Last Updated on February 27, 2024
It’s always difficult to trace the origin of a concept. Microlearning is no different, either. However, if you think hard, the essence of microlearning has been in place ever before we were born. Imagine the first of our generation, the Ancients who invented fire. Do you think they did it all at once? Certainly not! From gathering the moss to finding the right stones and flints and lighting a fire, it involved knowledge gathering in bits and pieces.
Fast forward to 2023, and people still struggle to answer when asked, “What is microlearning?”. In reality, it’s the same as learning to light a fire for the first time-gathering knowledge in bytes to master the bigger picture.
Today, L&D teams across businesses are fast embracing the goodness of microlearning to hire and train employees. For what it matters, microlearning is a viable option to address essentials like :
- Diminishing human attention span
- Demand for seamless, cross-device access, and
- Exciting mode of delivery like gamification.
Undeniably, it’s the brevity of microlearning that packs the punch.
Why Microlearning For Corporate Education
As an indispensable component of L&D, microlearning has helped fill vital training gaps, addressing both bulk and hybrid needs. In essence, it packs a slew of benefits:
Smaller, Digestible Chunks of Information
Microlearning has been a blessing for teams struggling to master a particular skill. With a robust approach, it has helped break complex info into smaller digestible bytes. This has not only helped accelerate training programs but also introduced new procedures on an incremental basis or reintroduced concepts for existing employees.
A Touch of Personalization
Microlearning offers a window to personalize learning modules. That way, employees can skip unnecessary learning materials and focus more on what is in line to realize their career goals. Companies embracing personalized training with microlearning can also retain their employees longer.
Preventing Burnouts
Burnout among working professionals is on the rise globally, thereby making people hate their jobs. Besides, it also brings with it negativity and reduced energy, and employees are turning out to be less productive.
The conventional mode of learning can not only be tiresome but boring as well. Instead, embracing Microlearning will help employees lower stress levels. With short bursts of knowledge, employees will be increasingly willing to explore new concepts and perform better at work.
A Cost-Effective Option
Compared to traditional learning, microlearning is way more economical for a number of reasons. Firstly, it requires limited resources to get things done, which means employees will never have to juggle tasks, leading to lower stress levels. Secondly, it makes employees more productive as they can quickly run a search to find microlearning nuggets as ready reckoners to solve problems.
5 Ways How L&D Teams Can Maximize The Benefits of Microlearning
L&D teams are uniquely responsible for driving growth and fostering a culture of learning across an organization. Here’s how they can optimize microlearning to their advantage.
Enhancing Employee Output
Multiple studies have concluded that microlearning ensures better knowledge retention. In a typical corporate environment, microlearning can enhance the ability to retain critical information by as much as 18 percent compared to long-form learning. Another positive aspect of microlearning is that everything happens seamlessly, which means employees will never have to leave their workstations, which means zero loss of productivity.
Boosting Employee Engagement
One of the biggest challenges that L&D teams face today is employee engagement. Microlearning fits effortlessly into today’s working culture, with social media, slack, emails, and smartphones allowing you to share microlearning files any way you like. In other words, microlearning makes way for a pervasive experience. However, while designing a microlearning module, you will have to ensure accuracy across descriptions, tags, and categories. Some popular microlearning formats that L&D teams can include are:
- Interactive videos
- Quizzes
- Games
- Short-scroll pages
- Email sequences, and more.
Improving Customer Experience
L&D teams can use microlearning to train employees faster. This, in turn, helps employees gain superior knowledge to offer better customer service. As a brand, it will only add to the goodwill.
A Future Proof Option
Microlearning has proven beneficial for upskilling employees and helping them take on new, challenging roles within the organization. L&D teams can keep track of learner feedback and update microlearning lessons as required.
Fostering A Culture Of Learning
Microlearning helps L&D teams optimize the employee learning experience chiefly because of the format. The brief modules readily capture employee attraction and inculcate the spirit of learning. Employees learning new concepts without having to compromise their daily schedule is a plus.
Wrap Up
Inarguably, microlearning has successfully blurred the line between working and learning. For L&D teams, it’s quite a blessing to help realize their objectives faster and better. Besides, microlearning can be effectively applied to a range of tasks. This includes skill enhancement, quick briefings, onboarding, on-the-job and compliance training. By all means, the success of microlearning is tied to an organization and how it plans accessibility for its employees.
With come-of-age tech, corporate learning has taken a leap ahead. Today, conventional training has taken a backseat, and the demand for concise learning is on the rise. At the center of everything, microlearning assumes a place of greater importance. From dealing with a diminishing attention span to neck break schedules, it presents an entirely unique learning opportunity.
Despite all this, the biggest predicament in microlearning continues to be a bunch of myths that hang around like a millstone.
- Some people believe microlearning is all about videos.
- Some believe the process is extremely time-dependent.
- Others are of the opinion that microlearning is a fad and it’s all about drawing the line between short and long-form content.
The truth is that microlearning is quite a revolution. Ever since it came into the picture, L&D teams have been performing better. Today, realizing the goals of corporate learning is no longer a challenge. With businesses looking for a window to gain superiority, microlearning is the perfect cue for growth and success.