Adaptive Learning: The 5 Things You Need to Know As An HR Professional
Human Resources is a vital department in any corporation. As an HR Professional, you are responsible for the wellbeing of those in your company and how they integrate and succeed within your business operations. Each new employee joining your organization comes with their own background and depth of experiences. When crafting training for new employees, it’s not one size fits all. Individuals learn at different rates and with different methods. One of the latest methods being adopted by HR professionals is that of adaptive learning. Adaptive learning can be highly beneficial for cultivating successful individual traits as well as overall organizational success.
What Is Adaptive Learning?
Adaptive learning is a type of personalized learning method that adapts to someone’s individual needs. Adaptive learning seeks to efficiently and effectively create custom, personalized learning paths to engage each individual learner.
Traditional training methods are stagnant and often considered boring (especially by those who have been through the process previously). Decades-old training literature and videos showing culture (and clothing) from the past does nothing to build the innovative, rapidly-growing company persona you wish to portray.
A mobile, personalized training option, however? That suggests to new employees, especially those in the millennial generation, that your organization is adaptive to change.
These are just five reasons you should consider adaptive learning as an HR professional within your organization:
1. Retention Is Higher
Everyone retains information differently. Adaptive learning is designed to be engaging and interesting, better assisting in not only understanding but in retaining information for the long-term. For example, according to a study conducted by the Colorado Technical University, accounting professionals have proven to retain their training better when adaptive learning is put in place. Course retention rose from 9% to 95% with the implementation of adaptive learning. That’s incredible, and just the very beginning of what adaptive learning can provide at all levels of an organization.
2. Adaptive Learning Saves Time and Money
Needing your staff members to take time from work to get training not only impedes on the hours that they could be at work, but it also costs money. Expensive training seminars, especially those out of town, are often a poor use of a company’s budget. Little information is retained or relevant, and the “work trip” often ends up being nothing more than a week’s paid vacation. Utilizing a personalized, adaptive learning method allows your organization to control the training material and message. The content is highly relevant to your organization. The cost is minimal as it can be repurposed or updated for other departments in the future. And best of all, the training can be completed directly on the employees’ own mobile device.
3. Competency Gaps Are Revealed
If there is a case where an employee does not have a specific skill that they (or you as the HR Professional or Management) weren’t aware they needed to have, adaptive learning can catch that. Rather than simply assigning a task and expecting someone to know about the skill they needed, adaptive learning ensures there are no gaps where there shouldn’t be. It slows down concepts as needed and picks up when it’s clear the user has a good, clear understanding of the concept.
4. Focus and Strengths
What are your team’s strengths? If you have data collected from adaptive learning, you can have the knowledge to know what you and your team should focus on. Being an HR professional includes knowing where to look when seeing what your teams’ strengths may be as well as knowing what areas could be improved on. This data will help facilitate future training topics.
5. Keep Your Team Engaged
Rather than having new recruits come in and be bored by their learning exercises, adaptive learning helps keep your employees engaged. As an HR professional, you have management oversight as well. Management who wants you to succeed in your position. Part of that is bringing on new people and integrating them into the skills and training they need to know to do their jobs properly. To learn more about adaptive learning and how you can benefit from it, you can turn to Concannon Business Consulting for help. We have a solution for all of your HR, staffing, and consultative needs.
