5 Easy Hacks To Personalize Your Training Program

In today’s time, all aspects of your daily life are getting more personalized than ever. Your social media feed shows the content that you would most likely to engage. Entertainment has become on-demand as online streaming apps automatically suggest the content based on your personal preferences. Personalization is impacting the way we learn, interact with our employers, and develop work expectations.

This trend is also impacting corporate learning as personalized training programs are getting better traction than the traditional approach. Today, employees have become accustomed to personalization in everything; be it learning, shopping, and entertainment. So, when your learners are consuming information in a personalized way; then why not create a training program that connects with them personally?

You can use these five simple hacks to personalize your training program:

Perform Learners’ Analytics

Use the learning analytics to understand your employee’s learning behavior and categorize them to deliver the content that is personalized and relevant to their needs. Following are the methods to perform learners’ analytics:

• Surveys: It can make a significant impact on the direction of your training program. By using surveys, you can find out their opinions and determine what they expect from your training program.
• Age group/qualification analysis: Different employees have different levels of learning ability and proficiency. Analyse their personas and identify their demographics like their age, qualification, and learning history to design your training with a more personalized approach.    
• Work function analysis: A sales manager will have different learning needs than a product manager. Outline your training by focusing on job-specific goals and success metrics for better personalization. 
• Feedback: A regular feedback helps you to understand your learners’ needs and assists you define the effectiveness of your training. Instant feedback is the best way to continuously improve your training and create a personalized learning environment in your company.

Give Freedom To Choose Learning Path

Personalized learning is all about giving your learners an option to pick what works best for them, thus allowing them to learn at their own pace. Give your employees the freedom to decide their learning path and let them choose their preference for a course and its completion time. When you give them control over such training aspects, they learn faster, retain new knowledge longer, and perform better. In result, freedom of choice reduces their apathy and motivates them to engage with the training more frequently and personally.

Connect Learning Outcomes with Work Performance

The primary objective of any training program is creating a learning environment and helping your employees to improve their performance. Therefore, you need to align learning outcomes with the on-job performance of your learners. When you create a link between their performance and training outcomes, it makes them aware of their strong and weak points. This personalized approach helps them to improve regularly and establishes the relevance of your training concerning their job responsibilities and work performance.

Apply Mentor-Mentee Approach

Whatever your training goals are, creating a structured mentoring program is an effective way to reap better results and improve employee performance. You can assign a mentor to every employee to ensure their individual learning difficulties are handled at a personal level. By considering the training goals, you can match the mentor and mentee based upon the desired outcomes. For example, if the goal is management training, then assign a mentor who is the department head. The relationship between mentors and mentees takes place gradually, but the result is truly beneficial for your organization.

Leverage Technology

An effective training helps your employees to grow and remain competitive. Therefore, you need to adapt to their needs and provide them with a personalized learning experience by leveraging the right technology. Using technologies like LMS, gamification, and mobile learning app, you can drive the training in the right direction with the more personalized approach:

• Adaptive learning path: You can create individual learning paths in LMS using the content based on individual characteristics of a learner. It allows the learners to follow their own route within that pre-defined learning path. It is like adapting the learning path to their personal learning needs.
• Gamification: Game-based learning allows learners to control their own learning experience. It makes learning more fun, increases retention, and boosts competitiveness spirit among employees. With gamification elements like Leaderboard, badges, and game challenges, you can make your training more personalized and successful.
• Mobile apps for microlearning: A training with small learning nuggets typically witnesses double completion rates. As smartphones have become omnipresent, a mobile learning app can add many advantages to your training. You can push notifications for new courses, enable cloud distribution, and deliver microlearning content directly to their pockets.      

The world is moving from traditional whole day training sessions to using technologies that deliver learning material to the individuals in a personalized way. For each job role, you need to map out all skills that an employee should possess and personalized learning helps you to do that more practically.

Produced this blog for Shezartech, a technology solutions and digital marketing company headquartered in Mumbai, India. 

How to get the most of your LMS data | Content Pie

Lynda.com

It is very important to analyze the LMS data at every step of your training program. You have to keep an eye on all the processes to know what data you should put to good use. Simultaneously, you need to analyze the way your learners are receiving the information you are conveying. It might all look technical to you initially but with right methods, you can surely get the most out of the LMS program. To achieve that, you should know how to read your LMS data and utilize it effectively.

Here are some data points that you need to check on a regular basis:

Assessment Report

The objective of the assessment is to identify their skills gaps and then get a clear picture of how your training is actually helping them to improve. It can be done at many levels including trainer, manager, and peers to gather the data effectively and boost learners’ performance. Today, most LMS comes with built-in assessment reports to compile data for individuals and groups and spot the problems that need your attention. For example, some learners score low on their communication skill exam at the beginning but then they score high by the end of the training. It means they have bridged their knowledge gap and your training has achieved the desired outcomes.

Training Completion Time

The completion rate allows you to monitor the performance of learners and helps you to take a targeted approach when necessary. Sometimes an employee can take longer than expected to complete a task. There can be multiple reasons i.e. lack of user-friendliness and crisp content, no multimedia support, non-compatibility with their devices etc. You can analyze the training completion time report weekly, fortnightly or monthly. For example, you have set the target that 90% of employees pass a specific course in 30 days. But after one month, only 50% of them complete the task. It indicates that you need to redesign your strategy to achieve the targeted timeline. Also, by tracking the training completion time in LMS, you can identify your top performers and use them as mentors for slow performing learners. 

User Feedback

LMS offers you an opportunity to tap into virtual interaction with your learners by online forums. Tools like an online forum, survey, questionnaires, and polls offer deep insights into your targeted audience. Forums offer an interactive method to measure the satisfaction level of learners while identifying the impact and flaws of your training. For example, in your forum, you get to know that your learners would like to see more interactivity in the training or they want micro learning nuggets to be a part of the program. By considering these inputs, you can personalize their training experience, making it relevant and relatable.

Analytical Report

For the success of the training, your learners must actively participate in your online training course. And to ensure that, you need to determine their engagement level by analyzing the activity report that LMS generates. The report provides data on how your learners are interacting with the training content and how often. It also tells you what kind of content is a hit among the learners so that you can customize your course material accordingly. The participation rate can also help you to gauge the effectiveness of your training and its targeted objectives. For example, you have implemented a new change in your training program. By running the analytical report and tracking test scores, you can measure if the change created the desired impact or not.

You can also use this data to compare the progress of your training quarter basis and apply the positive outcomes in the next quarter. Needless to say that your LMS data puts useful and actionable insights at your fingertips to help your training become more productive.

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I wrote this blog for Shezartech, Mumbai-based eLearning and technology solutions company. 

5 reasons why you should add social learning to your training program | Content Pie

Social media has become an essential part of our life as we are constantly connected with friends, peers, and the world for various purposes. We can gather knowledge in the form of blogs, videos, podcasts while can engage with people via games, discussions, and experiences. Also, this interaction is not limited to just chatting or sharing information; it has also become a learning tool for personal and professional growth. Therefore, many organizations are opting for a learning management system (LMS) that can integrate the social media to make eLearning more engaging for their employees.

An LMS with social media integration not only supports online training goals but also helps in increasing the participation and engagement of the users. Also, the effectiveness of including social media in your eLearning or eTraining program will depend on the fact that how positively your organization supports the use of social media in your work culture. As more people are logging on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, it becomes imperative to customize your LMS and align your training program with social media and analytics.

Your LMS can be more measurable by adding social learning features and analytics to your training and learning program. Here are five reasons that explain how social media integration of an LMS can provide a good eLearning engagement:

Interactive Learning

Social media when connected with LMS allows the admin to create interest-based polls, surveys and discussions to engage learners as well as trainers. As people are constantly connected to their mobile or laptop, they tend to interact more by sharing their common interests. This not only helps to spread the objectives of the eLearning program but also enables close communication among all the learners. This not only enhances the interaction but also helps all stakeholders to share their perspectives.

Measurable Analytics

With the internet and mobile devices, the learning has gone beyond time, demographics, and physical appearance. When your LMS has social media integration, it offers 24×7 accessibility to your employees and encourages self-learning to help them achieve in their daily goals. Also, if the learning program is using an LRS, you can store data about your learner’s experience by analyzing their social media habits. Using these analytics, you can customize your training program and engage your learners to improve their skill sets and boost the productivity.

Content Outreach

As your LMS users are connected online, they share information in real time using various social media channels. They share what they have learned using your LMS and what best practices you are using to deliver an impactful eLearning. This not only boosts the outreach of your content but also increases online visibility, which can potentially enhance your LMS sales. Social network integration also provides you an opportunity to connect with your target audience swiftly and build credibility among them in the most natural way.

Compound Learning

With the integration of social learning, you can the employees to learn things in multiple styles. You can create the variety by using audio, video, infographics formats and distribute the same using social media. By practicing this, learning becomes more interactive and sharable; therefore everyone enjoys the process to learn things quickly. You can also opt for third-party integration like YouTube, podcasts, and mobile app, which can act as a medium to deliver your training via LMS.

User-generated Content

We all love to share our achievements and success with the world, especially on social media. Learners who have got benefitted from your training can share their experience with their peers. This provides an opportunity to use your learner’s feedback as original content and reach out to the potential target audience by posting it on various eLearning industry forums. Additionally, this user-generated content also helps you to organically promote your business, training program, and eLearning courses.

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I wrote this blog for Shezartech, an eLearning and technology solutions company. Link: https://shezartech.com/2018/08/13/5-reasons-why-you-need-an-lms-with-social-media-integration/