Microlearning is an excellent learning approach that’s best suited for skill-building. It typically involves narrowing down a skill, topic, or concept to its most essential parts as bite-sized exercises and imparting training on only those ideas.
Put simply, it is a way of offering short, focused chunks of content to an audience, at the place and time best suited to them.
As a contemporary learning tool, the advantages of microlearning in modern workplaces, either as a part of a broader program or different parts of the learning cycle, are immense. In fact, a study suggests that such short content helps to drive more than 20% more information retention than long-form content.
Unlike traditional learning methods, the essence of microlearning is much quicker, smarter, and sharper learning nuggets or bite-sized exercises, offering a number of benefits to the modern workforce.
Among the common microlearning examples include a combination of the following types of content:
- Audio– especially useful when learning a language
- Videos– under 6 minutes long are preferable
- Images– helps illustrate various topics/ points from the videos or text
- Text– summaries, cheat sheets, and information
- Gamification– helps unlock levels and add further interactivity
- Quizzes– helps to test knowledge and add a layer of interactivity
Top 5 Use Cases of Microlearning
Although microlearning as a training approach can be adapted to suit most of the corporate industries, it is most beneficial for firms that undergo constant change in terms of the work environment and need to close knowledge or skill gaps quickly.
Here we are discussing the top 5 microlearning use cases in enterprises –
1. Product Knowledge Training
There is an ongoing need for product knowledge training for employees of organizations that operate on a national or international scale and release new products on a regular basis.
Microlearning is an ideal approach in such a scenario as it allows companies to create chunks of online modules to include new product images along with the main features and benefits.
This helps employees to quickly learn and get trained about the new products on their mobile phones or smart devices.
2. Employee Onboarding
In businesses with high employee turnover (such as the retail industry), there is always a need for effective onboarding. Microlearning based bite-sized approach helps to simplify the process of employee onboarding and get all the new hires up-to-speed quickly by offering the right information at the right time.
A microlearning approach primarily focuses on delivering the most important and actionable knowledge instead of overloading the new hires with the information they don’t need. Reducing the amount of material, they are exposed to helps in increasing the retention rate substantially.
Here are the 5 best practices in Employee Onboarding.
3. Compliance Training
Organizations in highly regulated industries such as healthcare and aviation can be benefited most when it comes to imparting compliance training using a microlearning approach.
Compliance training in most organizations is largely focused on policies, data, rules, and regulations. Designed to meet specific employee needs, microlearning allows you to make your training courses shorter, crisper, and easier to follow.
Using different content types and tests at your disposal, you can easily turn a mandatory compliance process into a fun and enjoyable experience and can ensure high completion rates at the same time.
The above example shows a microlearning nugget featuring conversational language and interactive & engaging visuals to take learners through varying levels of data security, along with giving them tips and best practices to protect data.
Here 7 modules your compliance training resources must include.
4. Professional Skills Training
Traditionally, microlearning has been used by organizations to improve soft (non-technical) skills such as leadership skills, communication skills, problem-solving skills, and more.
But the trend is fast changing as an increasing number of firms across the globe are now employing microlearning to teach various technical skills, including data analysis, software proficiency, project management, coding, and programming languages. Depending on the varying needs of employees, some of these modules can address the basics of a subject, whereas others can handle more advanced concepts.
Microlearning is especially suited for imparting technical skills to employees with short attention spans. Further, enhanced usage of smart devices and tech-savviness of present-day employees makes these bite-sized courses an ideal choice to deliver technical training.
5. Introducing Company Policies and Culture
Microlearning can be a great way to introduce employees to the company’s policies, procedures, and overall culture.
An excellent corporate training tool, the approach can cover diverse topics and concepts, including career advancement pathways, leave policy, organizational structure, office conduct, and equipment use.
Guide:
How to Create Custom eLearning Content for Every Budget
How Microlearning Can Benefit Organizations
When designed in alignment with formal training methods and executed systematically on online platforms, microlearning can be a robust training strategy that has the potential to support the professional development of employees across industries.
Here is how organizations across can benefit from microlearning-
- Ideal for Mobile Learning
Microlearning is an ideal option for mobile-based learning, as employees can easily participate in short learning modules based on their work commitments or convenience. They can access the content on their mobile devices from any place and enhance their skills/knowledge level.
- Easy to Create and Update
These short information nuggets are not only super quick to create but also easy to update, reducing the overall training turnaround-time for organizations.
- Boosts Employee Motivation
Helping employees to finish short training modules and acquire the needed skills, microlearning can be a great way to drive employee motivation levels.
- Employee-centric
Microlearning allows organizations to embed bite-sized information in the learning path, thus enabling them to choose what they want to learn and where they want to learn it.
- Cost-efficient
For organizations with limited training budgets, microlearning is an excellent way to fulfill employee training needs. It allows you to create and then deliver quality e-learning sessions without digging deep into company pockets.
- Quickly Fills Skill Gaps
The fact that microlearning focuses on one skill, task, or concept at a time, enables employees to bridge their performance gaps much faster.
Final Thoughts
Microlearning not only addresses the specific needs of the learners in a flexible manner, but it also offers a multitude of benefits for businesses as well.
Driven by learners’ need to consume short, bite-sized learning on the go, microlearning-based training adoption will continue to rise across organizations and industries as it provides them efficiencies of both time and money.
Whether you’re a start-up, SME, or an established organization, microlearning allows you to create need-based, relevant learning content and make it available for your employees, thus ensuring that limited timelines or budgets are not a deterrent to corporate learning.
Related:
- 5 Reasons to Integrate Microlearning in Mobile Learning Strategy!
- 7 Tips to Create Custom E-Learning Content on a Budget
- Top eLearning Development Companies for Enterprises & SMBs
- MicroLearning vs Mobile Learning – Similarities and Differences
- 7 Tips to Create Custom E-Learning Content on a Budget
- Transform L&D with Future-Ready mLearning Solutions
- 5 Ways to Create Effective Interactive Training Content
