Learning Paths & Development Plans

Understanding Your Development Plan

What Is a Development Plan?

Your Development Plan is one of Acorn's unique differentiators in the learning management landscape. It serves as a comprehensive view of your development landscape by displaying two critical capability categories:

• Assigned Capabilities: These are competencies required for your current role or position. Your organisation determines these based on job function, responsibilities, and performance expectations.
• Interest Capabilities: These are skills and competencies you've identified as personally relevant to your career goals. They reflect your professional aspirations, whether you're preparing for advancement, lateral development, or skill diversification.

By combining both assigned and interest-based capabilities, your Development Plan creates a personalized learning experience that respects both organisational needs and individual career ambitions.

How Development Plans Support Your Growth

Your Development Plan is more than a static checklist. It's a dynamic tool that aligns your learning activities directly to your competency gaps and career objectives. This means every learning activity you undertake can be tracked and measured against meaningful, role-relevant outcomes.

The personalized nature of your Development Plan ensures that recommended learning resources, courses, and development activities are relevant to your situation. Rather than generic training suggestions, you receive guidance tailored to the specific gaps between your current capabilities and your target capabilities—both those assigned to your role and those you've identified as personally important.

Creating and Completing Your Development Plan

Accessing Your Development Plan

Your Development Plan is accessible through Momentum forms, which provide an intuitive interface for creating and updating your personal development strategy. These forms guide you through the process of documenting your career goals, identifying capability gaps, and planning your learning pathway.

Momentum forms ensure that the process of creating your IDP is straightforward and aligned with your organisation's development framework. You can complete these forms at your own pace and revisit them as your career goals evolve.

Tracking Your Progress

Accorn PLMS tracks both the creation and completion of your Personal Development Plan. This tracking capability provides visibility into your development journey and ensures accountability for your learning goals. Key tracking elements include:

• Plan Creation: The system records when you initiate your development plan, capturing your initial goals and capability assessment.
• Plan Completion: Acorn tracks when you've completed assigned development activities and achieved targeted competencies.
• Progress Milestones: Your organisation can monitor your advancement through your development pathway, recognizing completed milestones and ongoing progress.

This comprehensive tracking enables both you and your managers to maintain clarity on your development trajectory and celebrate achievements along the way.

Making the Most of Your Development Plan

Aligning Learning to Career Goals

Your Development Plan is most effective when you regularly review and align your learning activities to your documented career goals. As you engage with learning resources in Acorn PLMS, consider how each activity contributes to closing your identified capability gaps. This intentional approach transforms random learning into a cohesive development strategy.

Reviewing and Updating Your Plan

Career aspirations and role requirements evolve over time. Periodically review your Development Plan to ensure it remains relevant. You may discover new interest capabilities that align with shifting career interests, or your assigned capabilities may change due to role transitions or organizational evolution. Regular updates keep your plan actionable and current.

Collaborating With Your Manager

While your Development Plan is personalized to your needs, it's most powerful when you engage your manager in the process. Discuss your assigned capabilities, career aspirations, and planned learning activities. Managers can provide valuable perspective on development priorities, resource availability, and how your growth supports both your goals and organisational objectives.

The Personalized Learning Experience

Accorn PLMS's approach to Individual Development Plans reflects a core philosophy: learning is most effective when it's personalized. Rather than requiring everyone in a role to follow identical training paths, the platform acknowledges that professionals have unique strengths, interests, and aspirations.

Your Development Plan embodies this philosophy by creating a learning experience that adapts to your context. Whether you're developing depth in your current specialization or building capabilities for career progression, your IDP remains focused on your specific needs and goals.

Summary

Individual Development Plans in Acorn PLMS transform generic training into targeted, personalized development strategies. By combining role-assigned capabilities with your personal learning interests, your IDP creates a meaningful pathway to career growth. Through Momentum forms, you can easily create, track, and update your development plan, ensuring that your learning activities consistently contribute to your professional goals. Regularly engage with your plan, collaborate with your manager, and leverage Acorn's personalized learning approach to maximize your development journey.

Learning Path Creation & Assignment Learning Path Creation & Assignment

Accelerating performance and development across your organization requires a structured approach to learning. Acorn PLMS enables you to create comprehensive learning paths that guide learners through multiple courses, tailored to their roles, departments, or organizational context. Whether you're managing a single organization or supporting multiple partner networks, you can build and assign learning paths efficiently at scale.

Understanding Learning Paths in Acorn

Learning paths in Acorn are built using Programs, which serve as containers for organizing multiple courses into a cohesive curriculum. When you create a program, you can add courses sequentially and enforce a staging order, ensuring learners progress through content in the intended sequence. This structured approach supports both mandatory compliance training and developmental curricula that build skills progressively.

Beyond simple course sequencing, Acorn supports sophisticated learning architectures. You can configure programs to align with your organization's specific needs—whether that means organizing by topic, company, department, or audience type. Sections of a program can be provisioned to specific cohorts, giving you granular control over who accesses which curriculum components.

Building Your Learning Paths

Creating Programs

To establish a learning path, begin by creating a Program within Acorn. A program functions as your curriculum framework, allowing you to:

• Add multiple courses and define their sequence
• Enforce a staging order that learners must follow
• Organize content by topic, business unit, or organizational structure
• Assign different program sections to specific audiences

This flexibility means you can build a single program structure and adapt it across different parts of your organization without duplicating administrative effort.

Leveraging Content Variety

Your learning paths can incorporate diverse content formats that engage learners and support modern learning needs. Acorn supports interactive videos with embedded quizzes, SCORM-compliant content, signable PDFs for compliance documentation, and rosters for tracking in-person sessions. This multimodal approach ensures your learning paths accommodate different learning styles and performance objectives.

In addition to structured learning content, you can enrich your programs with resources. Non-learning materials such as handbooks, codes of ethics, policy documents, and procedural guides can be uploaded to your catalog's resources section. These materials act as a data repository that learners and key personnel can access on demand, providing essential reference information alongside formal learning activities.

Assigning Learning Paths: From Individual to Organization-Wide

Role-Based and Cohort-Driven Assignment

Accorn's cohort architecture enables you to assign learning paths based on multiple dimensions of your organization. You can create customized pathways that route learners based on:

• Job role or position
• Department or business unit
• Onboarding cohort
• Partner or organization
• Region or geographic location
• Audience type or learner segment

This means learners are automatically placed into appropriate learning paths based on their organizational context. Each learner experiences a tailored curriculum and user interface that reflects their role and learning objectives, all while you maintain centralized administration, reporting, and governance across your system.

Multi-Partner and Multi-Tenant Support

If your organization manages multiple partner networks or operates in a decentralized structure, Acorn's tenant and cohort architecture supports this complexity. You can maintain distinct learning journeys across different partner organizations while keeping administration, compliance tracking, and reporting consolidated in a single platform. This capability is particularly valuable for organizations like Water.org that work across multiple partner implementations globally.

AI-Driven Personalization

Accorn PLMS goes beyond traditional learning path assignment through its proprietary Bedrock AI and access to the world's largest capability database. This technology enables you to create individual learning paths that map directly to each learner's role and aspirations.

To generate AI-driven learning paths, you can upload existing job descriptions, role profiles, or job postings. Acorn's AI analyzes these documents and matches them to relevant capabilities and content—including your own e-learning and live learning content as well as third-party vendor offerings. The result is personalized learning paths grounded in authentic performance needs, not just generic curriculum assignments.

These AI-generated paths surface to learners through their Individual Development Plan (IDP), providing a pointed, role-specific interface that shows exactly what they need to learn and why.

Assigning and Managing Learning Plans

Approval Workflows and Manager Oversight

When learning path changes or new assignments need approval, you can configure manager and admin hierarchies to ensure appropriate governance. Managers within your organization can:

• Approve attendance for live learning events
• Assign training to direct reports
• Rate employees' capabilities
• Track and review employees' learning and development plans

This hierarchical structure ensures accountability and allows managers to oversee their team's development while maintaining organizational standards.

Specialized Assignment Roles

For onboarding scenarios, Acorn offers a dedicated Onboarding role. Users assigned this role access only onboarding course content through a specialized onboarding view, creating a focused experience for new employees. This role-based restriction ensures that onboarding learners see only relevant introductory material while maintaining security and content organization.

Supporting Comprehensive Learning Frameworks

Accorn PLMS supports full learning plan architectures including:

• Learning Plans: Structured curricula organized by courses and sequenced for progression
• Individual Development Plans (IDPs): Personalized learning paths mapped to role, capabilities, and career aspirations
• Task Lists and OJT Sign-offs: Workflow-based task lists that track on-the-job training completion and manager sign-offs
• Gradebooks: Progress tracking tools that monitor learner advancement against learning plan objectives
• Custom Capabilities: Integration with the Capabilities product for mapping learning to organizational competencies

Tracking Progress and Impact

Once you've assigned learning paths, you need visibility into learner progress and outcomes. Acorn supports custom reporting dashboards built with Reporting Widgets. These dashboards can be tailored for different user types—executives, managers, and learners—providing each group the insights they need to review tracking data and measure learning effectiveness.

Best Practices for Path Assignment

When designing and assigning learning paths in your organization:

• Start with clear role definitions or job descriptions that inform path structure
• Use cohorts to segment your learner population logically
• Enforce course sequences where progression matters
• Incorporate varied content formats to support engagement
• Leverage AI-driven path generation for at-scale personalization
• Set up appropriate approval hierarchies for compliance and accountability
• Build custom dashboards to monitor adoption and completion

By combining Acorn's program architecture, cohort management, and AI capabilities, you create learning paths that are both scalable and personalized—driving performance where it matters most.

Path Prioritization & Weighting Path Prioritization & Weighting

Effective learning management requires clear distinction between training that is mandatory for role performance and training that supports professional development. Acorn PLMS provides tools to prioritize and weight learning paths so your organization can direct resources toward business-critical development while still offering supplementary learning opportunities.

Understanding Path Prioritization in Acorn PLMS

Path prioritization allows you to establish a hierarchy of learning requirements across your organization. Rather than presenting all training as equally important, you can designate certain paths as essential to role competency while marking others as beneficial but optional.

By prioritizing paths, you ensure that:

• Critical roles receive targeted development aligned to business objectives
• Learners understand training urgency and can allocate their time accordingly
• Managers can focus coaching efforts on foundational competencies before advanced topics
• Compliance and regulatory requirements are clearly flagged as non-negotiable
• Your organization's strategic goals are reflected in learning assignments

Programs: Structured Pathways for Business-Critical Development

Acorn PLMS Programs feature enables you to create structured learning pathways aligned to specific business needs. Programs are particularly effective for establishing priority learning sequences because they allow you to:

Define Role-Based Cohorts

Programs can be organized around key organizational roles or 'cohorts'—groups of employees who share similar competency requirements. For example, you might establish a Program for new managers, customer-facing staff, or technical specialists. Each Program represents a prioritized pathway tailored to that group's developmental needs.

Establish Sequential Learning

Within each Program, you can structure learning in a deliberate sequence, ensuring foundational knowledge is acquired before advanced topics. This weighting by sequence communicates which training must be completed first and in what order, naturally prioritizing essential content.

Align to Business Objectives

Programs tied to specific roles or cohorts make it clear why certain training is being assigned. This connection to business outcomes helps learners understand the importance and relevance of their learning path.

Capability Framework: Linking Learning to Organizational Needs

The Capability Framework feature in Acorn PLMS connects learning paths to specific organizational competencies and skills requirements. This integration allows you to weight learning paths by their strategic importance:

Capability-Driven Assignments

Capability assignments ensure that learning outcomes are directly linked to organizational needs. When you map learning to specific capabilities, you're essentially weighting that training by its criticality to organizational performance. High-priority capabilities receive corresponding learning paths that your organization emphasizes.

Clear Performance Linkage

The Capability Framework demonstrates to learners and managers why certain training is required. By showing how a learning path develops specific capabilities needed for their role, you provide context that reinforces the training's importance.

Targeted Development for Key Roles

Capability assignments ensure that key roles—those most critical to organizational success—receive the development resources and learning prioritization they require. This targeted approach improves workforce readiness by concentrating effort where it matters most.

Distinguishing Required from Recommended Training

Acorn PLMS provides clear mechanisms to differentiate mandatory from optional training:

Standard Designation

The LMS clearly delineates between required and recommended training through its standard designation system. This distinction means:

• Required training is marked as mandatory and typically includes compliance requirements, role-essential competencies, and business-critical skills development
• Recommended training is marked as optional, offering professional development opportunities and supplementary skills enhancement

Visible Communication

This designation is transparent throughout the system, so learners immediately understand whether a training module is non-negotiable or discretionary. Managers can also quickly identify which training must be completed to ensure role readiness.

Implementing Path Prioritization and Weighting

To effectively prioritize and weight learning paths in your organization:

1. Map Organizational Needs

Identify which roles are most critical to business success and which competencies drive performance in those roles. This assessment forms the foundation for your prioritization strategy.

2. Create Role-Based Programs

Use the Programs feature to establish learning pathways for key cohorts. Structure these Programs to reflect both business urgency and logical learning progression.

3. Assign Capabilities

Leverage the Capability Framework to link learning paths to specific organizational competencies. This weighting system communicates to learners why their training matters.

4. Designate Training Status

Clearly mark training as required or recommended within each pathway. Ensure that compliance, regulatory, and role-critical training is consistently designated as required.

5. Communicate Expectations

Make sure learners and managers understand the prioritization and weighting system. Clear communication about why certain training is required versus recommended increases engagement and completion rates.

Benefits of Strategic Path Prioritization

When you implement thoughtful prioritization and weighting in Acorn PLMS:

• Improved workforce readiness through focused development on critical competencies
• Enhanced compliance by clearly flagging mandatory training requirements
• Better resource allocation by directing learning investments toward high-impact areas
• Clearer learner pathways that guide employees through training in logical, purposeful sequences
• Stronger alignment between learning initiatives and organizational strategy
• Increased completion rates when learners understand the relevance and importance of their assigned training

By using Programs and Capability Framework features strategically, you transform Acorn PLMS from a simple training repository into a performance-driving tool that ensures your organization's learning investments directly support business success.