How Custom LXP Resolves Typical Learning Challenges

The Forbes expert with 17+ years in eLearning, Belitsoft’s CTO, shows how the LXP helps businesses discover skills gaps across the company, address them by providing properly recommended content, analyze learning outcomes, and improve learning efficiency.

To illustrate how an LXP resolves typical learning challenges, we’ll use two robust fully-functional LXPs by Degreed and Belitsoft.

Challenge 1. What to teach?

The primary goal of continuous learning is addressing skills gaps by upskilling employees.

However, business and HR leaders often lack full visibility of what set of skills the employees master and don't measure what skill levels they have. Without this data, they aren't able to timely reveal skills gaps and make data-backed decisions about what to teach for addressing them.

LXP-based Solution: Reveal skills gaps to decide what to teach

Teaching should start from discovering skills gaps, which is the difference between current skills and target skills.

For that, the company creates a skills matrix where they describe which abilities and knowledge should correlate with every skill level.

Having the skills matrix, the company can set up target levels for each position to benchmark the expected competencies for their teams.

To discover a skill gap, the current skills of each employee have to be assessed. It can be realized in different ways:

• by AI-powered assessment tool that is getting popular in Talent Management;
• there is a certified examination made up by the company or a content provider;
• otherwise, employees themselves or their mentors do the self-assessment.

For example, a Data Scientist with the current level 3 in Big Data Analysis can open the position of Data Scientist and see the Target Level and the series of skills that are obligatory for the position.

Thanks to the skills matrix, the skills gaps can be measured and analyzed not only on an individual level, but also on a company level. All the information about current skills of employees across the company is gathered in a single analytical dashboard. Thus, managers or educators can see which skills gaps the company faces.

The goal of learning through the LXP is to close this gap by upskilling employees.

Challenge 2. How to teach?

Traditionally, L&D managers or educators offer one-size-fits-all content with a strict, predefined learning path for all employees. Such an approach may not take into account learner's interests, current skills level, and individual learning goals.

Besides, the businesses have to manually update their learning library, spending extra resources on it regularly. Otherwise, the content quickly gets out-of-date and dull, leading to low engagement and poor learning outcomes.

LXP-based Solution: Create a learning path with individually recommended content

To properly address the revealed skills gaps, it's time to create a learning path with the properly recommended content.

Once an employee enters their own profile page, they can see a learning plan assigned to them by the company to develop the target skillset.

Instead of passing the entire learning process from a zero level, the LXP suggests the employee finding the appropriate content based on their current skill level.

After completing a learning path for mastering a certain skill, an employee returns to the skill assessment. Depending on an LXP, there might be different assessment methods. The most popular and demanded one is a test or exam with certification as a reward.

Challenge 3. How to measure results?

To track the learning process and outcomes, HR and L&D managers or educators regularly create tests or arrange interviews. The process is based on manual work, which consumes a lot of time and implies the risk of biased assessment.

On top of that, without real-time automated analytics, business leaders don't see how many employees are learning, how fast skill gaps are reducing, who are the top performers in their company, and many other useful metrics. As a result, top managers cannot make timely and data-backed decisions about further learning activities.

LXP-based Solution: Automate the tracking of learning progress and outcomes to make data-backed decisions

By tracking the learning progress and outcomes, L&D managers and educators can use it to identify top and low-performing learners objectively. Having such data can be used to see who has best mastered new competencies and can be promoted, and who needs assistance or follow-up.

Company managers and educators can also analyze if a skill gap is getting less across the company by getting skill rating analytics.

In addition, the company management can get insights about the learning process from multiple other aspects. For example, how many employees are active learners, how many courses are used for learning, which content is most popular, and many other useful metrics.

Challenge 4. How to improve results?

Most learning programs are considered successfully completed after finishing the course, without further analysis of whether the learning process has been useful and engaging, and whether employees feel satisfied with the experience. As a result, employees don't feel motivated to start training new skills, the skill gap across the company grows, and investment in training doesn't bring expected outcomes to business.

LXP-based Solution: Keep high learners' engagement to accelerate the adoption of new knowledge

What would you do in case the learning performance tracking shows poor results, or you want to improve the learning outcomes even more? Think, how engaging is the learning content that your company offers?

Learners' engagement is critical for the success of learning. That's why LXPs include not only courses assigned by the company, but also learning based on employee's personal interests. That's one of the differences between LXP and LMS.

The LXP can both import the internal learning content from the company's LMS and integrate external content providers, such as YouTube, TED videos, Google podcasts, and others via xAPI. (xAPI retrieves records from external sources and aggregates them in a learning record store – LRS. xAPI is compliant and widely used by the top LMSs, such as Moodle, Blackboard, Docebo, Learndash, etc.).

Mixing internal and external content makes an LXP a perfect solution to the issue of the up-to-date content shortage that is typical of an LMS.

Microsoft General Manager of Enterprise Corporate Learning, Alessandro Giacobbe, confirms the profitability of integrating LMS and LXP, stating that there is no point in replacing LMS as it’s critical for compliance and professional development; instead, their aim is to provide employees with the broad learning catalog by uniting LXP and LMS. To illustrate, it can be a Sharepoint-based LMS and Microsoft Viva, which also seamlessly interact with Microsoft 365 and Teams, turning into a holistic learning solution.

Anyway, whether you use a standalone LXP or its combination with LMS, here are a couple of features that increase employees' engagement when applied in the LXP.

AI-based content recommendations

Content recommendations based on learner's personal choice

Interactive Chat-based Learning

Social learning

GET FREE CONSULTATION from the Belitsoft team that knows how to resolve eLearning challenges by building a custom LXP or customizing your existing software for upskilling employees.