How to Create a Training Roadmap for your Learners

If you want to achieve the best possible results from your employee training, you need to follow a strategic, well thought out training roadmap.

A training roadmap ensures that your training course is always guiding learners to the desired training outcome. Through this, you will effectively meet your training objectives.

So, what exactly is a training roadmap?

Also referred to as a learning path, a training roadmap is a sequence of well-structured learning activities that teach specific topics. Essentially, this is a way to map out training, making the learning process smoother.

Developing a training roadmap is different to developing a self-contained lesson. Creating a roadmap requires that you consider each training segment as part of a unified whole, with each part building on the last to achieve greater value.

Roadmaps are a popular tool in the Learning and Development industry, and there are three common types of roadmaps. Here, we unpack each type.

3 Types of Training Roadmaps:

1. Customer Training

Organisations provide clients with roadmaps to help them understand complex products and services. This strategy for customer retention helps in increasing client satisfaction, and generating leads for future business. This type of road mapping is popular in the IT and Software industries.

2. Career Development

When an employee’s position within a company is growing, professional development roadmaps can be used to help close any competency gap, ensuring ease of transition.

3. Partner Leadership

This kind of roadmap is key to making business partnerships work. Partner Leadership roadmaps are usually given to managers and high-level associates of partner organisations, ensuring their collaboration has excellent operational efficiency.

The Value in Mapping your Training

Training roadmaps have become popular in the Learning and Development industry for a variety of reasons. They are comprehensive, distributing the learning over multiple sessions. Because of this, trainers aren’t forced to leave out important content due to time restraints. This ensures that trainees can gain complete knowledge of the topic over a strategic period of time.

You may think it a negative that training takes more time with this learning strategy. This is not a negative at all. Roadmaps ensure every training session resonates with the learner. This saves time, reducing the need to re-train learners.

Another benefit of roadmaps is that they increase an employee’s interest in learning because it shows them how each part of training fits together, assisting future career growth.

Putting a Roadmap Together

Creating a training roadmap can be broken down into steps.

1. Objective

As with all training or learning initiatives, you need to identify what you want to achieve from it. Have a list of what you want your learners to be able to achieve after they have completed the learning path.

2. Topic Sequence

Once you have completed your list of training topics, you can determine the sequence in which you teach them – and the sequence that will have maximum impact. This is the most crucial step to creating a roadmap. You need to carefully consider the order in which the information is relayed on to the learner.

Trainers can organise topics based on importance, how familiar trainees are with certain topics, and cause and effect relationships. The most basic factor when it comes to sequencing is “prerequisites.” What the learner needs to know first, needs to come first. Simple as that.

3. Understanding your Learners

It is also important to understand that all your learners learn differently. Therefore, it is crucial to gather information on your audience, their backgrounds, and their training preferences. With this information, you can create segmented roadmaps for different groups within your audience.

4. Create, Implement, and Show Reward

Here, you can begin creating your online courses and adding them to a customer learning path on your Learning Management System (LMS). It is always a good idea to add incentives at the end of your roadmap – such as consideration for a promotion or a discount for customers. It doesn’t need to be substantial, any incentive counts.

Another way to provide incentive is through “badges” or certificates. This provides them with validation, and your LMS can award these automatically upon completion of certain learner milestones.

5. Implement Learning

Now you are ready to send your learners down the path you have developed. As participants start to work the roadmap, track results and get feedback to improve your process and make your roadmaps better in the future.

In Conclusion:

Building a training roadmap requires time on the part of a trainer, but the rewards will make this extra work worth it.
Better performance, reduced costs, stronger relationships with trainees, and better learner engagement certainly make the extra effort worth it.