Microlearning ranks among the best ways to train and upskill employees. Discover how microlearning can benefit your corporate learning programs.
The average employee expects clear, concise, and relevant education in this age of instantaneous information. With very little time to spare for training, the limited opportunities to gain new information can quickly create a learning plateau.
Microlearning aims to break through these educational doldrums by providing pockets of learning opportunity that fits nicely into an employee's busy day.
Data from Deloitte indicates that modern learners can only dedicate about 1% of their workweek to professional development. When you break it down, that equates to only 24 minutes per week for someone working a 40-hour schedule.
We experience microlearning every day, whether we know it or not. Think about the recipe you made for dinner this week. You needed to include a diced onion but weren't sure how to do that. So you watched a YouTube video, absorbed the information in five minutes, and then executed it to complete the task. In the same way, integrating bite-sized educational opportunities into the workplace is essential for training your employees effectively.
So, what are the primary benefits of microlearning in the workplace? How can a digital microlearning platform enhance your corporate learning and development (L&D) programs?
Microlearning offers several advantages when it comes to corporate and on-the-job training. Primarily, microlearning provides employees with bite-sized learning opportunities focusing on one objective at a time. To get the most out of your microlearning initiatives, it helps to leverage one platform to serve your training programs.
An article published in the Journal for Knowledge Management & E-Learning highlights exactly why microlearning has such a meaningful impact on corporate training. For starters, by condensing your programs into three-to-five minute multimedia packages, content becomes digestible and engaging for learners, whether beginner or advanced.
Take compliance training, for example. Millennial and Gen Z workers have forced companies to pivot learning strategies towards microlearning because that's how many of them are already engaging in the digital world. As a result, conveying your compliance training through bite-sized modules can appeal more to this new workforce, leading to better knowledge retention and behavior application that could lower the risk to your business.
Modern microlearning reflects the successes of social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. Quick and succinct pieces of information are easier to understand and retain than traditional long-form or instructor-led training. Your employees probably remember a TikTok they watched last week, but can they recall everything from yesterday's training?
Boost employee engagement by breaking your learning modules into digestible pieces that fit today's shorter attention spans. Instead of feeling worn out after finishing extended modules, employees enjoy a sense of accomplishment from wrapping up several short ones.
To make modules more engaging, they should include things like:
One Learning Management System (LMS) engagement survey found that 58% of respondents prefer when learning is broken up into multiple short lessons.
This is based on how our brains naturally absorb information. Well-crafted microlearning modules only include the most important information and skills required to meet a learning objective. Further research from the Association for Talent Development (ATD) found that microlearning engages more learners than traditional eLearning strategies because of its unique nature.
For example, at Magellan Health, an American healthcare company, only 80 of their 6,900 employees engaged with their learning platform. After adopting microlearning, engagement grew by 80%, as employees interacted with about 2,000 microlearning lessons each month. The shift to microlearning significantly increased engagement with its corporate learning platform, leading to demonstrably greater learning and behavior change.
Hosting microlearning modules on a central platform is imperative to successfully training a hybrid workforce. Digital microlessons allow them to interact with corporate learning programs on their own time, no matter where they are. The easy access to relevant information helps workers increase knowledge acquisition and—perhaps more importantly—retention.
According to the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, learners forget 50% of what they learned within the first hour and 90% after the first seven days.
If your primary training vehicles include long seminars, you're wasting money and your employees' time. Microlearning strategies combat the forgetting curve by continually introducing and reinforcing lessons to boost retention.
Because learners can readily access their training programs, they can quickly refresh their memory, thus cementing concepts. A study from the Technical University of Denmark found that our attention spans have reduced rapidly in recent years, and blames the decline on the daily bombardment of information we receive. Thus, most employees struggle to concentrate on long-form learning sessions. What little information they do retain may quickly wind up lost in the corners of their minds.
Microlearning’s tiny bits of information are significantly easier to complete in the flow of work, commit to long-term memory, and recall as needed. Because of its interactive nature, microlearning improves focus, engagement, and overall retention.
As the modern worker has less time to learn, microlearning solutions are increasingly important for corporate training and retention. Employers must seek alternative methods to train and develop their workforce to prove impact and protect their training investment.
To get the most out of their employees, organizations can leverage the convenience of a centralized learning platform like Mindmarker to host all of their microlearning modules. Workers just don't have time to sit through long-form learning sessions these days. Mindmarker’s simple, efficient delivery and adaptive individualized program capabilities allow employees to learn what they need when they need it. Meanwhile, the L&D team can track employee progress, along with a number of metrics—completion, responses, scores, and more—to see what is and isn’t sinking in, and adjust training accordingly.
Contact Mindmarker today to learn how they can supercharge your L&D initiatives.