Less Is More: Microlearning Examples In The Corporate World
French author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote that "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away".
Microlearning is the application of this principle in the realm of eLearning, inspiring instructors to skim the fat and give their learners the essentials. Here are several microlearning examples to inspire you and help you achieve big results through micro-content.
Microlearning For Training New Employees
Many industries can't afford the luxury of an extended employee training course. Businesses with high employee churn rates and seasonal business peaks, for example, have to train replacement workers and temporary hires quickly and need to get them productive as fast as possible. Microlearning, with its emphasis on short courses and bite-sized content, is the best way to train employees with limited responsibilities on short notice.
A popular retail chain, for example, can use microlearning to familiarize freshly hired salespeople with its products ahead of the festive season. Similarly, businesses in the hospitality industry can leverage microlearning to train temp workers hired to cater to the increased demand during the summer and the holiday season.
Microlearning empowers employees in such industries to learn on the job (requiring just their smartphone, which they always carry on them anyway) and allows them to quickly refer back to their training material whenever the need arises.
Microlearning For Customer-Facing Jobs
Microlearning can also be a valuable training approach for customer-facing roles, such as those in retail and customer support. A common requirement across such jobs is the ability to memorize lots of details and to be able to respond to different customer inquiries and demands.
Retail employees, for example, need to be familiar with product specifications and financing options. Similarly, customer support employees have to know how products work and how to troubleshoot common user issues.
Microlearning, in the form of training cards, is a tried and true method that can help employees in such roles go through lots of bite-sized information quickly and memorize it effectively.
Microlearning For Employee Onboarding
The purpose of employee onboarding is to welcome employees to their new company and give them the necessary information that they need to "hit the ground running." The key words here are "briefly" and "basic". Employee onboarding calls for the very kind of nuggets training approach that microlearning excels at.
A short microlearning course can teach employees all that they need to know, in an easier to digest and more engaging manner than a full-blown employee onboarding course. Combine it with an in-person tour of the premises, and a meet-and-greet between the new hires and your senior employees, and you'll have a much tighter onboarding experience with just 20% of the effort of a traditional onboarding program.
Microlearning For Compliance Training
No list of microlearning examples would be complete without a reference to compliance training, as this kind of content is uniquely suited to a microlearning approach.
Microlearning is an excellent fit for the simpler kind of compliance training that involves getting employees to learn a relatively small number of simple rules (safety procedures, environmental guidelines, codes of conduct, and so on). That said, microlearning can serve equally well as a complementary tool in a larger compliance training curriculum.
In fact, there already exists a long history of microlearning examples concerning such use. In its pre-digital form that made use of printed and handwritten study cards, microlearning has been adopted (alongside regular studying) by medical and law students that needed to memorize lots of information quickly.
Microlearning For Just-In-Time Training
What's especially handy about online learning is how easy it is to update your training content when the need arises. Microlearning takes this flexibility to the next level. The brevity and simplicity of a microlearning unit make it the perfect training tool for when a company needs to quickly teach its employees about a new product or workflow.
A company that has just released a major product update, for example, can very quickly put together a set of training cards and use it to teach its employees how to promote it. Or consider a restaurant chain that's about to launch some new menu items and wants to teach its franchisees how they should be preparing them. The chain's headquarters can prepare a microlearning course (complete with videos and illustrations) and push it to employee smartphones in next to no time.
Microlearning For Professional Skills Training
While this article has focused on more specialized microlearning examples such as onboarding and compliance training, you can also leverage microlearning for regular employee training.
Microlearning makes for an excellent general employee training tool, either standalone or alongside a broader professional skills training program. As it is especially suited to small screens and smartphone-based studying, it is liberating for employees with busy work schedules, as it empowers them to study at their own pace, and from wherever they happen to be.
The connection of microlearning to the smartphone also makes it especially engaging to employees otherwise intimidated by desktop software. Everybody (or almost everybody) loves their smartphone and spends inordinate amounts of time using it. Today's microlearning platforms are also much more powerful than the simple card-based training applications of yore. TalentCards, for example, goes far beyond the text-based material, letting you include microlearning videos, audio, infographics, presentations, and even games and other interactive elements in your content.
Conclusion
A powerful, engaging, and easy to deploy tool for your employee training arsenal, microlearning is guaranteed to deliver quick and budget-friendly results in all kinds of corporate training scenarios. Businesses, big and small, have already seen great results from embracing micro training—and looking at the current corporate training trends, microlearning in business is only poised to grow bigger (pun intended). Try TalentCards today, and give your employees their first bite of bite-sized training!