With major disruption across virtually every industry as a result of COVID, there’s plenty of focus immediately on pivoting, reskilling, and retraining teams. But the truth is, big training efforts don’t work. After only one day, people forget 70% of what they learned.
Basically, adults are terrible learners.
So there are two options.
- You can attempt to force retention for training sessions, with quizzes, certifications, and (potentially) consequences for forgetting your training.
- You can implement micro-learning at your organization — and embrace the fact that the majority of training is forgotten immediately, so you only train on a small amount, all the time.
Today, we’re getting to dive into that second option.
What is micro-learning?
Micro-learning is just about what it seems like — it’s a really bit of learning, in order that it’s impossible to forget.
There are a couple of characteristics that ought to be called out that separate micro-learning from just a smaller training session:
- It’s usually organized into courses or programs
- What you teach is directly associated with what your team is doing
- It’s often gamified, to create that internal pressure
- Video content is usually the main target
- There’s some kind of validation that the training has been completed / absorbed (quiz, etc… )
Here’s how you’ll implement it within your own organization.
- Identify your learning objective
Before you are doing anything you would like to know your learning objective. What does one want people to understand that they don’t know now? More importantly, why? What organizational challenges are you trying to unravel , and why is micro-learning the simplest thanks to get there?
- Find your content — and break it up
Now that you simply have your learning objective, you would like to seek out your content to support it. This may likely be content you have already got , but it’s often constructed as an overall training day or longer course.
So you would like to interrupt it up, or recreate snappier versions of it. Quick-and-dirty videos are often honest thanks to doing that work.
Ideally, this is often more of an editing job than a creation job, but sometimes you’ll end up with a content gap. If you’re not the topic matter expert, get them on a Zoom call and ask them the questions you would like answered. Record the entire thing, and cut that into a brief video. Voila — micro-learning content able to go.
- Organize your micro-content into a course
Now that you simply have you ever to arrange your content into a small course. If you recognize your content and your organizational objectives, then building out a course should be relatively simple .
However, if you’re struggling, you’ll always storyboard the course then show it to a couple of end users. Get their perspective thereon — see what is sensible to them and what doesn’t, and adjust accordingly.
- Deliver your content when it’s relevant
This is the trickiest step, and sometimes the one where you’ll need a tool to try to do it right. The goal here is to deliver your content when it matters, in order that your learning is reinforced by actually doing the thing you’re teaching your team to try to do.
For example, let’s say you’re reinforcing and training on compliance. Ideally, you’d have your team undergo compliance training right before they’re during a position to form a choice about compliance.
- Gamify your experience
This is an optional step, but if you’ll gamify your experience, you’ll have much more positive learning outcomes. Create a points system, a leaderboard, or some quiet rewards system that permits people to compete.
Learners are going to be more willing and more engaged with the education you deliver, and you’ll create a mechanism to reward those that have the best. At an equivalent time, if you’ll gamify the experience, you’ll get more regular learning engagement and improve information retention.
- Validate your learning objective
This is the foremost important set of all when it involves micro-learning.
You need to make sure that you’re taking the time to validate that you’re achieving your learning objectives, which those learning objectives are resulting in better organizational outcomes.
It’s easy to forget that any learning initiative is ultimately a way to an end. In other words, it’s how you get to a specific outcome, not the result in its title .
This is easy to lose sight of when you’re within the thick of building and deploying micro-learning.
So once your program is called to the planet , take a while to gauge and see if it worked.
You’re trying to find two things.
- Did your learners achieve their learning objective?
In the case of micro-learning, this could be evaluating if quiz scores are higher, or more training was taken, or more people are certified and fully compliant together with your training rules.
If these numbers haven’t improved over your baseline, that’s ok! you only got to revisit the drafting board and check out something else to interact with your audience.
- Was your organizational outcome achieved?
For example, if you’re a business, you could possibly roll out micro-learning for your sales team to extend your win rate. So after your micro-learning has been deployed, you would like to gauge the people that took the training versus those that didn’t — did you see a rise in win rates?
It’s imperative that you simply close the loop on your learning programs to prove that the work you’re doing helps your business or association achieve its overall goals.
Wrap Up
Learning is tough , and as adults, we’re not excellent at it. Combined with the pressures of our jobs, we can often desire an additional task that just gets within the way of ‘the real work’.
But study after study shows that upskilling your team is one among the simplest returns on investment a corporation can get. So it’s well worth the effort (even if I don’t desire it).
Given this problem — we all know learning is effective but nobody wants to try to do it — micro-learning is often a part of the answer .
It makes learning more digestible, improves retention and effectiveness, and if you’ll gamify it, can drive engagement across your organization.
If learning may be a tool you would like to use to realize lofty organizational goals, then micro-learning should definitely be a tactic on your list.
