize the online training experience for learners.
Given the geographical diversity of the employee population in the company I work for, our learning and development team chose to focus on this initiative in 2015. In an effort to drive performance and build organizational capability, we utilize a strengths-based personality profiling tool. The tool improves our employees’ understanding of individual differences of team members to maximize communication and enhance effectiveness, resulting in increased productivity. Traditionally, this tool is introduced to learners through instructor-led sessions; however, the majority of our 18,000-plus workforce is geographically dispersed, making this training approach challenging. The result is a strong reliance on self-paced learning initiatives administered via our learning management system.
One of the obvious benefits of delivering instructor-led training courses is the ability of the instructor to tailor the delivery of the content to their audience. When the geographical diversity of learners and your business needs do not allow for classroom training, personalization is much more complicated to deliver effectively. In our company, we understood maintaining the level of personalization in the delivery of this profiling tool was critical, so finding a way to train our employees online through an individualized approach became our objective.
This year, we created an e-learning solution that provides a highly interactive way for our employees to learn about their personality profile. Personalization is achieved by asking the learner to enter their profile information when beginning the course. Based on the information provided, the course customizes the online experience to deliver the interactive exercises in a method associated with their profile. The course also accounts for employees who do not have a profile by varying the design of the exercises giving the learner a chance to experience different styles to determine which one resonates with them.
The course is groundbreaking in its ability to respond to the learner. In a white paper entitled “Principles of Adult Learning,” Tony Smarella identifies key adult learning principles. Personalization addresses a number of these principles including an adult’s desire to direct his or her own learning and how each person has a different learning style. Delivering the exercises in a manner that matches their preferences links the experience to the individual learning style, and the flexibility to customize the learning experience speaks to an adult’s desire to direct his or her own learning.
Our company has been able to recognize the cost savings of offering the online module. In addition, our employees across the globe have benefited from the accessibility of the program through our learning management system. The online module permits our trainers to provide a consistent message while allowing time to focus on more specific coaching and training tailored to each employee.
Based on the success of this project, we are continuing to pursue personalization of online content to support the development of our global workforce. Our overarching goal is to increase the impact of training effectiveness while creating a unique individualized user experience in this world of blur.