Gartner’s research shows that with the predictive approach, employees apply only 37% of the new skills they learn.
What are your biggest challenges when delivering employee learning and development? Perhaps you struggle with the forgetting curve and the inability of workers to remember important information. Maybe the learning method in place is inflexible or there are time constraints that cause issues.
Microlearning could be the answer regardless of where you fall on this spectrum.
What is Microlearning?
Microlearning is a form of corporate training that breaks knowledge modules down into small chunks (bite-sized) for flexible and easy-to-access information that can be learned just in time to use in the organization.
It is a method of training and teaching employees quickly while reaching your intended goals.
It includes short bits of text, concise videos, quick games, visually compelling infographics, and other types of blended learning content that capture the learner’s short attention span. It’s a form of employee learning that focuses on efficiency, knowledge retention, and sharing the most important information.
Microlearning courses can help with the challenges of integrating learning into the flow of work. Since the lessons are quick and can be accessed from anywhere, there’s always time to pop in and learn something new.
What are the benefits of Microlearning in the Workplace?
Microlearning offers a solution for optimizing corporate learning, enhancing employee engagement, reducing the knowledge gap, and providing numerous benefits to your organization.
1. Better Knowledge Retention
The forgetting curve suggests that learners forget 90% of acquired information within seven days unless it’s reviewed. By breaking down complex topics into a bite-sized microlearning nugget, learners are less likely to feel overwhelmed and are more likely to remember the information they have learned.
A microlearning training course also allows for repetition, spaced learning, and personalized learning experiences, all of which are proven techniques for better retention. By providing learners with real-life examples, using visuals, and creating interactive learning experiences, microlearning engages learners and makes the learning process more enjoyable and memorable.
2. Facilitate Just-in-Time Learning
Just-in-time learning has gained popularity for its effectiveness, with microlearning being one of its best online training forms. Microlearning enables your employees to acquire targeted knowledge from compact modules, which they can immediately apply in real-life situations.
It also acknowledges that learners don’t need comprehensive knowledge upfront. They can learn essential information in a brief format and expand upon it when necessary.
3. Enhance Employee Engagement
Microlearning is concise and targeted, making it more engaging than traditional training. And bite-size learning content is often video-based and highly visual, maintaining learner engagement throughout the session.
Pairing microlearning with gamification further boosts engagement. A Software Advice report shows that employees are 50% more engaged with microlearning courses, while HubSpot states that microlearning increases engagement and completion of online training fourfold compared to traditional corporate training.
4. Offer Learning Flexibility On-the-Go
Your employees need the ability to learn when and where they choose, at their own pace, while utilizing short periods for learning throughout the day. Microlearning modules are brief, manageable, and accessible via the cloud or offline, making learning convenient and flexible.
Learning flexibility is also achieved by offering diverse media options, including microlearning videos, text, images, infographics, and games. These diverse microlearning options cater to various preferences and promote positive outcomes for adult learners.
5. Increase Return on Investment (ROI)
Microlearning enhances an organization’s ROI by providing actively retained and applicable skills and information. Additionally, you’ll achieve higher participation and retention rates when you provide bite-size microlearning content options. Ultimately leading to a greater ROI than traditional training courses.
6. Encourage a Continuous Learning Culture
According to a Rapid Learning Institute Survey, 94% of learning and development professionals prefer microlearning over traditional online learning due to higher employee engagement with the modules. It promotes a learning culture by enabling learners to access information anytime and anywhere, facilitating constant learning within an organization.
7. Expedite Development and Deployment
Learners can complete courses faster while being quicker to develop and deploy when microlearning is available. This meets the needs of organizations seeking to train staff swiftly without a significant time investment.
Learning expert Ray Jimenez, Ph.D. estimates that microlearning enables organizations to develop courses 300% faster and reduce development costs by 50%.
Latest Examples of Microlearning
To take advantage of microlearning, you must effectively deliver this strategy to your employees.
Here are 4 examples of microlearning you can utilize to ensure employee growth.
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Interactive Microlearning Videos: Short, engaging videos that cover a specific topic or skill and can be accessed on demand, allowing learners to watch them at their own pace.
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Flashcards: Digital flashcards designed to be easily accessed on mobile devices, providing a convenient way for learners to review and reinforce their knowledge.
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Microtraining courses: Short online courses that focus on a specific skill or topic, often consisting of a series of microlearning modules.
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Interactive Quizzes and Assessments: Brief quizzes or assessments provide immediate feedback, reinforce the learning material, and allow employees to gauge their progress and identify areas for improvement.
4 Key Challenges of Microlearning
Microlearning, known for its bite-sized content, is an effective upskilling tool. Yet, it comes with challenges that organizations must tackle for successful implementation.
1. Maintaining Microlearning is Complex
It requires significant time, resources, and planning to ensure relevance and coherence across modules. Regular updates are essential to keep pace with evolving technology and business procedures.
2. Scaling Personalized Content
Personalizing vast amounts of content for individual needs is challenging due to the potential multitude of micro-learning modules required. This task demands meticulous organization and direction by instructional designers to ensure relevance and effectiveness.
3. Accessibility Problem
Ensuring accessibility for microlearning poses significant challenges, especially regarding compliance with disability standards and optimization for various technologies. Instructional designers must meticulously format and optimize courses to meet accessibility requirements.
4. Lack of Time to Invest
Some employees face significant time constraints, making it challenging to participate in mandated microlearning courses despite accessibility. In such cases, scarcity may also hinder their ability to address job-related tasks, impacting overall productivity independently.
9 Tips to create engaging Microlearning content in 2024
Let’s see the different ways microlearning can be leveraged in your day-to-day business.
Here are 9 tips to help you develop and implement effective microlearning content strategies for your organization:
1. Choose your targeted microlearning format
Acknowledge that people learn differently. Some prefer visuals, some are auditory learners, while others may respond more to kinesthetics. Microlearning caters to different types of audiences based on their preferred learning styles, and which format you choose is dependent on the kind of content you want to create and the intended audience you want to reach out to. So videos work when teaching soft skills, flashcards work when teaching hard skills, and assessments work when you want to refresh what was already consumed. Take a business decision based on your target audience.
2. Ensure readers take away a definite one-line message from your microlearning content
Unless there is a clearly defined learning objective that emerges out of every microlearning module, you may have missed the bus. There are so many videos out there on the internet that are otherwise beautifully made and you enjoy watching them, but in the end, you did not find any definite takeaway. Did you just run a series on how to drive a car where you talked about everything about cars except how to drive them? Keep this in mind: every microlearning module should carry in itself a one-line message that clearly comes out without effort.
Tools like Magisto and StepShot are popular in the microlearning milieu for creating videos.
3. Use Audio intelligently
Effective use of audio could just be the game changer. Cut down on unnecessary voiceovers. Supply audio only to the extent of supporting the visuals. Also, microlearning does not mean you have to necessarily go for narration-style audio. Sometimes an enchanting background score works better to complement the messaging and the context. Just don’t go overboard with the sound effects and sync the pace correctly.
Omnisphere and WaveLab are popular audio tools these days.
4. Use Slideshows/Infographics as interactive learning modules
Use as many representational graphics and illustrations as you can to make learning appear visually descriptive. Dumping plain content in bullet points and reading them out is almost an insult to your audience. Blend compelling visuals with concise text. Highlight trends and product features that stand out. When you pair a fact or statistics with a graphic illustration, it adds weight to your point and learners tend to retain it more (just don’t do overkill, be it with the stat or in the design, and avoid putting excessive information).
Visme is a super cool infographic maker that allows you to create interactive presentations. While Visualize.me focuses on letting users create infographic resumes.
5. Use lesson-based Podcasts
Auditory learners simply go gaga over podcasts. In a way, podcasts personalize training by arranging a conversational framework, letting employee access training at their suitable time basis their availability and workload. The best thing about it is you can take a podcast even when you are on your morning walk or on the treadmill in the gym! So you could either go to popular podcast sites like SoundCloud or just create ones yourself.
6. Include Quizzes
Maybe when we were students, the surprise tests and assessments looked cringeworthy. Surprisingly as it may sound, no student has ever hated a quiz! Because it’s gamified by nature, even with learning as its bedrock. It’s in fact a very good way to recap the information and summarize what had been taught. On the trainer side, quizzes help identify which areas learners are lagging behind in, and accordingly, the trainer could adjust their approach by tracking the progress of individual learners.
Some of the popular quiz-creation tools are ProProfs, QuizMaker, and Articulate Rise, among others.
7. Go Mobile
If you are in 2024, you have to be responsive on mobile. In fact, the more mobile-friendly you are, the better will be the consumption of your microlearning content. Mobile-friendliness and microlearning go hand in hand. Create your microlearning online tutorials with responsive design tools with optimized layouts, legible fonts, and seamless navigations.
8. Democratize and incentivize content creation
In the knowledge world, expertise no longer lies with a single person. For instance, within a digital marketing team, there may be an ace digital marketer who understands how LinkedIn Ads work and another who understands how Facebook Ads work. It is a good idea to distribute the burden of content creation to your staff and create “topic owners” whose job it is to codify and disseminate knowledge.
Requesting everybody to create content is not enough. What’s in it for them? The best learning organizations bring knowledge creation as a part of annual appraisals.
And the 9th could well be your best business strategy!
What do your employees presently do for their learning and development: search on the internet for online training materials, right? How about making their lives easier with a targeted approach to disperse microlearning training resources, saving them a huge amount of time and effort? Create an online training metadata and collate all learning content into one centralized location. Divide the training content into distinct categories, and thereafter go the microlearning way with bite-sized content snacks.
This would go a long way in facilitating online training for your corporate learners and they would be able to address
5 Best Practices to Leverage Microlearning for Effective Employee Development
According to a report by Deloitte, 58% of organizations are actively using microlearning to deliver training and improve employee performance.
While microlearning content is useful in all sorts of situations, it has to be designed to be impactful for the learner. Creating the right experience is a must if you choose to turn to short learning methods like these. Below, we’ve covered five microlearning best practices for effective learning experience and employee development.
1. Ensure Your Microlearning Strategy is Mobile-Friendly
One of the most important aspects of a microlearning strategy is making it mobile-friendly. This gives workers the ability to learn on the go from any location. Mobile learning lets people learn in the environment and at the time that works best for them. This makes it far more likely that the content will be covered.
Disprz LMS lets you automate workflows related to employee performance. It includes microlearning experiences, such as curated pathways, on-the-job training, live training, and manager coaching from any location.
A mobile microlearning platform lets you turn this idle time into productive working time. For example, someone who is waiting for a client can log into the system and do some microlearning modules to take advantage of extra moments.
2. Utilize Gamification to Make Microlearning More Engaging
Everyone wants to feel engaged while learning. It’s an excellent way to ensure that workers learn the material rather than just passing through it and moving on. There are many ways to make a more engaging and collaborative learning process, but one of the best is gamification. By adding gaming elements like polls, a roulette wheel, and sticky notes, you can make online learning sessions interactive and engaging.
Zippia shows that gamification results in 14% higher scores on skill-based assessments. In addition, when gamification is used for work incentives, it results in better employee performance and customer satisfaction.
3. Analyze the Effectiveness of Your Microlearning Program
Once you have a microlearning platform and system in use, how do you ensure it’s doing the job? You should monitor the different types of training content you use and track which of them are working best for your employees.
For instance, track the course enrollment and completion rate to find out which modules are being completed and impart the most knowledge in your workforce.
4. Provide a Variety of Content Formats for Microlearning
When choosing the best bite-sized learning content to include in your microlearning efforts, be sure you also select impactful content. You can’t get by with blocks of text that take forever to read. Instead, make it more interesting by incorporating statistics, a short video, or lots of images/graphics.
5. Promote Continuous Learning
Even with the best microlearning options, it’s important to create a culture of continuous learning that goes beyond basic employee training. This is the best way to improve learner engagement, help workers retain knowledge, and continuously gain access to new ideas and thoughts. It may require a change to the company culture but it’s well worth it for an engaged workforce and better worker retention.
How to Offer the Best Microlearning Experience with an Employee Learning Platform
Microlearning is a great way to share learning experiences in the workplace without the need to spend a great deal of time on the process. Microlearning offers a host of benefits to organizations and could be the right fit for your company.
Disprz LMS is one of the best ways to implement the needed technology for microlearning at your business. It’s fully compatible with mobile devices, offers rich analytics to gauge what content works best, and is the premier method of sharing microlearning experiences.
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