How to create personalized learning paths for tech skills

If you hand your teams a learning platform without giving them any direction, chances are they won’t know what skills to learn or when and how to learn them. 

Personalized learning paths empower teams to learn tech skills aligned with their personal goals and broader organizational objectives. Here’s how to build custom learning experiences in your organization.

• What are personalized learning paths?
• Benefits of personalized learning paths: Overcome upskilling challenges
• How to build custom learning paths for technical skills
• Quickly build learning paths with a generative AI assistant

Personalized learning paths, or custom learning paths, are structured learning journeys tailored to individual needs and skill levels. They list the courses, hands-on labs, and training resources a learner needs to complete to develop technical skills for a project, earn tech certifications, reach a promotion, or achieve other goals.

Learning paths help you overcome common upskilling challenges.

30% of technologists don’t know where to focus their skill development, and 25% aren’t sure which learning resources to use. If they’re lost or overwhelmed by their choices, they either won’t take advantage of learning opportunities, or they’ll end up learning skills that don’t benefit themselves or their team.

Personalized learning paths remove uncertainty and give teams a clear way to progress to achieve their goals.

Lack of employee engagement with upskilling programs is one of the top barriers to tech skill development. Technologists don’t want to sit through hours of training on information they already know. They want to learn skills relevant to their experience that they can apply to their role immediately. 

Custom learning paths make learning more efficient and engaging by ensuring technologists bypass information they know and actually learn new skills. You also show learners you value their precious on-the-job learning time.

Follow these steps to curate personalized learning paths for tech skills.

Start by setting goals for your tech skill development program. What should someone know or be able to do after completing this learning path? What skills or competencies do they need to achieve those goals?

You’ll have different learning goals for different roles and experience levels. For example, maybe your organization is planning to build a GenAI-powered app. You need everyone to become familiar with AI, how they can use it, and the potential data, privacy, and security risks. Your tech teams also need to know how to prepare data for machine learning models and deploy AI models.

Once you identify your learning objectives, assess the skill levels for each group. What knowledge does each group already have? Where do they have knowledge or skills gaps that will prevent them from reaching the goal? 

Skill assessments, surveys, and on-the-job performance can help you understand their capabilities. Use that information when deciding what to include in each learning path. 

For example, maybe everyone is already familiar with basic AI terminology. But they’re unfamiliar with prompt engineering techniques. Or maybe your technologists are already familiar with AI security but haven’t fully grasped the ethics of AI or how to deploy it in a cloud environment.

Learn how to identify tech skills gaps on your team.

As you build your learning paths, think about which skills are most important for teams to learn. What skills might be optional or included as additional resources for further learning? 

You should also keep in mind the specific tools, technologies, and programming languages needed. If you’re planning to build an app with the OpenAI API, your teams probably don’t need to learn the ins and outs of Gemini (at least right now). Similarly, if your organization uses AWS for the cloud, you wouldn’t want technologists learning Azure instead.

The length of each learning path is another important aspect to consider. When do your teams need to learn these skills? How many hours per week do you expect tech professionals to dedicate to learning? Do you provide on-the-job training time?

All these factors determine how successful your upskilling program is. Learn more about creating custom learning paths for cloud.

Now that you know what skills your teams need to develop, collect the learning resources they need to build those skills. This might include video courses, hands-on labs or sandboxes, webinars, or instructor-led training.

You won’t be able to include everything. If you can’t decide, return to your timeframe and skill priorities. What skill or information is more critical? What’s the time commitment?

An AI assistant like Pluralsight Iris can also help you sort through large volumes of content and create structured learning paths for your team. Describe the requirements you’ve outlined, including who the learning path is for, the skills they need, the time frame, and the assistant will create a learning path for your teams.

Here’s an example.

Once you create learning paths, roll them out to your teams. Explain the process, what they’ll learn, and how it will make their job easier. Then provide enablement to help them get started. Here are some ways to do that:

• Make learning a team-building activity. Set up learning cohorts or Slack channels to connect learners with each other and give them a space to interact with and ask each other questions.

• Set aside time to answer questions. Hold office hours to answer questions about the material or upskilling program. 

• Offer incentives. Whether you give shout-outs when employees achieve learning milestones or send them gift cards to order food during a lunch and learn session, reward learning when you can.

After some time, conduct check-ins to gauge employees’ learning progress and engagement. Getting employee input is critical to making sure the learning path meets their needs. 

• What are they enjoying most? 

• Where are they getting stuck?

• Do they have the right learning formats and methods? Do they need more hands-on learning experiences?

• Are any skills or topics not resonating? 

• Are there any skills or topics missing from the learning path?

After employees complete their learning paths, track the results. Did employees learn the skills or competencies you outlined? Can they apply them on the job? Have you made progress towards your goal?

If you’re not sure what to track, these 17 metrics can give you a good starting point. Another place to start is skill assessments. Compare results before and after completing the learning path. Did they improve? If not, where did they have trouble? If yes, what skills should they learn next? 

You don’t have to create personalized learning paths manually. Pluralsight provides curated learning paths for popular skills like Python and AWS operations. 

Need something more specific? Learn how to use our AI assistant Iris to create custom learning paths for you and your team.