Suffering From Engagement Challenges? Try Learning Personalization!
As critical as it is for successful Learning and Development, remaining engaged can be tough for your learners, especially if the training is mandatory or inapplicable to their roles and goals. But fear not—we know where the most common engagement challenges stem from. Here's how you can overcome them by leveraging learning personalization in your virtual training.
Common Engagement Challenges And Solutions For Overcoming Them
Accessibility Issues
A fundamental roadblock in training engagement is inaccessible learning design. By not accounting for disabilities, language barriers, and varying levels of digital literacy, you run the risk of excluding a large portion of your audience. It is your legal and ethical responsibility to offer an accessible learning experience to all employees. Not to mention that it's extremely unrealistic to expect high engagement in one-size-fits-all training.
To overcome this engagement challenge, aim for more inclusive design practices. Create training that is relevant to your learners' requirements, compatible with various devices and assistive technologies, and compliant with accessibility guidelines, like WCAG. Aiming for diverse content formats and modes of delivery should also help prevent you from offering unvaried, rigid training to all your learners.
Lack Of Motivation
Demotivated learners are the greatest foe to your engagement metrics. These learners are far more likely to skip, drop out, or underperform in their training, especially without an incentive to do otherwise.
Addressing this challenge requires you to clearly articulate the purpose and value of your learning offerings. By elucidating the connection with their job roles and desired career progression, employees will be far more likely to stick to their training. In addition, leverage what really drives your learners; is it recognition for a job well done or the knowledge reaped to further their aspirations? Find out which incentives work best and use them to nudge your learners forward. For long-lasting results, combine intrinsic and extrinsic motivators.
Ineffective Technology
Successful training requires investing in appropriate technology. However, some organizations, wishing to cut corners or bring down costs, refrain from splurging on the right tech for their training. Ineffective technology is not only an investment without returns; it's a major hindrance to offering valuable learning experiences and a prime perpetrator behind your engagement challenges.
Therefore, choosing the right technology to support your training initiative is crucial for streamlining every phase of the process, from design to delivery and beyond. It is also instrumental for facilitating higher rates of engagement. Isn't it time to retire the never-ending slide decks and text-heavy PDFs? Try building a robust technological ecosystem that delivers dynamic, interactive, and useful learning experiences and see the results.
Poorly Designed Learning
Generic or low-quality content can be the cause of your engagement gaps. Dull or outdated material fails to capture and maintain attention, which is a prerequisite for engagement. And if the training has poor instructional design, lacks interactivity, or isn't applicable and tailored to specific job roles, is it surprising that learners fail to see its value?
As such, engaging instructional design and a comprehensive array of just-in-time, role-relevant resources are key. Your employees are short on time as it is; do you expect them to find room in their busy schedules to learn things that aren't useful? Aim to make your training content dynamic, interactive, and tailored to different job functions. It's the only way to make the learning experience more stimulating and relevant.
Benefits Of Personalized Learning For Learners And Organizations
For Learners
- Relevance: Personalized content draws from your learners' pain points, roles, and goals, making it immediately applicable on the job.
- Engagement: Customized learning experiences entice and motivate learners, encouraging the formation of positive and long-term learning habits.
- Retention: Personalized learning fosters higher knowledge retention because you match the content to learners' needs, performance gaps, and interests.
- Development: Tailored learning experiences accelerate skill-building efforts and drive tangible behavioral change.
For Organizations
- ROI: Personalized learning requires less time to mastery, making it more likely to bring back positive ROI in less time.
- Future-readiness: Training is aligned with organizational skills gaps, which makes organizations more future-ready and prepared.
- Productivity: Tailored learning boosts efficiency because employees learn only what's relevant or needed.
- Learning culture: Successful training personalization makes learning part of the organization's identity and culture.
Strategies For Customizing Virtual Training
- Research your audience
Understand your learners' roles, challenges, and goals. Personalization begins by asking questions to figure out what's needed for impactful change. - Create role-relevant content
Your training should reflect the day-to-day reality of your learners. Align it with their responsibilities and knowledge gaps through role-based learning paths. - Connect individual and organizational objectives
Combine learners' interests based on their desired career trajectories with skills missing in the company. You don't have to find the perfect role fit; you can create it. - Design with accessibility in mind
Be flexible in content format and delivery methods, and make sure to follow inclusive design principles to make your content both tailored and accessible. - Invest in robust technology
Without the right tech, your organization can't deliver personalized and effective learning. Investing in robust technology is worth the initial cost in the face of long-term gains. - Use analytics
Engagement dashboards, feedback surveys, and learning progress analytics are invaluable tools to help you gather insights and continuously improve your training approaches.
Example Of A Personalized Training Environment
If you still struggle with what a personalized training environment should entail, let's see an example. Say that a mid-sized company requires a scalable virtual training program to improve efficiency, accelerate skill-building, and increase engagement and participation among remote and hybrid employees.
Aiming for a personalized approach, the organization launches a virtual training environment that dynamically adapts to each employee's role, skill level, and career goals, as well as their ongoing progress. The platform leverages modular and customizable components, and layouts change based on training segments, further bolstering learning personalization efforts. During content development, the platform supports a wide array of multimedia and interactive tools (whiteboards, breakout rooms, polls, etc.), providing flexibility in both format and delivery.
The training environment uses role-based paths to guide learners through essential modules for their current position and suggests content tailored to fit with their goals. As they progress, it measures important metrics, such as learner engagement, course completion, attendance, and quiz results, supporting current and future personalization.
Does it sound too good to be true? Well, it's not. Take a look at Adobe Connect—the platform is a prime example of an effective personalized training environment in action.
Conclusion
For educators, Instructional Designers, and L&D experts, learning personalization has been the answer to many questions in the past. It seems like it's also the solution for low training engagement. So, if your organization is plagued by engagement challenges, the key may lie in implementing it in your next virtual training.
Download Addressing The Learner Engagement Gap In Virtual Training today to leverage the latest tech, implement tested strategies, and overcome engagement obstacles in your L&D program.
You can also check out Adobe Connect's webinar "Can You Hear Me?" Isn't A Learning Strategy to uncover why traditional video tools don't cut it for training, and what to use instead.
