Microlearning for your employees
Businesses who invest in upskilling and training their employees are rewarded with a team of competent and confident people, who know what is expected of them and have the tools to deliver.
However, large chunks of training can be overwhelming, which can impact on knowledge retention and create “learner’s fatigue”. Additionally, if your staff are very busy, the impact of the time it takes to complete large chunks of training can prove problematic for them and your business’ operations.
Microlearning are short, concise lessons/modules, which focus on a single objective or topic. Typically, these bite-sized lessons can be completed in less than 20 minutes (I prefer to keep my sessions less than 5 minutes, depending on the circumstances).
The beauty of microlearning is that employees don’t need to block out large sections of time in their calendars. They can spend 5 to 20 minutes to complete a short lesson, which is less overwhelming and easier to manage.
Ways of using microlearning for employee training
In-time training
I personally love in-time training and it goes a long way to creating a learning culture within a business. These microlearning modules provide instructions to your employees of processes used within the business. They are fantastic for new employees or as reminders of processes that employees don’t typically do very often. For example, you might include a short video and instructions for how to replace a gas bottle.
In-time training can be as simple as a short video on how to complete a task. It could include a visual aid like a flowchart or a compliance aid like a checklist. Online training enables a variety of ways to deliver information to your team in a highly accessible way.
In-time training resources means that employees can be confident in completing new tasks, without continually interrupting other staff members for instructions.
Knowledge refreshers
Employee inductions are usually large in size and chock full of important information. New employees are often overwhelmed, and this will impact on how much knowledge they retain.
You can follow up your employee induction training with microlearning lessons, which focuses on key elements of the onboarding content. For example, you could have short lessons on your emergency procedures, important safety procedures, manual handling, and HR policies such as discrimination and harassment.
I recommend that these sessions be delivered around two to three months from commencement of employment.
You may also use microlearning modules to provide annual refresher training to existing employees.
Knowledge checking
Quizzing and knowledge testing is a great way of reminding people about important information and ensuring they have understood the key training points. Additionally, some organisations need to prove their employee’s understanding of certain information. Using microlearning modules to test knowledge is a simple way of achieving this.
Use gamification to make knowledge testing fun!
Introducing something new to the business
As our businesses evolve, we need to keep our employees informed of the changes that are occurring. This could be a procedural change, the use of new software, introduction of company cultural elements, etc.
Use microlearning as a communication tool as part of your change management strategy or when implementing new procedures. If you are hosting your training on a LMS (learning management system), you can easily check that your employees have completed the learning units, plus you can add a knowledge checking activity to ensure they understand the new requirements.
Specialised training
It is common that not everyone in the business needs to complete the same training, so include microlearning modules that provides specialist information to the people who need it.
If your LMS permits, you can assign targeted training to your different teams. For example, you may have specialised training lessons for your technical team, which the customer service team members don’t need to know.
Chunking down large training courses
Make your training content more manageable for your staff by creating a course with small lessons, which can be consumed in short periods of time. It is easier to find 10 minutes during the day to complete a lesson, than having to do a 2-hour training lesson in one sitting.
This can also have the added advantage of being a resource for employees who need to refer back to information again in the future; they can easily re-find the information in a well-developed training course.
There are many advantages to using microlearning and the ways you can use them are endless. The WUZZOO team are specialists at creating employee training and developing learning cultures within organisations, so contact us to discuss your needs.