Digital delivery is more important now than ever. As organisations move towards an increase in remote working, people will need the resources to support learning away from the office.  One key way to do this is via personalisation, something that’s increasingly of interest to L&D practitioners, thanks to new technologies emerging to support it.

Arguably, personalisation in most types of learning is beneficial to the learner. Whether at school or at work, most people want to feel engaged and connected to their work. One great way to achieve this is to help learners design a development path suiting their individual needs. Putting control of learning into an individual’s hands not only motivates, but also helps build confidence. The question is this – just how much personalisation is possible? It turns out that with modern technology, personalisation has never been more effective, and we can expect to see it applied widely in 2022.

 

The path to personalisation

Recent polls such as the L&D Global Sentiment Survey have found that L&D practitioners are keen to adopt personalisation. Despite, or perhaps because of, the Covid-19 pandemic, personalisation has retained its popularity in learning and development over the past two years.

The challenge for personalisation has always been the same – how to achieve it at scale? In a traditional face-to-face training environment, where people are taught in cohorts of up to 30 people, personalisation is reduced to the small amount of input a trainer can provide an individual in class, or the extra assignments they can allocate to be completed after training. In an online environment, with the support of technology, things are very different.

Cornerstone has a focus on Skills AI and Content AI to drive personalised learning, which has proven successful with several thousand users. Cornerstone offer users multiple ways to choose, personalise and track their learning. It also helps in driving a sense of connection with people during a pandemic, a period that’s proven difficult for learners around the globe.

Huler is another important name in personalised learning, illustrating a need for a holistic approach to gain insight into what employees want from employers. Huler reaches employees through their innovative HulerHub, which allows users to organise their digital workspace in a simple yet engaging format. This tool puts employees in control of their learning, as Huler allows each user to tailor the Hub to their personal needs. Two more digital learning platforms that are also incorporating personalisation are upskilling platform Degreed and personalised solution CoachHub.

Career progression is often led by an organisation finding the difference between the skills required by a current or future role and the skills the learner has. Planning a digital pathway to close this skill gap is essential when looking at career development, and personalisation is only going to make closing this gap faster. However, the best thing for companies to do is not simply redesign the current training programmes with a little added personalisation, but instead create new programmes that are specifically tailored to the user. This is one of the biggest challenges in personalised digital learning, as it requires time and effort from both those providing the training and those learning.

The future of personalisation in learning might appear strenuous, however, the digital revolution of L&D is here and ready to make it happen. The L&D community and wider working world have adapted decades of routine to suit the new digital needs in just two years, so anything is possible in 2022.

 

Let’s get digital

The L&D community is becoming more digital every day. A blend of positive advancement in technology – as well as the not-so-positive effects of Covid-19 – has changed the ways we learn forever. Many people are accustomed to remote working, online training, and digital events. These events are the best place to discover more about digital learning in general, and you can expect one hot topic for discussion this year will be personalisation. One of the key digital events this year is the Pre-Conference Digital Days by Learning Technologies, taking place online in March 2022. Here you can discover more about personalisation in digital learning, as part of the featured launch for the main Learning Technologies event London from 4-5 May.  

 

Discover more on digital learning

Watch LEO Learning’s webinar 'This Time It’s Personal: 3 Models of Learning Personalisation' as part of our on-demand LT Digital Series 

Watch the webinar from Charles Ross and Travis Damgaard on Microsoft Teams as a personalised learning platform