Creating Effective Learning Paths for Your Team: Guiding Skill Development

Last Updated on

March 29, 2022

Alicja King

Learning new skills to progress a career is commonplace, but so is getting lost and unmotivated when you have a lot of courses to work through. Building learning paths to ensure that doesn't happen to your employees/learners is a great way to give them support and structure, while still letting them self-direct their studies.

Myskillcamp is here to explain what learning paths are, why they're useful, and how to build them yourself.

What is a learning Path

A learning path is a sequence of courses that teach a particular skill in a step-by-step manner. They can cover any skill and (when built using an LMS/LXP) include multimedia. With the help of intuitive platforms they can adjusted per learner, can include analytics, and use courses from those outside your business.

Why they're useful

More engaging - Unlike a single course, a learning path fully engages the learner with multimedia and allows them to fully immerse themselves in the topic that - with the help of multiple courses - can tackle a subject from various angles. For example, if you wanted an employee to learn conflict resolution, having multiple video examples, followed by a discussion, then a quiz (aka learning path) would be more effective than a single course.

Shorter sessions - microlearning is a popular course structure as it focuses on dispensing a lot of information in small, bite-sized pieces. If you build learning paths with bitesized courses you can keep learners' attention while still teaching a topic in-depth. This type of learning is used by Duolingo and other language-learning platforms.

Suits all learners - It's no secret that there are different types of learners. Some are tactical, some are visual, others are auditory. Having a learning path means you can add a plethora of courses to suit everyone. This is especially useful if you want to make a pathway for a team rather than just one learner. With myskillcamp for example, you can use quizzes, discussions, events, certification and media to create courses. Meaning course creators can pick and mix what they include in their learning paths.

Suits all departments - Alike the previous point, the way we learn/what we learn can also depend on the department we're in. A platform or program may be used by the whole company, but the parts used can differ by department. Take excel as a basic example; most companies would like their employees to have a grasp on excel but the way an accountant would use excel can be vastly different to how HR would use it. By creating learning paths you can tweak the courses per department to suit their needs. This is much easier than creating separate courses and allows all employees to learn a subject in-depth.

Transition skills to long-term memory - Ever taken a test after cramming the night before only to completely forget what you learned as soon as you leave the exam hall? That's short-term memory for you! Learning something once isn't enough to transition it to your longterm memory. For that transition to happen a person needs repetition. Having a series of courses can help you achieve this, and turn knowledge into a skill.

Learn from professionals - Good LMS'/LXPs will have courses available to you from training providers. After all, you can't be an expert in every subject, nor how to create engaging courses. If you lack the time and/or know-how, you can rely on professional content. Our content providers offer courses that are popular, thoroughly tested, and in-depth. Whether you want your employees to take language courses with Global Exam, business courses with LinkedIn Learning, or Corporate Learning with Bookboon, you can take the courses you like and build learning paths full of professional content.

How to create effective learning paths

So it's pretty clear why learning paths work, but how are they created? This may be slightly different depending on the LMS/LXP you have, but we will show you how you can create effective learning paths on our platform, myskillcamp.

You'll be able to create courses and learning paths if you're a training manager or course creator. Simply access the 'I Create' section when you log in.

From there you click on 'my learning paths' then create! You can personalise all aspects of the path, from description, to skills learned, and of course, the courses included. You can drag and drop courses, create new courses, import courses, and pick courses from the myskillcamp marketplace.

Access the learning paths you create at any time to edit (you can tweak any aspect of the path based on your learners' scores and feedback), check analytics, duplicate or delete. And if you get stuck, a dedicated member of the myskillcamp Customer Success Team will be on hand to help.

Start creating learning paths

Learning paths can only be created effectively with an LMS/LXP platform, as it offers scalability and help centres. If you don't have a platform that offers learning path creation, or you've reached the limit of what your LMS can do for you, reach out to us for a free personalised trial.

You can start creating, importing and downloading courses straight away and build learning paths with us on your very own training hub.

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