Hiring quality employees is sometimes easier said than done. And once you do find that gem of an employee, there’s no guarantee they will stay with your company for the duration of their career. Unless you are willing to invest in your employees and their futures, they may leave you for another employer who does see their worth. Developing a customized learning path to promote ongoing learning development among your staff is one way to invest in your employees and increase retention.
What Are Custom Learning Paths?
Customized learning paths are a strategic method for designing your employee training to build an employee’s knowledge beyond the typical new hire training. There are many advantages to developing custom learning paths, including:
- Improving operational efficiencies.
- Creating training structure and consistency.
- Developing a healthy work environment and culture.
- Providing employees with a sense of purpose and value.
Custom learning paths are also a good way to implement upskilling and reskilling strategies within your organization in order to prepare employees for promotions or completely new positions.
How Do I Design Custom Learning Paths?
Customized learning paths are exactly that – custom. So, there is no template for how they should be designed for your organization. Each one should be tailored to fit your company and can even be tailored to an individual employee. However, here are a few examples of learning paths you can develop for your employees.
New hire learning path: If you have an employee onboarding process for training, you may have already built out a learning path and didn’t even know it! New hire training can be time-consuming, and it’s good to have a plan in place that can be implemented for new employees. You may need to tweak things depending on position and person but developing a learning path to take employees through your onboarding process will increase effectiveness and efficiency.
Career development learning path: One of the main benefits of learning paths is the ability to prepare employees for promotions and upward movement within your organization. Develop a training path that will enforce the skills employees need, when they need them. These paths can be used for employees with management potential to develop their leadership skills and build a future with your company.
Compliance learning path: Does your organization have compliance training topics that require certification for you legally stay in business? Create a compliance learning path to help track training and certification so you can be assured you’re always meeting state and federal regulations.
Retraining or skill maintenance learning path: Sometimes employees just need refreshers or reinforcement on certain training topics – particularly when it comes to compliance or human resource training such as harassment prevention. Develop a retraining learning path to automate schedules for refresher training and keep your employees performing at their best.
Custom Learning Paths and Your LMS
Develop custom learning paths even easier with the assistance of a Learning Management System (LMS). An LMS will allow you to set up automated schedules to assign training modules weekly, monthly, even annually, so you don’t have to worry about assigning training for each employee. Depending on your LMS, you may even be able to completely build out the learning path with a schedule for training so all you have to do is assign a learning path, and the LMS does the rest.
Explore Custom Learning Paths with trainingGrid®
The trainingGrid® learning management system delivers online training and blended learning strategies through learning paths that are customized for your organization. Its intuitive design makes learning management simple and allows employees to begin training with just a click. This flexible system comes with a variety of robust features customizable to fit your needs in addition to built-in reporting and certification tools that track your compliance documentation.
