Personalized Learning at Scale: 4 Ways to Make it Work

EDITOR’S NOTE: Because enterprise learning involves multiple disciplines and perspectives, we regularly invite experts from other organizations to share their insights. Today, Jason Miller, Director of the Totara Alliance Partnership at Synegen, recommends strategies for personalized learning success.

Two employees with the same job title may need very different things from workplace learning. Yet too often, they receive identical treatment: L&D assigns the same course, recommends the same sequence, and measures completion against the same requirements.

Unfortunately, a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t match what most people want. EY research says that 62% of employees prefer a more personalized workplace learning experience. And 75% value course recommendations based on their unique career goals and skill gaps.

So, how can your organization move beyond cookie-cutter training to deliver what individuals actually want? More importantly, how can your team personalize learning across a large, diverse workforce without becoming overwhelmed?

In this article, we’ll look at the benefits and challenges of personalized learning in enterprise environments. We’ll also explore proven strategies to achieve better results…

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What Personalization Looks Like in Practice

Personalized learning adapts a specific portion of the learning experience to an individual’s needs or goals. This may affect the topic a learner pursues, where they begin, which route they follow, the type of support they receive, or a combination of factors. For example, it could include:

• Targeted learning for someone taking on new responsibilities
• A shorter route for experienced people who demonstrate prior knowledge
• Role-specific branches after all learning participants complete a shared core program
• Mobile access for frontline teams working away from a conventional training environment

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Why One-Size-Fits-All Learning Falls Short

Standardized training serves a valid purpose. For instance, you may need everyone in the same job to understand an established process or to demonstrate the same level of competence. But achieving a consistent outcome doesn’t always mean everyone must take the same route.

Consider a situation where a beginner and an experienced employee are both taking on the same role. Both must reach a required performance standard, but different learning paths are likely to make more sense.

Imagine asking a beginner to jump directly into advanced content. Gaps in understanding can put learning, compliance, and performance at risk. In contrast, requiring an experienced person to repeat familiar introductory material only wastes time and diminishes engagement.

These differences become even harder to ignore as learning becomes a more continuous process throughout employee careers. In 2025, the World Economic Forum found that 50% of workers had completed training as part of an employer L&D initiative. That’s up from 41% in 2023. And as AI and other technologies transform the nature of work, the need for regular reskilling is only likely to continue.

So, I recommend focusing on differences that make the most meaningful impact on the learning journey. By introducing variations where they genuinely improve the experience, you can make personalization a more manageable process, while advancing your broader performance agenda.

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Long-Term Benefits of Personalized Learning

According to LinkedIn research, people who set career goals engage with learning 4x more often than those who don’t. And making progress toward these goals is the primary reason people spend more time learning. So, if you map learning to individual goals, your organization can eventually gain significant advantages:

1. Better Learning Content Utilization

By combining content in various ways and establishing different start points, you can reuse available resources across multiple learning pathways. This increases the lifetime value of each learning 0asset. It also helps your team serve more diverse needs without increasing the complexity of library content maintenance.

2. Improved Internal Mobility

Learning is more useful when it supports an employee’s current role and also prepares them for their next step. This is why broader skills and knowledge development matters. In fact, among companies with the strongest learning cultures, internal mobility is 23% higher.

3. A More Responsive Workforce

Roles and responsibilities don’t remain static. Neither should learning. A personalized approach lets you adjust development as an employee’s capabilities, responsibilities, or organizational requirements change.

For example, we helped the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) develop a continuing education mobile app that lets members access courses offline and receive notifications when new learning becomes available. This platform now supports 50,000 ASA members, making it easier for learners to continue their development wherever they are, at a pace that matches their needs.

4. Increased Employee Retention

Relevant development opportunities also influence whether people see a future with their organization. For instance, LinkedIn found that retention rates are 57% higher among companies with strong learning cultures. Of course, personalized learning only plays a partial role. However, it connects individual goals to development, which, in turn, fosters career growth and workforce retention.

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Personalized Learning in the Real World

Thus far, we’ve looked at personalization from the learner’s perspective. But what happens when you’re supporting large groups of people with very different needs?

An excellent example comes from the National Center for Construction Education and Research (NCCER). This trade organization develops construction industry training and credentials, with a network of nearly 7,000 delivery points supporting more than 24 million professionals.

When transforming the way construction companies train employees, NCCER realized that people engage at very different proficiency levels and stages in their careers. Some are new to construction and need to build knowledge and skills from the ground up, while others are experienced professionals who may only need training for a particular job. But they all tend to move from project to project, so classroom training is difficult.

To increase flexibility for small and midsize contractors, NCCER developed a digital solution called CraftPro. Built on the Totara platform, CraftPro provides full online access to the organization’s training library, so contractors can create specialized learning paths for employees. The integrated mobile app gives learners access to everything they need for remote training and testing, while their progress and credential data remains connected to the platform.

NCCER already had a substantial training library. But by making it easier for contractors to organize that content around specific jobs and learners, individuals now receive exactly the training they need, delivered from the same underlying learning ecosystem. Adoption immediately increased with this powerful, personalized solution, which now administers more than 300,000 certification tests a month.

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4 Proven Ways to Personalize Learning at Scale

Personalization can quickly become difficult to manage if every new audience or development need results in another pathway. To avoid becoming overwhelmed, focus on these strategies:

1. Be Selective About Where You Personalize

Instead of trying to tailor every aspect of the learning experience, start where more relevance can make a meaningful difference.

Identify where learners drop out or struggle to find relevant content. To further narrow the focus, keep your business priorities in mind. A capability gap or a group of changing work roles probably deserves attention before an established program that performs well.

Ask this question: “Where would personalization solve a problem we can clearly identify?”

2. Make Learning Content Easier to Reuse

Evaluate your content library structure. Is everything directly associated with roles or learning outcomes? Can you assign any resource to multiple pathways? Can your team find existing content that meets their needs before they generate something new?

This is especially important as the number of learning pathways expands. We’ve seen it with NCCER, where an existing training library can support different credentialed pathways, jobs, and projects without requiring L&D to reproduce underlying content.

Another example is SAS Institute, where we combined course discovery, access, and learning in a unified experience. Now, SAS offers personalized certification pathways based on user type, geography, and language. Their system features 180 personalized customer dashboards supporting more than 150,000 users at more than 35,000 organizations. And the cost per customer has fallen from $300 to $68.

3. Let Learner Data Guide Personalization

Before you choose new ways to personalize learning, consider what you already know about your learners and where that information lives. Data about roles, skills, certifications, or development goals can help determine what else you need.

Also, consider how easily you can use this information. When an employee changes roles, does their learning profile adjust accordingly? When they complete a certification, does it prevent unnecessary retraining?

Connecting your learning platform with systems that hold relevant workforce information reduces manual work needed to keep pathways up to date. It also avoids the need to repeatedly ask employees or administrators for available information.

4. Make Sure Extra Complexity Adds Value

Once personalized learning pathways are in place, how do you know they’re making a difference? Completion rates and engagement figures are a useful starting point, but they don’t tell you whether people are getting the learning they need.

To determine if personalization is working as expected, look more closely at how people use each path. Watch for warning signs like these:

• Learners aren’t following recommended pathways
  Are recommendations still relevant to their roles and development goals? Verify that underlying data is accurate and up to date.

• People are dropping out early
  Look at where they tend to leave. Do you see any patterns? Perhaps the content targets the wrong experience level, or employees don’t have enough time to complete it.

• Learning activity is increasing, but performance isn’t improving
  Do employees have opportunities to apply what they learn? Speak with managers to see whether training is addressing the problems it was meant to solve.

• Administration is becoming more complicated
  If your L&D team spends more time maintaining pathways or making manual adjustments, review the bottlenecks. Are those variations still necessary? Would more automation help?

Before expanding your approach, decide what success should look like. Regularly review program results and actively involve managers closest to the work. They often have a clearer picture of how employees are putting learning into practice and where further adjustments could help.

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Finding the Right Personalization Balance

A personalized approach doesn’t require more content or a completely different experience for everyone. We know it makes learning more useful for individuals, while remaining practical for L&D teams to deliver at scale. We’ve also seen how the same learning assets can support very different audiences.

But success depends on flexible solutions that let you adapt pathways and learning experiences around key business goals and individual needs.

To explore these ideas more fully, watch the Learning with IMPACT webinars at Totara. This collection of free, on-demand sessions is designed for learning professionals who are interested in effective ways to deliver personalized instructional experiences through connected ecosystems.

To discuss how this kind of solution could work for your organization, book a call with Synegen.

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FAQs

What should organizations consider when reviewing or replacing a learning platform?

Start with business objectives. Consider your audiences and how learning supports their goals. Also, evaluate whether your platform can support multiple audiences, integrate with existing business systems, provide meaningful reporting, and adapt as your organization grows. Contract renewal periods are an ideal opportunity to review whether your current approach still meets your needs, rather than automatically renewing for another year.

How can organizations personalize learning at scale?

Personalization doesn’t have to mean creating unique content for every learner. Modern platforms automatically tailor experiences based on audience rules, roles, skills, interests, and learning history to recommend relevant content and learning pathways. AI also supports personalization by helping learners find relevant content and assisting administrators with content creation. This makes personalized learning more practical in enterprise settings.

Do all learning audiences need to use the same LMS?

Not necessarily. Employees, customers, partners, and contractors often have different learning requirements that benefit from tailored experiences. Platforms with capabilities such as multi-tenancy, branded learning environments, and delegated administration can personalize these experiences while providing central oversight.

How can organizations reduce learning silos without creating more bureaucracy?

A smart first step is to bring together people who are responsible for learning across various organizational units and functions. This is often called a learning council or guild. Its purpose is to facilitate regular cross-functional discussions that help teams share priorities, plan, and coordinate initiatives.

Can one LMS support multiple audiences?

Yes. Modern learning platforms support employees, customers, partners, and contractors in a single system that tailors the experience to each audience. Capabilities such as multi-tenancy, delegated administration, and configurable branding help deliver audience-specific extended enterprise learning without compromising governance or reporting.

Need an LMS for Personalized Learning? Let’s Talk…

For independent advice you can trust, schedule a free 30-minute phone consult with Talented Learning Founder and Lead Analyst, John Leh: