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One of the most effective ways of leveraging the productivity of your employees is by getting them trained. Irrespective of their positions within your organization, there is always some scope for training and adding to their skill-set. In the age of digitization, where technological advancements are at their peak, an organization needs to keep the skills of their employees in sync with the trends in the industry. 

However, it is not always adequate to get your employees enrolled in a full-time course or provide them with lengthy handbooks to read. Not every organization can afford to spend the valuable time of its employees getting them trained in specific skills. Moreover, the attention span of individuals has significantly gone down over time, thanks to the excessive consumption of micro-blogging platforms. This adds to the challenges faced by managers and team leaders to train their employees effectively. 

All of these issues can be resolved through microlearning. 

What Is Microlearning?

As the name suggests, microlearning is the approach to learning that involves making your employees learn through bite-sized content. Instead of making them spend hours learning specific skills at a time, microlearning allows your employees to spend no more than ten minutes every day consuming content designed for training them.

This helps you train your employees one day at a time without getting them exhausted with a plethora of training resources. All you need to do is add the necessary training materials to your knowledge base and have your employees access them according to their convenience.

Important Benefits Of Microlearning

1. Catering To Limited Attention Span
   
   If your employees are provided with lengthy and time-consuming content simultaneously, they are less likely to retain the knowledge acquired. Instead, microlearning makes them consume a limited amount of content every day, making it easier to retain the information consumed. This approach helps them revise small chunks of lessons every day, increasing the overall effectiveness of the training provided.
   
   
2. Easy Access To Information
   
   Microlearning puts a range of training materials and educational resources at the disposal of your employees. If you have integrated the microlearning features with the collaborative platform you work on, your employees can get trained on the same platform that they work on. When there is an ease in accessing information, your employees are no longer required to look for the resources and lessons on multiple platforms.
   
   
3. Provision For Using Engaging Content Formats
   
   The content format used in providing training to your employees through microlearning plays a vital role in the approach's effectiveness. If the employees are provided with plain text with a few reference images, they will likely get bored or start feeling uninterested in the topic being covered.
   
   Through microlearning, you provide your employees with the training content in multiple engaging formats, such as videos, animations, infographics, etc. This helps you keep the employees hooked throughout their sessions, ultimately increasing the effectiveness of the training provided.
   
   
4. Peer-to-peer Sharing Of Knowledge
   
   The adding of training resources for microlearning is not limited to managers and team leaders. You can allow experienced and senior employees to share their resources and training materials to help their peers train specific skills. Naturally, employees know the best about the tasks they undertake and the field they work in. When the more experienced employees share their acquired knowledge with their peers, it increases the effectiveness of the training provided.
   
   
5. A Focused Approach
   
   As the duration of microlearning sessions is limited, the training sessions are focused only on the areas that matter the most. There is no beating around the bush and talking about aspects that do not matter to the employee. From the get-go, your employees are provided with training sessions that are highly specific and limited to the areas of utmost importance for them.
   
   
6. Closing Small Skill Gaps
   
   There are times when a highly talented and dedicated employee is short of a single skill. In such cases, microlearning helps the employee in closing their skill gap effectively. A few short sessions can make them learn the skill they lack, thereby adding more value to the organization they work in.
   
   
7. Training Remote Employees
   
   Managers often face challenges in training employees working remotely or situated too far geographically. With microlearning, you can provide training resources to employees located in any corner of the world. As far as they have access to the host platform and an internet connection, your employees can get trained from any location and at any time via microlearning.
   
   

What Is Conversational Microlearning?

While microlearning is a highly effective way of getting your employees trained, it is difficult to alter the contents of the resources added to the knowledge base once the training session starts. If you are willing to keep your training sessions proactive and dynamic, it is advisable to implement conversational microlearning within your organization.

As the name suggests, conversational microlearning is a training approach where employees can learn new skills by conversing with AI chatbots. This is an upgrade to conversational microlearning and is included in modern employee service desks. 

Conversational microlearning allows your employees to interact with virtual assistants as if they were in a live training session with experts. Based on the resources added to your knowledge base, the chatbots answer every question your employees ask and guide them every step of the way. When integrated with a collaborative platform, employees can quickly learn lessons while working on specific projects and resolve their doubts within seconds.

Read More: Microlearning is the best bet for training the remote workforce. Here’s how? 

Top Five Benefits Of Conversational Microlearning

1. Personalized Training To Employees
   
   Conversational microlearning allows you to tailor the training sessions based on every employee's specific needs and preferences. While conversing with your employees, the AI chatbots understand the context of the issues they face, the areas they need to work on, and their key strengths, making the training sessions holistic.
   
   Moreover, as the virtual assistants interact with your employees, they become more aware of their preferences. This helps them uniquely treat every employee and provide them with suggestions/solutions that are best suited for them.
   
   
2. Optimum Utilization Of Knowledge Base
   
   Conversational microlearning helps you in making the most of the information stored within your enterprise knowledge base. The employee being trained allows you to provide relevant training resources and solutions to their issues in the best way possible.
   
   Here, the chatbots consider the historical data about the concerned employee while assisting them in getting trained. This allows you to keep the training materials updated at any point in time.
   
   
3. Keeping track of progress
   
   It is always crucial for managers to make regular assessments and keep track of the progress made by employees on being trained in specific skills. A conversational microlearning platform allows your managers to assess the knowledge gained by employees by tracking their progress on a centralized platform.
   
   You can add quizzes, tests, and training resources to help your managers and employees assess the progress made via microlearning. This allows you to obtain valuable insights about the training provided to your employees and make essential decisions regarding the same.
   
   
4. Immediate Application of Skills Learned
   
   On being integrated with a collaborative platform, conversational microlearning features help your employees apply the skills learned to their work right away. As the training takes place on a single unified platform, they can refer to the training resources and apply the lessons learned to the ongoing tasks.
   
   This allows your employees and managers to obtain instant feedback about the training conducted and the resources used. Also, this helps your employees save time by witnessing the application of the skills learned on the platform they use for work.
   
   
5. Making Employees Self-reliant
   
   Finally, one of the most significant benefits of conversational microlearning is that it helps you make your employees self-reliant. This approach to employee training prevents your employees from being dependent on external trainers or seniors for learning new skills and getting their doubts solved.
   
   When your employees are increasingly self-reliant, it leads to a boost in their morale and confidence. When they can learn new skills and apply the same to their work by themselves, their motivation to work improvements leads to an increase in the overall engagement and productivity of employees within your organization.
   
   Moreover, implementing conversational microlearning within your organization helps you cut down the cost of hiring trainers and setting up dedicated workshops to train your employees.
   
   

The Final Word 

These were some of the many benefits you can avail of by getting your employees trained through conversational microlearning. These features are often included in the modern AI-driven IT service desks and HR help desks to provide seamless support to your employees.