# **3 Keys to a High-Performing Exam Prep Program for Professional Learners**

Let’s begin with a cautionary tale for certification program leaders from an unexpected place: a New Hampshire newsroom roughly 30 years ago.

Through the 70s, 80s, and 90s, The Reidale Tribune was the hottest newspaper in Reidale County, New Hampshire—on par with the New York Times, Boston Globe, and New York Post. Then, something changed.

The internet age drove readers online, and the Tribune lost readers to virtual outlets. As a paper company stuck in a digital world, owner Sarah Haskin knew she had to change her business model. She had to reskill and upskill her reporters to write for the virtual space.

Sarah gathered every learning module, lecture, and training program she’d ever implemented and reworked them for online journalism, creating a virtual masterclass for her writers to follow. But something was wrong. While engagement levels were high at first, they crashed a few weeks into the course. Only 25% of Sarah’s writers graduated, and the rest fled to work for the competition. The reviews weren’t flattering either.

There are three key aspects to building an engaging learning program—**personalized study plans**, **practice exams**, and **actionable data**—and had the Reidale Tribune understood these key aspects, it could have been the most-read online news outlet in Reidale County, New Hampshire when the internet boom exploded.

These three keys are also crucial to crafting exam prep programs that actually work—programs that focus on engaging learners with personalized courses and study plans to meet their needs.

Let’s put **personalized study plans, practice exams**, and **actionable data** under a microscope to see how they’re critical to building an effective, high-performing certification exam prep program.

# Key 1

# Personalize Your Study Plans

Understanding your target audience is key to running any successful business. As such, to build a successful exam prep program, you need to first understand your learners. Learner expectations have evolved over the decades, as teaching techniques and new technology have reshaped the way people learn.

To meet modern learners where they are, you must remember the following:

**• They are easily distracted**. There are so many distractions bombarding their daily lives that dedicating uninterrupted time to online learning modules is a luxury many can’t afford.

**• They expect instant gratification.** Today’s learners are accustomed to the on-demand, just-in-time world. Exam prep and certification training programs are no different. The best programs are the ones that learners can access on their own time.

**• They are ready and eager to learn.** Learners are willing to reskill and upskill to keep pace with technology, and they expect your training and exam prep programs to do the same.

**• They long for social learning**. Learners will tap each other’s information banks to gain deeper insight into their industry and profession. In fact, [those who participate in discussions are more engaged](https://blog.benchprep.com/things-you-need-to-know-about-the-modern-learner) with their learning program than those who don’t.

**• They work remotely part-time or full-time.** In-the-moment or on-the-spot feedback helps learners identify and understand their blind spots.

People are wildly different in terms of their prior knowledge, skill sets, and learning ability, which makes it difficult to adapt your learning environment to meet the unique needs of each individual. Not only do your learners vary in terms of their skills and abilities, but their personal preferences vary, too.

A personalized learning strategy considers all these factors—your learners’ knowledge, skills, abilities, and preferences—and delivers a learning plan specifically designed to help each learner succeed.  It can be challenging to achieve individualized training plans for each of your learners efficiently at scale. Personalized learning seeks to remove inefficiencies by leveraging modern technology in a way that allows learners to learn the way they want to.

Follow these steps to build more personalized study plans:

**• Organize.** Gather and organize your content by topic, competency, or learning objective. Then, tag any related content and make it accessible from the main subject.

**• Pre-exam.** Give learners a pre-exam to measure their strengths and weaknesses before diving into the course.

**• Focus on weaknesses, reinforce strengths.** Design a study plan based on learners’ pre-exam data. Include content and practice questions related to their weaknesses, while remembering to bolster their strengths.

**• Measure learner confidence**. Selecting the correct answer doesn’t always mean they’re ‘right.’ Learners must understand _why_ it’s the correct answer if the information has any chance of sinking in.

**• Provide on-the-spot feedback.** In-the-moment or on-the-spot feedback helps learners identify and understand their blind spots.

**• Mix it up.** Leverage different mediums to deliver information. Flash cards, practice questions, podcasts, videos, lectures, games, and infographics are just a few examples.

# **How to Personalize Your Study Plan**

Personalization is essential to building an exam prep program that works with your learners’ lifestyles and needs, but how do you build an individualized program that also works at scale?

## Tip 
 1: Put Yourself in Your Learners' Shoes

As mentioned, understanding your learners is the first step in crafting an exam prep program that works for them. Consider the following questions, and narrow your strategy from there:

**• Who's taking your course? What type of professional/ learner are they?**

**• How much time do they need? How much time do they actually have?**

**• Would they benefit more from long-form online lectures, bite-sized learning modules, or a combination of both that they can use on the go?**

_Flexibility_ is essential when it comes to exam prep program training material. Your program can’t facilitate your learners’ diverse needs if it leans on a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, ensure that learner experiences follow a flexible framework based on **discovery, learning,** and **feedback**.

### The Discovery Phase

Use pre-exams to determine where your learners are and which areas they need to improve. From here, your exam prep program works with learners to determine how much time they must dedicate to one area. You’ll also establish the mediums through which you’ll convey the information.

### The Learning Phase

Leverage those learning mediums to focus on the weak points established by discovery. The end goal is to pass the inevitable exam. How learners get there should be entirely up to them.

### The Feedback Phase

Provide constant feedback to reinforce learner confidence during the learning phase. Late feedback is no good. Explain why practice questions are right or wrong instead of just saying they’re right or wrong. Redirecting to the source material is an excellent way to provide in-lesson feedback.

## **Tip 2: Tell Your Learners How Much Time To Spend Studying**

Professionals are strapped for time, so you must determine how many hours they’ll need to allocate to prepare for an upcoming exam. With this frame in mind, you can build a study plan that maximizes learners’ available hours. Now learners have a realistic expectation of how much effort they’ll need to put forth to prepare adequately.

## Key 2

# Provide Practice Exams

Imagine if you handed someone a textbook titled _How To Play Baseball_ and then sent them off to start a game. They’d be pretty lost, wouldn’t they? You can say the same for exam prep and the importance of practice sessions before the big game, or before their high-stakes exam.

Practice exams lead to more positive outcomes while reducing learner stress and anxiety. They must get as close to the exam experience as possible to build confidence. When the practice exam doesn’t mirror the actual exam, it can’t help learners prepare. We’ve established that learners don’t have much time and they certainly don’t have time to waste.

### Best Practices for Practice Exams

Practice exams are essential to creating effective and engaging exam prep programs. What role does a learning management system (LMS) play in delivering practice exams and immediate feedback?

## **Provide Immediate Feedback**

Feedback is perhaps the most crucial part of your exam prep program—and goes far beyond calculating a score at the end of a practice exam.

Immediate feedback dives into learners’ strengths and weaknesses, explaining why they got a question wrong, rather than just marking it as wrong. It also shows them where to find the correct information within the source material. Then they can head back to the question bank and focus on those highlighted areas to build their subject mastery.

## Conclusion

Learning businesses can unlock the full potential of their exam prep programs when they leverage the three keys to high-performing courses: **personalization**, **practice**, and **data**.