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Learning is a never-ending process. Irrespective of the position occupied by an employee within an organization, there is always scope to learn new skills and upgrade their skill-sets. We live in an age where digitization is peaking, and new technologies are invented at lightning speed. This makes it important for an organization to get its employees trained and in tune with the latest technological trends. 

However, training employees has never been an easy process. The traditional approach to the training involved companies spending a fortune in hiring industry experts and dedicated trainers to get their employees trained. Organizing seminars and workshops are still common in organizations across the world. 

However, the high consumption of micro-blogging platforms have reduced the attention span of individuals of all ages. People are not willing to spend hours getting trained and consuming information, irrespective of the channel involved. This makes it challenging for an organization to find the middle way between getting their employees trained and doing so in a lesser time. 

This is what makes microlearning important in 2021. 

What Is Microlearning?

Microlearning is a training design based on e-learning that uses small learning units to train or educate employees. When used by an organization to train its employees, it allows them to consume small units of content and obtain just the right amount of knowledge required. 

Microlearning comes as a refreshing change from the day-long training sessions and lengthy courses employees take to get trained. With microlearning, they can get trained one day at a time without spending a considerable amount of time doing so. 

Essentially, the goal of microlearning is to provide users with bite-sized lessons over digital platforms that cover only a couple of topics over a few minutes. According to RPS Research, microlearning improves the learners' focus and increases long-term retention by up to 80%. As the lessons engage in smaller chunks, the training sessions automatically become less intimidating, increasing information retention. 

A study by Software Advice, microlearning creates 50% more learning engagement. This makes it easier for organizations to reach out to their employees and genuinely learn new skills. 

Key Benefits Of Microlearning

Here are a few crucial benefits of microlearning that would help you make your employees learn better: 

• A Modern Approach
  
  Microlearning deviates from the traditional approach of training and learning. It makes use of modern tools and technologies to increase familiarity with the process. As people are now used to looking at answers right after getting the questions, most microlearning initiatives follow a similar approach to fit the users' needs.
  
  
• High Learning Engagement
  
  When your employees consume content that answers specific questions that they may have about their job or field of expertise, it automatically increases the learning engagement within an organization. This makes the employees naturally willing to learn the required skills through microlearning.
  
  
• No Clashes With Work
  
  Microlearning lessons have a shorter duration than traditional classroom sessions, so they do not interfere with the work done by employees. Moreover, many sessions can be accessed by employees according to their convenience. This allows them to get trained after getting all their important work done.
  
  
• High Retention Of Information
  
  Microlearning allows your employees to retain information for a longer time as the sessions are shorter and engaging.
  
  
• Applying The Learned Skills Immediately
  
  Microlearning often allows your employees to apply the skills they learn immediately to the processes they are carrying out. This helps the management and the employee assess the effectiveness of learning the concerned skill and reap the same benefits.
  
  
• Improved Employee Experience
  
  When an organization keeps a heavy hand in training its employees, it worsens the overall employee experience. Implementing the microlearning approach helps them learn new skills with ease and efficiency. This, in turn, leads to a better employee experience while working for your organization.
  
  

Best Strategies To Optimize Microlearning

Along with implementing the modern learning initiative, an organization needs to make the most of microlearning to obtain the best results. Here are some of the crucial strategies you can use to leverage microlearning within your organization: 

1. Choosing A Suitable Learning Platform
   
   Selecting an ideal platform for microlearning makes a lot of difference in the results obtained. To allow your employees to learn at their own pace and apply their knowledge to the work being done, it is advisable to integrate microlearning with an online collaborative platform through an AI service desk.
   
   The modern service desks allow your employees to access all necessary training resources from the collaborative platforms they work on. Here, a centralized platform can add training materials, access approvals, share the content, track the progress made, and a range of other processes. This makes it easy for an organization to train its employees and for the employees to learn the required skills.
   
   
2. Letting The Employees Create Training Content
   
   Experienced employees know their jobs the best. It is, therefore, advisable to make them add relevant training content to the knowledge base to share the same with other employees. This allows the employees to share their expertise, skills, and experience with their peers in the best way possible.
   
   Experienced employees can add recorded videos, images, and links to informative resources to let their peers, access the same and learn the required skills.
   
   
3. Having Clearly Defined Guidelines In Place
   
   It is important to develop microlearning guidelines to streamline the learning processes. A well-defined set of guidelines will help the organization decide when to use microlearning and when they shouldn't. If the skills to be learned, require in-depth and longer sessions, the team can steer away from microlearning.
   
   Moreover, microlearning guidelines would help you in maintaining consistency in the learning processes throughout the organization. Along with the guidelines, it is important to develop an approval process that allows the management to control the content hosted and shared by employees. This helps you maintain the flow of learning and ensures that accurate content is posted for your employees to learn.
   
   
4. Asking Employees To Concentrate Only On What Is Important
   
   For best results, it is always advisable to ask your employees to focus on topics and skills vital for them to learn when it comes to microlearning. Learning a full-fledged course in bits and pieces does not work effectively. If employees need in-depth knowledge about any topic, they can always refer to longer and more time-consuming resources.
   
   
5. Using Engaging Content For High Retention
   
   As discussed earlier, the attention span of people has reduced significantly over time. To further increase the attention span of your employees, you can gamify the content by making use of engaging formats. Use more videos, animations, infographics, and images to improve your employees' learning experience and increase the overall effectiveness of microlearning.
   
   
6. Making Use Of AI
   
   AI and machine learning have always helped businesses across the world leverage their processes and increase their productivity. Using AI in microlearning helps the platform understand your employees' needs, preferences, strengths, and weaknesses as they keep learning. Incorporating AI in microlearning is as good as hiring a personal trainer for each of your employees.
   
   The technology personalizes the learning for every employee and makes suggestions that best suit their needs. Ultimately, this helps your employees to learn more effectively and optimize the microlearning approach.
   
   
7. Having Seamless Mobile Customization
   
   If you are willing to train employees who do not have access to laptops/desktops or want to learn on the go, it is advisable to have seamless mobile customization for microlearning.
   
   This allows your employees to access training resources and learn new skills at any time and from any location.
   
   
8. Keeping track of the performance
   
   Along with allowing your employees to learn the required skills by themselves, it is important to measure their performance by keeping track of their progress. Have provisions for managers and team leaders to evaluate the progress made by every employee on accessing the training resources through microlearning.
   
   

Blend Microlearning With Other Training Methods

It is never advisable to have microlearning as the only approach for training employees. Make sure that you use it in the right proportions along with other training methods like instructor-led courses, webinars, live sessions, and many more. This ensures the holistic development of your employees and enhances their skills further.

The Final Word 

These were some of the crucial strategies you should implement to boost the performance of your employees through microlearning. No matter which industry you belong to, switching to microlearning and training your employees for 10 minutes a day is always an excellent alternative to exhausting them with lengthy courses and spending a fortune on hiring trainers.