How To Create An Impactful Microlearning Strategy For Performance Support
Microlearning is about delivering learning content in bite-size chunks that workers can easily consume whenever they have three to 10 minutes of downtime. Because the lessons are short and sweet, but fulfilling, they meet modern workers’ expectations for learning. They can learn skills they need on the spot without having to sit through complicated coursework for hours at a time.
This is especially important to millennials and younger generations who by 2020 accounted for more than half of all Americans, according to Brookings [1]. As a result, they will increasingly dominate the workplace of the future. They have been raised in the internet and social media age—which is a world filled with bite-size content consumption and shorter attention spans. All this makes microlearning the perfect addition to an effective learning program.
Keeping Workers Fully Engaged In Their Own Learning Journeys
Microlearning delivers many benefits. In particular, it enables employees to be masters of their own learning journeys, yet still fully supported by their employers. Because each lesson is short and concise, employees can consume them on an ongoing basis. This steady ingestion of new insights and knowledge provides ongoing performance support—something that’s essential for boosting employee morale. At the same time, it mitigates common risks, such as boredom or loss of motivation. A series of short, interesting lessons will keep employees fully engaged in their continuous learning journey.
What’s more, microlearning can be designed to address specific skills or topics that employees are interested in so they can perform their jobs better. This could be a skill they already learned but want a refresher lesson about, for example. Micro-lessons give employees the opportunity to refresh their knowledge without needing to spend time on a long course or read multiple pieces of content, empowering workers to steer their own learning paths.
Microlearning Overcomes Workers’ Pain Points
Microlearning smooths over many pain points employees may have, such as finding the time to learn. Organizations also stand to gain significant benefits when they deploy microlearning opportunities, including:
Boosting Learners' Motivation To Keep Learning
Microlearning delivers that elusive quality humans crave: instant gratification. Learning a new skill or task in a few minutes gives workers a sense of accomplishment—something they’ll want to repeat.
Bridging Performance Gaps
Because each micro-lesson focuses on one single task, skill, or concept, learners can choose to consume the lessons that fill in missing gaps in their performance. In this way, they can quickly jump over hurdles to achieving ideal performance on the job without having to sit through long and boring lessons.
Supporting Knowledge Retention
It’s much easier to digest and process small lessons than large ones. As a result, workers can easily move from nugget to nugget, retaining each micro-lesson as they go.
Supporting Mobile Learning
Because each micro-lesson takes only minutes to consume, workers can easily run through lessons on the go on their mobile devices.
Providing Fast, Easy, And Cost-Effective Course Creation
L&D professionals can get bogged down in creating long and detailed lessons. But micro-lessons can often be created and uploaded quickly. This allows organizations to have a greater impact faster.
Tips For Creating Impactful Microlearning Lessons
If you haven’t already embarked on the microlearning journey in your organization, here are tips to get started. Start with your employees’ learning needs: What are the lessons your workers need that can best be delivered in small chunks? These are often called the "moments of need." Microlearning for employee training is most effective when it’s used in an engaging package that fills in immediate knowledge gaps.
Think Small, Digestible Nuggets Of Wisdom
Focus on a single subject for each lesson. Get straight to the point. If you want to share more information on the topic, provide optional links for related content, thereby giving workers the ability to dig deeper or choose their way forward.
Choose Your Microlearning Content Format Wisely
Microlearning comes in many formats, including videos, infographics, podcasts, social media posts, gamification, articles, simulations, and much more. Choose the format that is most appropriate for each lesson.
Use Real-World Examples
A powerful way to ratchet up the impact of small lessons is to weave experiential insights into the content through actual on-the-job scenarios. This will help learners relate to the content and see exactly how it’s applicable to them.
Make Some Lessons Interactive
To fully engage your learners, weave an interactive component through simulations, interactive motions, and gamification into some of the lessons.
Include Links For Related Content
Just because the lessons are short, doesn’t mean employees have to stop there. Add links to additional content, both required and optional, that expands on or dovetails with the micro-lesson.
Conclusion
When microlearning is delivered consistently it can improve employee knowledge and retention. Another benefit of microlearning is that it helps employees develop a habit of continuous learning. This achieves the dual goal of helping the employee perform better while helping the organization succeed. Many L&D teams struggle with content curation and delivery. Without the right learning management system, microlearning can quickly become even more complicated than traditional learning. Because microlearning consists of so many different parts, it’s critical for L&D teams who want to leverage it to utilize a platform that makes organizing, segmenting, and delivering content easy. It’s also important to consider a platform that offers a mobile app, as this is how learners are most accustomed to consuming this kind of content.
Schoox is the ideal platform to enable microlearning both because of its comprehensive content curation and delivery options, and its native mobile apps available for iOS and Android devices. Schoox makes it easy for L&D teams to curate or upload content in any format, including those which work best for microlearning, like videos. Through its mobile app, which is available to customers at no additional cost, learners can access their entire course libraries in a way that feels natural to them, further encouraging engagement.
Download the eBook The Employee Engagement Playbook: 8 Proven Strategies To Drive Retention to discover how to leverage technology to hire, retain, and inspire top talent. It features insider tips to make your existing employee development program more collaborative, learner-centered, and results-driven.
References
[1] Now, more than half of Americans are millennials or younger
