Revolutionalizing Corporate Learning: 6 Top Benefits Of Microlearning

Revolutionalizing Corporate Learning: 6 Top Benefits Of Microlearning
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Summary: When it comes to the latest approach to impactful corporate training, small would seem to be the best, and it’s all thanks to a smart idea called 'microlearning'. Here’s how it works, and why it can boost your business’s profitability and help solve the conundrum of the modern learner.

6 Top Benefits Of Microlearning Usage In Corporate Learning

When it comes to the latest approach to impactful corporate training, small would seem to be best, and it’s all thanks to a smart idea called Microlearning. Here’s how it works and why it can boost your business’s profitability and help solve the conundrum of the modern learner.

What Is Microlearning?

Microlearning has been called one of the top 10 HR and learning trends for 2018—so what is it, and how can it help corporate learning?

Microlearning is a short, focused learning format designed to meet a specific learning outcome. It uses multimedia formats like animated audio enhanced slideshows, mini-webinars, video clips, or animations. It’s a learner-centric approach that provides just-in-time training, mainly digested via tablets and smartphones, desktops, and laptops. It’s easy to access, quick to complete, and it helps to apply learning by being delivered often during a normal working day. It usually comes in a 3-5 minutes "learning package", and while it can often be found delivered in a more informal training style, its impact on efficiency is massive.

Micro-Size, Micro-Priced

If we’re measuring the success of microlearning against your business P&L, here are some relevant factors that make it a step towards the right direction to increase your business profitability:

  • Bite-sized learning courses can be produced faster and at a less cost than traditional courses. Thanks to their modular structure, it’s easier and less time-consuming to roll out microlearning courses.
  • Your spend on resources is immediately reduced. There’s no need to pay for the instructor’s time, buy or rent physical classrooms and pay for the utilities, and spend money on classroom equipment.
  • It is easier and less time- and resource-intensive to update digital information than reprint training manuals and conduct supplementary classroom training sessions.

While microlearning is not a new concept, it is suddenly being talked about as the next significant approach to train workforce. Although chunking content into short bytes has existed for a long time, we are seeing an increased focus on microlearning as a fairly significant part of an organization’s overall training delivery.

Here are 6 more ‘top line’ benefits of microlearning-based training.

1. It Is Less Time Consuming

Microlearning sessions take less time. The clue is in the name, but quite how much less time needs to be dedicated to learning a new idea is startling. Training days often last 6 hours while a piece of microlearning content is around 5 minutes. Due to short training duration, the microlearning costs are lower than traditional eLearning. They can be created and deployed much quicker than traditional eLearning.

2. You Can Fire Your Travel Agent

Your entire sales team need to attend a training session, and they work all around your global region. Getting them together is a logistical nightmare and very expensive. While they are all sat in a room being trained, they are also not dealing with prospects and clients.

All this costs a lot of money. Microlearning is good for business profitability because it does away with much of the travel required for training and puts the training in the learner’s hands. Literally. It is changing workplace learning overnight.

3. It Is Less Expensive To Develop

Microlearning content takes less time to develop. Microlearning courses are the perfect solution to the organizations’ need to create effective eLearning materials quickly, in a cost-effective manner. Bite-sized online training modules can be developed faster and cost much less than conventional, hour-long eLearning courses.

4. Keep It Fresh For Less

Microlearning’s bite-sized ‘nuggets’ of Learning and Development gold can be tweaked, updated, or corrected very quickly to enhance their impact or adjust their content to stay relevant. This ability to be agile and adapt quickly, at a low cost, is yet another boost to business profitability, again, by keeping costs down.

5. It Beats The Ebbinghaus Curve

Our ability to memorize highly technical knowledge can only be boosted by repeated "practice", leading to an increased ability to remember.

Research also shows that when we repeat information well, with timed intervals between, we actually create new learning pathways, just the same way we learn certain "on-the-job skills' through practice, repetition, and continuous questioning about why something didn’t work.

The result? Performance gain and increased productivity.

6. It Meets The Needs Of The Modern Learner

Microlearning helps solve the learning engagement issues of the modern learner: feeling overwhelmed, impatient, and distracted. What better way to engage the tech-savvy but time-poor modern learner than with bite-sized bursts of learning that can be consumed on-the-go—anytime, anywhere, and via any device?

Increased Profitability Is An Inevitability

It’s quicker to develop, less expensive to change, takes up fewer employee hours by filling in the gaps in working day, and its impact on knowledge retention and learner engagement is remarkable.

That last point alone will save you on much additional training, retraining, and substandard performance due to missing competencies. Showing why microlearning can boost your business profitability is almost as easy as experiencing one of its famous 5-minute nuggets. Almost, but not quite. It’s not a case of "if" you adopt microlearning as a corporate learning strategy for your business; it’s a question of when you make what is an inevitable change. It’s just good, cost-effective business common sense. It’s fair to say that it’s not every day such an easy solution arrives on your desk!