As businesses adapt to a rapidly changing work environment, traditional employee training models are proving to be less effective in addressing modern workforce needs. In this context, microlearning has emerged as a powerful and versatile tool that revolutionizes employee development. With its focus on delivering short, focused, and digestible lessons, microlearning enhances knowledge retention, engagement, and applicability.
This article explores the transformative impact of microlearning on employee training and why companies are adopting it at a growing rate.
What Is Microlearning?
Microlearning refers to a training strategy that delivers content in small, easily digestible units, typically lasting 5-10 minutes. These units target specific learning objectives, allowing employees to focus on one topic or skill at a time. This differs from traditional training methods, which often involve lengthy seminars or workshops covering broad topics over extended periods.
Microlearning is often delivered through digital platforms, making it accessible to employees across various devices. Its flexibility and accessibility are key factors driving its popularity in today's dynamic work environments.
Key Characteristics of Microlearning
Bite-sized content: Lessons are short and focus on a specific learning objective.
Flexible delivery: Content can be accessed on-demand, making it ideal for mobile learning.
Interactive elements: Quizzes, games, and other forms of engagement are often integrated to reinforce learning.
Self-paced learning: Employees can learn at their own speed, reducing pressure and improving knowledge retention.
How Microlearning Transforms Employee Training
1. Improved Knowledge Retention
One of the primary challenges with traditional training is that employees often struggle to retain large amounts of information presented in lengthy sessions. Research suggests that people tend to forget 50-80% of new information within a few days if it's not reinforced. Microlearning addresses this by breaking down information into smaller chunks, making it easier for employees to process, remember, and apply.
Since microlearning delivers content in shorter, manageable sessions, it helps learners focus on one concept at a time. This spaced repetition approach helps employees retain more information over time, leading to better long-term results.
2. Enhanced Engagement
Modern employees, particularly millennials and Gen Z workers, prefer learning methods that are interactive, flexible, and personalized. Microlearning is designed to meet these preferences by offering content in various formats, including videos, infographics, and quizzes. This diverse range of learning materials helps cater to different learning styles, making the training process more engaging.
Additionally, microlearning promotes active participation, as lessons are often designed to include interactive elements such as quizzes, simulations, and real-world problem-solving tasks. These elements help reinforce learning, encourage curiosity, and motivate employees to stay engaged.
3. Flexibility and Convenience
In today's fast-paced work environment, employees often struggle to find time for long training sessions or workshops. Microlearning offers an ideal solution by allowing employees to fit training into their schedules, whether during breaks, commutes, or downtime. This flexibility ensures that learning does not disrupt productivity and enables employees to learn at their own pace.
Microlearning is also highly suited to mobile learning. Employees can access content on their smartphones, tablets, or laptops, allowing them to learn whenever and wherever it’s convenient. This flexibility makes microlearning particularly effective for remote workers and distributed teams.
4. Targeted Skill Development
One of the most significant advantages of microlearning is its focus on specific skills or knowledge areas. Instead of overwhelming employees with broad and generalized training programs, microlearning allows for the customization of lessons to meet particular job roles, tasks, or goals. This precision helps employees develop the skills that are most relevant to their responsibilities, making the training process more effective and practical.
For example, a sales team may use microlearning modules that focus on specific selling techniques, while a customer service team could receive training on communication and conflict resolution skills. By delivering content that's directly applicable to their daily tasks, microlearning ensures employees can immediately apply what they’ve learned.
5. Cost-Effective Training
Traditional employee training often requires significant investments in instructors, venues, and materials. Microlearning, particularly when delivered digitally, reduces these costs. Once content is created or sourced, it can be distributed to employees without the need for additional resources.
Additionally, microlearning reduces the need for time-consuming training sessions, which often pull employees away from their work. Because the lessons are shorter and more focused, employees can complete training without major disruptions to their schedules, leading to increased efficiency.
6. Measurable Learning Outcomes
Microlearning makes it easier to track employee progress and performance through digital platforms. Many Learning Management Systems (LMS) or microlearning platforms offer analytics and reporting tools that allow companies to measure engagement, completion rates, and knowledge retention.
These data points help organizations assess the effectiveness of training programs, identify areas where employees may need additional support, and adjust content as necessary. This ability to gather real-time feedback and adapt training strategies ensures continuous improvement and higher returns on investment in training initiatives.
Use Cases of Microlearning in Employee Training
1. Onboarding New Employees
Onboarding is often overwhelming for new employees, as they are required to absorb a large amount of information in a short period. Microlearning breaks the onboarding process into smaller, more manageable chunks, ensuring that new hires can grasp key concepts, company policies, and job-specific skills at a comfortable pace.
2. Upskilling and Reskilling
In an era of rapid technological change, employees need to continuously update their skills. Microlearning provides an efficient way to upskill or reskill employees without taking them away from their primary job responsibilities for extended periods. By focusing on targeted skill development, microlearning ensures that employees remain competitive in their roles.
3. Compliance Training
Compliance training is essential but often perceived as boring or tedious. Microlearning enhances compliance training by offering interactive, scenario-based lessons that are short, engaging, and easy to understand. This format improves engagement and ensures that employees stay up to date on the latest regulations and best practices.
4. Performance Support
Microlearning can serve as a powerful performance support tool. Employees can access microlearning modules when they encounter specific challenges or need quick refreshers on particular topics. This just-in-time learning approach enables employees to apply what they've learned directly in real-time, boosting productivity and efficiency.
Microlearning has revolutionized employee training by offering a flexible, engaging, and highly effective way to build knowledge and skills. Its ability to deliver bite-sized, focused lessons makes it particularly suited to the modern workforce, where time is limited and learning needs are constantly evolving. Whether for onboarding, upskilling, or compliance training, microlearning helps businesses create agile and capable teams while reducing training time and costs.
As more companies recognize the value of microlearning, its adoption will continue to grow, transforming employee training programs and helping organizations stay competitive in an ever-changing landscape.
Video-Based Microlearning for Employee Training: Ready-Made Content
Video-based microlearning leverages the visual and auditory strengths of videos, allowing learners to see and hear how processes work in real time. The brief nature of these lessons means employees can easily fit them into their schedules, ensuring training doesn’t disrupt their productivity.
This training model is well-suited to today’s tech-savvy workforce, where mobile devices and flexible learning are the norms.
Key Features of Video-Based Microlearning
Short, focused modules: Each lesson targets a specific skill or topic, making learning fast and efficient.
Mobile-friendly: Employees can access video lessons anytime, anywhere, often through their smartphones.
Engaging formats: Videos combine visuals, audio, and text to accommodate different learning styles.
On-demand learning: Employees can revisit lessons whenever needed, reinforcing retention.
The Role of Ready-Made Content in Microlearning
Creating custom training videos can be time-consuming and costly. However, ready-made content offers a practical alternative. Ready-made video content refers to pre-produced, high-quality video training modules that cover a broad range of topics relevant to different industries and job functions.
Advantages of Ready-Made Content
Time Efficiency
Ready-made video content is available for immediate use, eliminating the need to produce materials from scratch. This accelerates the onboarding and upskilling processes, allowing businesses to quickly deploy training programs without lengthy delays in content development.
Cost-Effective
Producing custom video training materials involves costs such as hiring production teams, scriptwriters, and videographers. Ready-made content, on the other hand, is available at a fraction of the cost and provides a vast library of pre-recorded lessons created by industry experts.
Expertly Developed Content
Ready-made video lessons are typically created by professionals who are subject matter experts in their fields. This ensures that the content is not only accurate but also delivered in an engaging and pedagogically sound manner.
Diverse Topics
Ready-made libraries usually cover a wide range of topics, from technical skills (e.g., software tutorials) to soft skills (e.g., leadership, communication). Businesses can choose the modules that fit their training needs, ensuring employees receive well-rounded development.
Scalability
Ready-made video training can easily scale across teams, departments, or entire organizations. Whether you're training ten employees or a thousand, the same content can be deployed quickly and consistently.
Accessibility
With the shift towards remote and hybrid working models, employees need flexible learning solutions. Ready-made video-based microlearning is often available on-demand, meaning employees can access content at their convenience, whether they're working from home or the office.
How Ready-Made Video-Based Microlearning Boosts Employee Engagement
The use of videos in training has been shown to increase engagement, and when combined with microlearning, the benefits are amplified. Employees are more likely to complete shorter video lessons and retain the information because they’re not overwhelmed by large amounts of content.
Additionally, video-based training is often more engaging than traditional text-based modules because it incorporates visual storytelling, demonstrations, and real-world scenarios.
Interactive elements like quizzes, gamification, and assessments can be added to video-based microlearning to further boost engagement. These elements turn passive watching into active learning, encouraging employees to apply what they've learned and gain immediate feedback.
Improved Retention and Application of Knowledge
Research shows that microlearning enhances information retention by breaking content into smaller pieces, allowing learners to focus on one concept at a time. In a video format, this is further strengthened as employees can pause, rewind, and rewatch lessons as needed. This active engagement with the content ensures employees are more likely to apply what they’ve learned in their daily tasks.
Implementing Ready-Made Video Microlearning in Your Organization
Adopting ready-made video-based microlearning in your organization is simple and requires minimal infrastructure. Here are the key steps:
Identify Training Needs
Start by determining the specific skills and knowledge gaps within your workforce. This will help you choose the most relevant video modules from the ready-made content library.
Choose a Platform
Select a Learning Management System (LMS) or a microlearning platform that supports video content delivery. Many platforms offer built-in ready-made content libraries or allow integration with third-party providers.
Curate Content
Once you have access to a library of ready-made videos, curate a training curriculum tailored to your team’s needs. Consider mixing various topics such as compliance, technical skills, and soft skills for comprehensive development.
Monitor Progress and Performance
Track employee progress using the reporting and analytics tools within your LMS. This will help identify areas where additional training might be needed or where employees excel.
Gather Feedback
After implementing the video-based microlearning, gather feedback from employees to understand how the content has impacted their skills and job performance. This can help refine future training programs.
Summary
Video-based microlearning offers a dynamic, efficient, and scalable way to train employees. By utilizing ready-made content, organizations can save time and resources while providing their workforce with high-quality, engaging training materials. With its ability to improve engagement, retention, and application of knowledge, video-based microlearning is poised to become a cornerstone of modern employee development strategies.
Whether you're onboarding new hires or upskilling your current workforce, ready-made video content can help you build a more knowledgeable and capable team, all while keeping training costs and time commitments to a minimum.
About LMS Portals
At LMS Portals, we provide our clients and partners with a SaaS-based, multi-tenant learning management system that allows you to launch a dedicated training environment (a portal) for each of your unique audiences.
The system includes built-in, SCORM-compliant rapid course development software that provides a drag and drop engine to enable most anyone to build engaging courses quickly and easily.
We also offer a complete library of ready-made courses, covering most every aspect of corporate training and employee development.
If you choose to, you can create Learning Paths to deliver courses in a logical progression and add structure to your training program. The system also supports Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT) and provides tools for social learning.
Together, these features make the LMS Portals platform the ideal SaaS-based platform with ready-made video-based microlearning content for our clients and training partners.
Contact us today to get started or visit our Partner Program pages
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