The Benefits of A Learning Path

by Chris Daily

A learning path is one that guides you through your career journey. Originally developed by teachers as a tool to guide children in the classroom, learning paths create a path forward for adult learners as well. It includes all the steps you need to take in order to achieve success at your job or reach your goals. At Agile Meridian, we believe that developing an individual learning path approach is critical to your personal success. With an effective learning path, you will be able to get the most out of every opportunity and create a successful future for yourself.

Vision

A learning path will provide a framework to help you understand the different skills and knowledge required to achieve the goals you have set for yourself, the different activities and exercises necessary to obtain them and how long it might take to prepare yourself to meet your goals. This means that you will become better at asking more incisive questions about your next career move or learning opportunity. Learners are less likely to fall behind in their learning because of this increased knowledge they gained by utilizing a learning path.

New Opportunities

New opportunities will come up often throughout your learning journey. By incorporating a learning path and knowing exactly where you are headed, you will know which opportunities to take advantage of and which ones to pass on for later on down the track. As a learner, your learning path can give you a clear vision of what is important for your future success, so consider every learning experience carefully when following this method of progressing through your learning. Learning paths, when combined with accurate job descriptions, provide a new employee a vision into what the current and future requirements are for success.

Objectives

A learning path will clearly define your learning objectives. This means that you will be able to closely monitor your progress towards learning goals. You will have a better idea of what you need to learn next, whether it is ability, skills, or knowledge, and by learning in this way, you can avoid learning unnecessary information that might later become irrelevant.

Focus

Learning paths provide a way for organizations to focus employee training on a particular topic and associated learning activities as individual steps to master. The approach of incorporating learning paths at all levels provides a structure that a learner can follow to be prepared for the next step. In addition, learning paths provide a guide for learners to use to determine what types of ability and training might apply. The increased focus will reduce time required and increase proficiency, creating business opportunities for current and future employees.

Improved Experience

Every experience has the potential to help enhance your learning and knowledge, even if it doesn't seem beneficial at first. A learning path allows for creating different learning activities and opportunities that lead into one another so that each step can give you an insight into the future steps ahead of you. Learning paths provide the ability to avoid unnecessary topics, improving the speed towards achieving your goals.

Engaged Employees

An improved experience will create engaged employees, resulting in increased knowledge retention. Engaged learners lead to an increase in the proficiency of employees. Each completed step in the process is a rewarding achievement for employees as they continue on their respective journeys.

Create your learning path

Many Agile organizations are transactional in nature. In other words, they deliver a certification class, and then tell you that the next certification class is all you need.  They may understand that more than just process knowledge is required, but they take the easy route.

At Agile Meridian, we have created learning paths for you to use as a foundation to start building your own learning path. Developed based on our successes and failures, the Agile Meridian Learning Paths take into account more than just topics that are agile-focused. Using learning paths as a guide to the training programs we have developed provides a well-rounded foundation for your own personal journey. We have incorporated agile topics with the so-called "soft-skills" topics to provide a balanced approach that results in learners with high proficiency.

Agile Meridian Learning Paths

We have created three different learning paths for Agile Leaders, Product Owners, and Scrum Masters. Each of the learning paths can be used as an example that you can utilize as you map your way forward in your journey.

Have you adopted a learning paths methodology to your learning journey? Want to learn more about how learning paths improve your proficiency? Does your new employee know where to start? Agile Meridian can help you. Check out how learning paths can help create an effective career development strategy in today's rapidly changing job market through our Agile Meridian training courses. Enroll today.