Reinvent Your Millennial Training Budget By Leveraging A Personalized Learning Model

Reinvent Your Millennial Training Budget By Leveraging A Personalized Learning Model
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Summary: One of the most popular strategies modern organizations are using to overcome the challenges of training millennial employees is to develop a training program using a personalized learning model. Creating a personalized program for online learning can help you improve the effectiveness of your training programs and increase your ROI.

Creating A Personalized Learning Model To Achieve ROI Targets

Today's workforce is incredibly diverse. Millennials are now the largest generation of workers and they are known to be one of the most unique groups of people in recent history. Unfortunately, the millennial presence in the working world has created some disruption in recent employee trends.

In the past few years, employee retention rates and engagement levels have been declining. In fact, recent research has found that 43% of millennial employees plan to leave their organization for other opportunities within two years [1]. What is even more interesting is that Gallup recently reported that only 29% of millennial employees are engaged at work [2].

Millennials learn and work differently than the generations before them. The training and development strategies that worked for generations like baby boomers are not as effective with millennial audiences.

Personalized Learning Experiences: Gearing Up For The Millennial Workforce
Discover new approaches to better engage employees and prepare for the future of work.

Providing learning experiences that are both effective and engaging for all of your organization’s employees can become challenging, and ineffective training is expensive in more ways than one. For learning plans to be successful, businesses must develop training that works well for millennials as well as the rest of the workforce.

One of the most popular strategies organizations are using to overcome this training challenge is to develop a training program using a personalized learning model. Creating a personalized program for online learning can help you improve the effectiveness of your training programs and increase your ROI.

To help you understand how personalized learning can help you get the most out of your training budget, we have shared some of the top ways this strategy can help you level up your training and reduce costs.

Streamlining The Learning Process

Personalized learning programs increase the efficiency of training by only providing the most relevant content for each individual learner. Personalized learning programs begin by assessing everyone’s role, skill level, and learning preferences. AI-enhanced online training then develops a plan to meet these needs. This process prevents employees from having to participate in training courses that may be irrelevant and slow down the training process.

In many cases online personalized training can be accessed from nearly anywhere there is internet and can also be accessed at any time. This is incredibly useful as millennials prefer to work flexible schedules and the number of employees who work remotely only continues to grow. This removes barriers for many employees and allows employees to complete their training more quickly.

Individual Student Learning Paths Improve Engagement And Knowledge Retention

One of the pitfalls of a one-size-fits-all approach to training is that it tends to lower the levels of engagement, which also lowers the overall effectiveness of the program. Millennials lose interest in content they feel is irrelevant quite quickly. Especially if the content is also presented in a format that doesn't fit their learning preferences.

As mentioned before, personalized learning programs use learner data to create a path that only includes the most relevant courses. In many cases, the format the content is presented in is also tailored to meet specific learner needs.

Optimizing the training content also helps increase employee engagement by preventing information overload, which can be a problem for employees of all generations. Providing only the most crucial information is also one of the best ways you can increase knowledge retention.

Increased engagement and knowledge retention are essential for training effectiveness. Training will have no impact on employee productivity if participants cannot use and apply what they have learned while on the job. Improving these two elements significantly impacts the ROI of your training programs.

Online Learning Environments Can Adapt To Learner Needs

Updating and changing your training content can be expensive and time-consuming. It also takes time to manage which employees need to take different courses and develop learning paths manually. Personalized learning programs make it easy to automate and manage this process. Many simple changes may be done automatically and others can be done with little effort.

Learning analytics can also optimize the training content to make it meet the learners' needs more easily. Learning analytics tracks, analyzes, and reports learner data. This information can help identify learner patterns and trends and show the L&D teams which training content is the most engaging and effective and which pieces of content may need updating.

The adaptability of online learning environments will help you optimize training with little effort and time, which will cut down the costs of major content revamps as well as the time needed to manage training paths. This will help your employees learn the skills they need quickly and increase their productivity as well as their skill level.

Increasing the quality and speed of your employee training programs increases operational efficiency and helps your organization get the most out their training investment.

Conclusion

As the number of millennials in today's workforce continues to grow, employee needs and priorities will continue to shift. Training and opportunities for development are high in demand. 87% of millennials consider L&D opportunities a high priority [4]. However, the most successful training strategies also need to take millennials' unique preferences into consideration.

Choosing a modern training strategy will help your organization increase engagement and employee retention, which will increase profits. You might be surprised to learn that the cost of replacing a single employee can cost between 1.5-2 times their salary. On the other hand, an effective training strategy can help your company increase its profit margins by as much as 49% [5].

Personalized learning is a strategy that organizations can use to create learning experiences that are unique and impactful for employees of every generation. The ability to optimize individual training paths and learning content offered by this strategy will help drive down the cost of training and speed up time-to-competency, maximizing your ROI.

To learn more about personalized learning strategies and how they can help you engage your millennial workforce, read the eBook Personalized Learning Experiences: Gearing Up For The Millennial Workforce.

References:

[1] Nearly Half Of Millennials Plan To Leave A Job Within Two Years, Study Finds

[2] Millennials: The Job-Hopping Generation

[4] Millennials Want Jobs to Be Development Opportunities

[5] HOW CAN TRAINING BOOST YOUR PROFITS?

Originally published on September 8, 2020