Creating personalised learning paths

What are personalised learning paths

A personalised learning path is a planned route from the skills a person has today to the skills their role, or the role they want next, will need. Some organisations call them individual or personal learning paths. Whatever the name, the difference from a training catalogue is the starting point: the path is built from one person's skills gap, not from the courses on offer.

That starting point is what this playbook is about. Personalised learning paths help people acquire the right skills at the right time, which keeps learning relevant, keeps people engaged and makes what they learn more likely to stick. But you can only tailor learning to someone once you can see where they stand, and that is the step that is easiest to skip.

What to expect from this playbook

Whether you work in HR or L&D or manage a team, this playbook shows you how to create personalised learning paths for employees: the benefits, a six-step method for planning each path, how to design and monitor the learning, and the challenges to expect.

Benefits of creating personalised learning paths

Personalised learning paths give organisations a more deliberate way to develop skills than one-size-fits-all training. Here are the advantages we see most often.

1. Improved employee engagement
   Personalised learning paths engage people for three reasons. The content is relevant to their role, so they can use what they learn straight away. They get a choice of learning options, which gives them ownership of their development. And they can track their progress against milestones, which keeps them committed.
   
   That commitment matters beyond the course itself. In LinkedIn's Workplace Learning Report 2025, 88% of organisations said they were concerned about employee retention, and providing learning opportunities was respondents' number one retention strategy. A path people can see themselves on can give them a reason to stay.
2. Faster skill acquisition
   Personalised learning paths speed up skill acquisition because they target each person's actual gaps, so nobody spends time relearning topics or skills they already know well. People can also move at their own pace, which makes the learning more thorough and more likely to last.
3. Long-term knowledge retention
   Personalised learning paths also help knowledge stick. When the content matches the learner's job, they put new knowledge and skills to work in their daily tasks, and what gets used gets remembered.
4. Adaptability to changing needs
   Skills and job requirements can change quickly. Because personalised learning paths are reviewed and updated as people progress, learning keeps pace with those changes. So your workforce will be on the ball.
5. Self-directed learners
   Personalised learning paths put people in charge of their own development. When employees have a say in their learning, they feel responsible for their growth, and setting and reaching learning goals becomes a motivation in itself.
6. Cost-effective learning
   Personalised learning paths are also a cost-effective approach to employee development. One-size-fits-all training programmes often lead to unnecessary spending as they cater to a broad audience, including employees who may already possess certain skills. Personalised paths put the budget where the assessment shows a real gap, and people spend less time away from their work. There are set-up costs, but better performance can repay them over time.

How to assess skills and needs in order to plan learning paths

Building a strong foundation for personalised learning begins with skill assessments. They reveal each person's skill gaps, which tells the organisation what its learning goals should be. They also give you a baseline, so you can measure later whether the learning worked, and they let you set learning objectives that address each person's actual gaps.

Here are six steps to create personalised learning paths, starting with the assessment.

Step 1: Define the organisation's learning goals and objectives

Begin by defining the organisation's current learning goals and objectives. Identify the skills that matter most for success in specific roles or projects and establish strategic skill development priorities. If you have one, start from a skills inventory: a record of the skills, education and experience of your current employees, set against the competencies each role requires. If you don't have one yet, developing one is highly recommended.

Select assessment methods aligned with the skills to be evaluated, which may include self-assessments, peer reviews, manager assessments, tests, or quizzes.

Step 2: Identify current and future skills needs

To identify the skills required for current and future needs, follow these steps:

• Analyse your organisation's immediate objectives, focusing on the roles and projects that matter most for achieving them.
• Consult relevant stakeholders, such as department heads and project managers, to understand the skills essential for ongoing tasks.
• Look ahead to the organisation's goals for the next five years, considering potential changes in business strategy or industry models. List the skills needed to meet these new objectives.
• Keep an eye on market trends and on technology changes that might require new competencies.

Step 3: Establish a skills gap hierarchy

After compiling a list of the skills your organisation currently possesses and those required for today and the future, you will identify the skills gap. If people have rated their proficiency while mapping their skills (on MuchSkills, that is a scale of 1 to 9), you will also see how far each person is from the level the role needs, which gives you even more comprehensive data to shape your future strategy. With an extensive list of skills to acquire or develop, the next step is prioritisation, ensuring that the allocation of time, resources, and effort is targeted for maximum impact.

Step 4: Prioritise skill development

Your learning objectives should align with the organisation's mission and broader business goals. To prioritise skill gaps, consider their importance and the impact of their absence on your business. Not all gaps require immediate attention. For example, Employee A, a project manager, lacks a crucial skill in project management software, directly affecting project timelines. This demands immediate action. On the other hand, Employee B's skill gap related to emerging technology may not immediately impact their job performance. In this case, prioritise addressing Employee A's skill gap due to its direct impact on projects and business outcomes. Employee B's skill gap can be addressed over time without the same sense of urgency.

Step 5: Tailor learning paths

Customise learning paths for individual employees based on their skill gaps and developmental needs. Ensure that the training content and delivery methods, whether through workshops, online courses, or other means, align with each learner's unique requirements.

Let's go back to Employee A. Their path might start with a short online course in the project management software their team uses, chosen because it covers the features behind the missed timelines. Next come a few weeks of working alongside a colleague who is an expert in the tool, with a real project plan to build together. Their manager then checks progress in their regular check-in after a month, and Employee A re-rates their proficiency once they have used the tool on a live project. Employee B's path can wait for the next quarterly review, and it might be no more than an article, a webinar and a conversation about where the technology is heading.

Step 6: Continuously monitor progress

Regular reviews ensure that learning paths remain aligned with employees' evolving needs and organisational objectives. Implement a system for ongoing skill assessment and progress monitoring, and regularly review and update learning paths as employees develop their competencies.

These six steps are a skills gap analysis applied to one person at a time. For the full method at team and organisation level, read our complete guide to skills gap analysis. And if you are planning learning for a whole team rather than one person, our guide to upskilling your team starts from the same place: a map of the skills you have.

Once you know what each person needs to learn, the next question is how they will learn it.

Designing personalised learning journeys

Designing the learning itself comes down to four building blocks: curriculum customisation, microlearning, peer-to-peer learning and internal communication platforms. Mixed to suit each person, they turn a list of skill gaps into a path someone can follow.

1. Curriculum customisation

The first is curriculum customisation. This process includes selecting modules, lessons, or courses that directly address identified skill gaps. For instance, choose content from online course platforms like Coursera, Udemy, edX or LinkedIn Learning, or from your own LMS and internal training, that aligns with your employees' skill development needs.

2. Microlearning strategies

Microlearning breaks learning content into small, topic-specific modules that people can fit around their work. Organisations can turn their internal training materials into such microlearning modules. For example, a company might develop microlearning modules on distinct sales techniques, compliance guidelines, or software tutorials.

3. Peer-to-peer learning and mentoring

Peer-to-peer learning and mentoring spread knowledge that no course holds. You can tailor it by pairing people with complementary skills, or by matching a mentee with an experienced colleague who has the skill they need or the career they want. It works best when you can see who the experts in a skill are, rather than relying on who happens to be known for it.

4. Internal communication platforms

Internal communication platforms such as Slack or Microsoft Teams serve as valuable channels for employees to share their insights and expertise on particular topics or skills. Use them to build a culture of learning and knowledge exchange, where people help each other develop their skills.

Personalised paths work best when people set some of their own goals too. For employees who want to do that, we have a separate guide: How to set personal growth and development goals.

Practical steps to encourage employee involvement

A learning path that is planned for someone, rather than with them, rarely gets followed. These practical steps get employees involved in their own paths:

• Provide self-assessment tools to help employees evaluate their skills and generate personalised gap reports.
• Conduct workshops on effective goal setting, emphasising SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals.
• Hold collaborative planning sessions where employees contribute to the design of their learning paths.
• Encourage open feedback sessions for employees to share thoughts on skills and development needs. Regular manager check-ins and one-on-ones are a natural place for these conversations.

Monitoring progress

Involvement gets a path started, and monitoring keeps it useful. Regular feedback and adjustment keep the content relevant as people's needs and the organisation's needs change, catch problems early before learners lose interest, and make it far more likely that the time and money spent on learning pay off. Here is how to monitor progress and adapt each path.

1. Conduct skill assessments

Repeat the skill assessment at regular intervals to see whether each person's proficiency is actually moving.

2. Give feedback

Establish feedback mechanisms so learners can give their view on the effectiveness of learning content and their overall learning experience. Short surveys or interviews will tell you what to improve.

3. Harness learning analytics

Use learning analytics to track engagement, completion rates and assessment scores. They show how each employee is progressing through their path and where they are getting stuck.

4. Ensure content is up-to-date

Keep learning content current with industry trends and best practice, and retire material that has gone out of date.

5. Make individualised adjustments

Adjust each path based on the person's feedback and progress. Some learners will need extra resources or a different format.

Common challenges and how to tackle them

Even well-planned learning paths run into obstacles. Here are the four challenges organisations run into most often, and how to deal with each.

1. Resource allocation

Challenge: Designing and delivering personalised learning content can be resource-intensive, demanding time, budget, and personnel allocation.

Solution: Start with the skills that matter most to your organisation's goals, using the gap hierarchy from Step 3, rather than personalising everything at once. Reuse what you already have: courses you already license and internal training can often be linked to the skills they teach instead of building new content.

2. Resistance to change

Challenge: Employees and managers, accustomed to traditional training approaches, may resist the transition to personalised learning.

Solution: Explain why the change is happening and what it means for each person, train managers to hold development conversations, and start with a pilot group whose results you can show to everyone else.

3. Technology integration

Challenge: Integrating personalised learning technology with existing systems and platforms can be complex and resource-demanding.

Solution: Choose tools that connect to the systems you already use, such as your HR system and LMS, involve IT from the start, and pilot with one team to find integration issues before a wider roll-out.

4. Measuring ROI

Challenge: Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of personalised learning paths can be challenging when immediate performance impact is not apparent.

Solution: Agree a few key performance indicators (KPIs) up front that tie each path to a business outcome, such as a skill level reached, a certificate gained or a project delivered. Then track them over time, because the return often shows only once people have used their new skills for a while.

The IBM case study

IBM is one of the best-documented examples of personalised learning at scale. Its learning platform, Your Learning, tailors content to each employee's role, skills and career aspirations. In 2019, 99% of IBM employees visited Your Learning at least once, and employees spent an average of 77 hours learning that year (median 52), according to a 2020 working paper by MIT. Among IBM's technical sales staff, the researchers found that each extra learning badge was linked to about 9% higher odds of promotion. IBM still reports an average of 80 learning hours per employee in 2025. The case shows what becomes possible when learning is tied to each person's skills and progress is tracked over time.

Introducing the MuchSkills learning and development feature

Personalised learning paths only work when they start from what each person can already do. That is the part MuchSkills takes care of. On MuchSkills, everyone maps their skills on a scale of 1 to 9, and My Growth shows each person how well they fit every role their organisation has defined. They see the skills they have, the skills they are missing (including certificates that are missing or have expired) and which of those matter most for the role.

Courses from Coursera, Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, any LMS or your internal training can be linked to roles, skills and certifications, so each gap arrives with a route to close it. People turn a missing skill into a development goal, with AI guidance on the route, and can find the experts in that skill to learn from. Managers follow their team's goals, HR and L&D can set one goal for hundreds of people at once, and a growth summary report shows which goals are being pursued, by whom and with which coach. Read more on our employee development page.

If you want to see how it would work with your roles and your people, book a demo.