What Is Microlearning, And What Are The Benefits For Employee Development?

What Is Microlearning And Why Do You Need It?

No one likes sitting through long presentations, and you can use microlearning to help your employees break down large ideas into smaller learning blocks. This is a great way to encourage ongoing education and development through virtual events because you can present important information in a way that is easy to understand and consume. 

Much like a microscope zooms in on specific cells, microlearning offers brief learning units or short-term professional learning activities on a particular skill or topic. 

Microlearning offers participants bite-sized learning nuggets to consume at their own pace. 

Virtual training is crucial for engaging employees and providing the learning experiences that will impart the skills needed for onboarding and employee performance support. The challenge is presenting the amount of information necessary for training purposes in less time to accommodate the increasing demands of employee schedules. 

While this term doesn’t have a solid definition, it has long-term benefits that have employee training course designers rushing to implement microlearning into their corporate training strategy. 

Make Your Company More Productive!

It’s challenging to get all of your employees in one place during regular times, and with remote work, it can be almost impossible. Still, employee training and professional development are needed more than ever to help employees sharpen their skills and impart much-needed knowledge into your workforce. 

Business owners and corporate training managers must adapt their employee training practices to conquer the new frontier of corporate learning with a solid virtual learning strategy. 

Because they are miniature eLearning courses, microlearning is facilitated on a virtual micro-learning platform accessible on any device with a wifi connection, even a mobile device. 

The beauty of microlearning is that it enables learners to select topics most applicable to their company’s current needs or career role on any handy device at any time. This makes it the perfect choice for busy millennials’ short attention spans or last-minute employee training. 

This learner-driven learning format increases employee engagement improves training efficiency, and builds interest in seeking additional training opportunities.

Now that you know what microlearning is let’s look at what it can look like for your employee development strategy.  

What Are Some Examples Of Microlearning?

Microlearning provides short bursts of content with compact learning objectives for employee training. 

This content can take many forms but should always be brief and to the point. Some examples of microlearning activities are: 

• Images: Use infographics, photos, or illustrations to deliver content. 

• Brief Text: Utilize short phrases or brief paragraphs. 

• Short Video: Make sure they are brief and don’t run for more than 10 minutes. 

• Audio: Provide short snippets of music, speech, or other recordings. 

• Tests And Quizzes: Keep them short and to the point. 

• Gamification: Consider simple, single-screen challenges or five trivia questions. 

• Case Studies: Present brief case studies that offer valuable lessons. 

It’s important to remember that not all microlearning LMS apps support every type of content. It is essential to choose a microlearning platform that not only supports a variety of formats to provide differentiation but delivers certificates to your goal-orientated learners. 

5 Benefits of Microlearning

Although we have more technology at our fingertips than ever before, we are short on time. Between work and family commitments coupled with self-care requirements, employees are stretched thin. 

Microlearning offers benefits for employees and managers alike. Let’s take a look at five benefits microlearning has for your employee development: 

1. Affordable Mobile Learning 

Because a microlearning course requires fewer resources and fewer instructors, they are much cheaper to produce than traditional learning and development courses. 

Corporate training managers don’t have to worry about refreshments, scheduling conflicts, or other logistics that often impede employee development. 

2. Fast Delivery Of Microlearning Content

Fewer pieces of content to create means shorter microlearning content design and delivery times. With microlearning, you can design eLearning courses with dozens of modules in an hour. 

This gives you more time to respond to changing business goals, new training demands, and employee questions. 

3. Flexibility In Microlearning Strategy

Microlearning can cover any topic that traditional eLearning courses can, just in a condensed way. Most microlearning content can be consumed in less than 10 minutes to maintain the format of delivering short bursts of information. 

You can create courses that provide a broad overlook of a subject or create multiple microlearning content for complex topics. This means your microlearning strategy is flexible and fluid, making it easy to adapt to whatever your business’ needs may be. 

4. Boosts Knowledge Retention 

When you utilize chunking in microlearning instructional design, it allows participants to study the material repeatedly and revisit the material if they need a refresher. This allows for a higher retention rate as the information seeps into the employees’ long-term memory. 

The repeated study fits nicely with microlearning units because they are self-contained, small, and easy to access after the initial session. 

5. Interactive Employee Engagement 

Microlearning engages participants because it lacks the same seriousness that regular training provides. Sure, you want your employees to take training seriously, but what you really need is for them to engage in the microlearning content in a way that guarantees retention. 

Since microlearning courses are miniature, they are easy to download and take with you offline. This means your participants can complete training anywhere at any time, even when they are working out or commuting on public transit. 

 Micro-courses’ format mimics social media’s appeal: easily consumable content tailored to what you need and want. 

Because microlearning allows employees the freedom and flexibility to study in short stints on demand, it is more likely that your employees will complete training promptly.

Partner With BeaconLive For Your Microlearning Needs 

At BeaconLive, we have our fingers on the pulse of the eLearning industry. Our learning management system offers complete solutions and provides a central location for creating content, implementing employee training, and tracking participant progress. 

Contact BeaconLive to start implementing microlearning into your eLearning strategy today.