Whether you are hiring a bunch of new team members or re-skilling and helping long-term employees develop professionally, training sessions are a must so they know the ins-and-outs of the company, the responsibilities in their role, and how they can advance in their career. Training and development courses are essential for all staff members regardless of how much time they have put into the company they’re working for, but long, drawn-out sessions can be an overload for staff.
Many companies are learning more about microlearning, which is the practice of doing short training sessions that last a three-to-fifteen minutes tops. This is an effective method that can help staff to retain information better with less overload–and it even works great for training and development courses.
Let’s check out microlearning and the minute details on how it can positively affect your staff in training and development!
Microlearning in Training and Development: The 101 on How This Learning Tactic Works
The ways that microlearning work for training and development sessions and courses can make a difference in staff participation and retention!
Microlearning has its benefits to helping staff efficiently learn different terms or concepts in training and development courses. Image courtesy of Aim Higher Training.
Training doesn’t have to drag and be boring for staff–instead opt for microlearning tactics that can help to boost learning retention and participation! Microlearning can make a huge difference on how staff learn new material, re-skilling courses, or even development sessions to help them advance within their career.
What is Microlearning?
Microlearning is a unique learning technique that helps staff to retain what they learn better–and the key is to train in increments of three-to-fifteen minutes at the max. These short bursts of training can vary in length, but they focus primarily on a specific term or concept–which helps staff to remember what they learned without being overloaded with multiple topics and objectives. With targeted content, it improves retention, increases engagement, and is a cost-effective method with the flexibility to allow staff to complete and not fall behind on their normal, everyday responsibilities.
There are a bunch of common methods used in microlearning to make it more interactive and fun for staff to learn new skills and objectives. Some of the best ways to train staff using microlearning techniques include the following:
- Infographics
- Short videos
- Interactive quizzes
- Games
- Interactive simulations
- Podcasts or audio recordings
- Checklists
- Job aids
How Does Microlearning Help in Training and Development?
Microlearning can come in handy when it comes to training and development for staff in any type of business, for any role, and in any industry. Typically for training and development purposes, microlearning works best for onboarding with new hires to prevent overwhelming them with too much information.
It can also work great for compliance training with fun games or simulations, especially since these types of topics are normally something that staff need to be re-skilled in frequently. Microlearning is also commonly used in software training with short “how-to” videos on how to work new programs and break simple tasks down to make them easier to understand.
Professional development is also something that many employees shoot for where they sign up for training courses that can help them advance in their career. If your staff wants to participate in these training sessions, but not get too far behind on their work in their current role, short microlearning bursts can be accessible through their mobile device. This way they can put time aside for training without the fear of falling behind–plus it helps them to know that they’re working hard to advance in their professional career without any delays.
Ways to Tackle Microlearning in Training and Development
There are many ways to keep your staffs’ attention throughout training and development courses and with the right microlearning tactics, of course!
Microlearning can help staff work towards advancing in their professional career with development courses and also for typical training sessions. Image courtesy of Staff Skills Training.
Learning essential new hire policies and onboarding, compliances, software training, and even professional development is crucial for staff in a number of different industries and fields. Holding large training sessions that last for several hours is not the best way to go about training anymore as most people cannot retain buckets of information thrown at them all at once.
Keep your staffs’ attention with some of the best microlearning tactics for training and development!
Simulation or Interactive Scenarios for Soft Skills Training
One of the most essential skills to master for any employee is brushing up on your soft skills. Soft skills involve working on your interpersonal, non-technical, and behavioral traits when it comes to interacting with other staff members, customers, or even for those in a leadership role. Microlearning tactics for these skills is a great way to boost engagement by having staff participate in interactive simulations or scenarios to perfect communication, teamwork-building, problem-solving, and even adaptability.
Having staff interact and explain how they would react or what they would say in particular situations can help keep them involved in the learning process and remember what they learned so they can use it in real life situations.
Interactive Quizzes
Another way to test your staff’s knowledge on a particular topic is to create interactive quizzes to see how well they retained what they learned. Interactive quizzes are a staple for microlearning because you can hold discussions about a particular topic or objective and then quiz them, or instead offer a quiz at the end of a unit or module to ensure that staff retained everything that they learned.
Implementing interactive quizzes in training and development can also come with rewards where staff can see their name on a ranked leaderboard, earn virtual badges, or even certificates that they can use in their current position or to advance in their career.
Gamification for Interactive Fun
Something that can bring many people together to have fun are games. Board games, card games, or video games–it doesn’t matter, consider gamifying your microlearning sessions for more immersive and interactive fun!
Many managers use gamification for microlearning for both training and development courses where modules can be broken down into five-to-ten minute game sessions that are easily accessible from your staff’s cell phone. These games can consist of fun, quick quizzes, scenario-based, watch a short video with questions at the end, or even matching terms together.
From ranked leaderboards, or adding points and badges to achieve, it can help staff aim for a high score by retaining information better and boosting engagement. These games can also provide immediate feedback on how well they performed, plus it helps to make training a daily, yet rewarding habit.
Track Staff Progress Using a Learning Management System
Something to consider when implementing microlearning into training and development courses is how well your staff are doing and how they are pacing themselves in it. It’s important to make sure that even with these short sessions that your staff are still on pace to complete the course in a timely manner, hence why a learning management system (LMS) is a great way to track this information.
A LMS can assist any manager or an HR department track how each staff member is progressing in a training or development course. It can do everything from track completion rates, assessment scores, and it can even identify gaps in performance or pinpoint problem areas. If there is a specific unit or term that staff members are struggling with that you notice using a LMS, it’s a smart idea to have quick review sessions merged into the training or development schedule. This ensures staff are excelling and fully understand the material.
Add Spaced Repetition to the Schedule
While short-burst microlearning topics are easily digestible, it’s important that your staff remember these important terms and objectives long-term. Microlearning helps to make learning easier without the feeling of being overwhelmed by tons of terms, concepts, and other content. Adding spaced repetition to the schedule can help staff to remember what they learned not just in the moment, but when they go to use it within their job as well.
Spaced repetition is the idea of showing the same information over-and-over again in increasing intervals to help achieve long-term retention with staff. There are many applications and systems that you can use to help refresh staff on terms that are important to remember, such as TalentCards and 7taps–or you can create micro-sessions using flashcards to quiz staff on their knowledge.
Other ways of implementing spaced repetition in microlearning includes doing active recall quizzes with one-to-three questions staff can answer from their mobile device. You could also utilize reinforcement nudges using popular tools such as Slack or Microsoft Teams to send quick reminders of what your staff learned a few days after the topic has been covered.
Digital Signage in Microlearning: How This Form of Technology Makes Training and Development More Immersive
Creating content to present through digital signage can help submerge staff into learning by boosting engagement and retainment!
Using microlearning techniques and digital signage together can help to make training and development sessions more immersive for staff. Image courtesy of S3 Technologies.
Keeping staff engaged in training and development courses is crucial, as it leads to higher success and completion rates. Digital signage is a great form of technology that many businesses are adding to their meeting rooms, training centers, and in high-traffic areas that staff often travel as it leads to higher engagement and internal communications, plus it boosts productivity.
How Digital Signage Makes a Difference in Microlearning
It is a lot easier to implement microlearning practices with the use of the right technology–and digital signage can be the tool you need for higher completion and retention rates. Digital signage simply uses a LED/LCD screen or monitor, a media player, and a content management system (CMS) to create the content, quizzes, or interactive games or simulations to use for microlearning and training purposes.
While a digital signage screen can present the content that you create, you first need a reliable CMS platform to use to create content for microlearning. The right CMS platform paired with digital signage can aid microlearning techniques by allowing you to create visual content in bite-sized pieces that can up knowledge retention rates and reinforce training.
Some specific ways that digital signage can help improve microlearning in training and development include:
- Reinforce key concepts and terms
- Create visual training modules for staff to follow
- Update information in real-time
- Create interactive quizzes, simulations, games, and trivia
- Display tips and quick review outside of training
Shift: Your All-in-One CMS Platform For Microlearning
With the many CMS platforms to choose from, there are none that are quite like Shift–which is highly regarded for its methods in boosting employee engagement, productivity, and communications. Shift uses their top feature–the Content Navigator–to help managers update content with remote management capabilities right at their fingertips.
Whether you’re updating content to reflect new policies and compliances, a quick employee recognition moment, or a QR link to a new microlearning lesson, Shift can help with all of your content creation needs to help in training and development and create a team of staff that is well-educated and willing to professionally grow and advance in their career.
Create a Fun Learning Environment in Training and Development With Microlearning
Microlearning shouldn’t be boring with the right tools. Digital signage and Shift’s unique content creating platform can help to enhance microlearning in both training and development courses to boost knowledge retention and engagement within staff.
Consider picking up Shift to help you create the best microlearning content for training and development courses for your team today!
