Four ways to use microlearning for staff training
Staff training is an essential and yet thankless task. The better equipped your workers are to do their jobs, the more profitable your business will be. However, face-to-face training is a logistical nightmare, especially for disparately-located teams that can be spread across stores, cities, regions, nations and continents. Traditional eLearning is not a great help as courses are typically long, uninspiring and ineffective. There’s also the question of onboarding whereby getting a new staff member up and running (once you’ve made them the initial job offer) is a process that can become derailed before impacting on other workers. Then there are the generational boundaries, training that works for Gen-Y and Gen-Z may not work for Boomers. On top of all this, adults generally don’t react well to being ‘forced’ to learn new things for work. If any of this resonates, you need microlearning for staff training.
Related: What is microlearning?
4 ways to use microlearning for staff training
1. Mobile learning
The younger generations are glued to their phones already but smartphone penetration is such that older workers will have them too. Staff regard work computers as tools (and that’s not optimal for absorbing new training information) but they’re comfortable looking at smartphone screens. With large screens, fast internet and high processing power widely available, distributing microlearning-based staff training to mobile devices makes a great deal of sense. Workers can interact with a device they’re comfortable with and do so in their own time; wherever they want and at their own learning pace. You can find out more about mobile learning, here.
2. Peer Learning
Your staff know your own products and practices better than anyone, so instead of outsourcing general soft-skill learning to external specialists (which takes time and costs money) why not get existing workers to create microlessons themselves. This could be as simple as uploading a video or adding content, questions and answers to an existing microlearning template. Your audience will be able to relate to and engage with the content much more effectively. It’s a great way of utilising microlearning for staff training.
3. Spaced repetition
When it’s essential for staff to learn about a particular subject to the point where they cannot afford to forget about it, use spaced repetition. Also, known as distributed practice, this is a great learning technique for staff training that’s enabled by microlearning. It involves revising content that a learner has demonstrated they’re struggling with, at increasing intervals, until knowledge is embedded.
4. Gamification, rewards and competition
Smartphones already enable interactive lessons but these can easily be turned into games. These are great for boosting engagement with microlearning and staff training – even more so when scores and timers are used. The addition of prizing acts as another incentive (small prizes work better than the opportunity to win large prizes) while Leaderboards can add a sense of competition (plus mild peer-pressure) between individual staff or groups of staff.
If you’d like to know more about training staff with microlearning, get in touch at enquiries@edapp.com. You can also try EdApp’s Mobile LMS and authoring tool for free by signing up here.
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Guest Author Daniel Brown
Daniel Brown is a senior technical editor and writer that has worked in the education and technology sectors for two decades. Their background experience includes curriculum development and course book creation.