Last week I saw lots of people talking about personalisation at the Learning Technologies Exhibition and Conference. The focus in the exhibition seemed to be on the TECHNOLOGIES part rather than Learning, and that’s a problem.

Learning is inherently personal; what I might need to learn at any given time or date will be different to you, and the expectation that I get what I need, when I want, on terms I establish, is the heart of being personalised. We see it in Donald H Taylor’s Global Sentiment Survey – personalisation was fourth on this year’s list.

I saw the image above the other week. It’s from a 2016 Boston Consulting Group survey into barriers in personalisation for products. Look at the reasons for failure to personalise – how many of these relate to your failure to personalise for your colleagues in your organisation?

Before you say it, I know this is product related, consumer facing, and a supply side process. If you’re turning learning into product, marketing to colleagues as customers, driven by a supply approach, how different are you in reality?

Yes, we can scale and personalise on our terms in ways we never did before. It will mean the people you work with will always want more and you might need to think about how you design for them, not for you.