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Designing Training for Millennials

Designing training for millennials is important to keep engaged new generations. Younger generations don’t want to see stale PDF’s and be stuck in an office to complete training. They want fun, interactive, engaging training content that they can access when convenient for them. That’s why we wrote this guide on how to deliver mobile training for millennials and Gen Z. Learn all our best practices here!

1 Dec 2020 by Rocco Brudno

The age of training in-person is losing priority to modern solutions that offer convenience and improved results. Younger generations like millennials and Gen Z expect their organizations to deliver mobile training—and with good reason. Employees aren’t at their desk more than 50% of the workday. That means you’re losing valuable training moments by blocking training access for your team where and when they want to learn.

If you can deliver mobile training, your millennial and Gen Z staff will be more engaged, and more likely to learn. Mobile training also enables training to happen when convenient for your team, meaning public transit can become a learning moment. This article will give you proven methods to deliver mobile training to millennials and Gen Z employees. Let’s dive in!

TL;DR

We get it: you’ve got a lot on your plate and want to get straight to the point. We’ve got you covered—this section has all the facts, upfront so you know everything about how to deliver mobile training at a glance.

Mobile training is any training content delivered or accessed via a mobile device.

Millennials and Gen Z aren’t interested in in-person training or PDF’s. That’s why mobile training is perfect for them.

Social media platforms are a great way to deliver mobile training that’s affordable, effective, and fun to use. Plus you have great data into the interactions your team has with the training! 👨‍💻

Video and Podcast training tools have increased by 19% and 82% respectively as learning modalities in 2020. And with how easy they are to make and share, it’s a no-brainer! 🧠

Online training platforms combine the best training features to create powerful content that’s easy to deliver mobile training with. And with mobile responsiveness, you can make, share, and measure training all from a mobile device!

Want to see how all of that pans out with the research to back it up? Read on for the full blog article from our experts!

What is mobile training?

Going off industry standards, we found a great quote from Training Industry on the market definition of what is mobile training:

Mobile Training refers to training programs or content that is delivered or accessed via a mobile device.

Training Industry

Why has mobile learning taken off? Well, as our founder mentions in our article on what is eLearning, mobile device applications are a huge driver for online training platforms. The ability to create engaging training content that’s easily accessible revolutionized how teams could learn.

Millennials and Gen Z employees in the workforce prefer mobile device-based training to any other option. This is because mobile devices are the most accessible form of technology and most readily available at any time of day.

Just in 2020 alone, mobile-focused training has grown so much that L&D budgets have expanded to prioritize it. This uptick makes perfect sense with many teams shifting to remote work in 2020. Being able to deliver training to teams out of the office improves training efficiency, wherever your team is learning.

The downside of being able to deliver mobile training has a flaw that many organizations don’t consider. According to Brandon Hall Group, only 6% of all online training is mobile-ready or optimized for mobile devices. That’s a staggeringly low amount of training content that’s unresponsive or ineffective for sharing knowledge. Optimizing training content for mobile delivery is crucial to delivering training to mobile devices.

So how can you deliver mobile training to millennial and Gen Z employees that doesn't become part of the ineffective 94%? By leveraging our proven mobile training practices below, you’ll be delivering training your millennial and Gen Z staff will love. Let’s examine how each modality can work for your team.

How to deliver training to millennials and Gen Z staff

As we mentioned above, both millennials and Gen Z prefer you to deliver mobile training to in-person classroom-style training. It’s also guaranteed that most of your employees in either generation have a smartphone. If you want even more incentive, did you know your employees spend less than half their work-day at their desks?

Though the possibilities are infinite thanks to cloud web development advances, you can deliver mobile training via three methods:

  • Social media platforms
  • Video and audio platforms
  • Online training platforms.

Each has its own strengths and weaknesses and we dive into those below.

Deliver mobile training with social media

One of the more popular mobile training delivery methods is leveraging social media platforms. These are unconventional, but highly engaged spaces that your team already use. Like online training platforms, you can use social media to deliver multimedia content that’s mobile-friendly.

The best way to start delivering training this way is to gather your content into one space to store it first. We recommend either a cloud storage option like Google Drive or Dropbox to keep training in one space. From here, you’ll want to identify knowledge gaps. Once you’ve identified training areas you need to fill in, create the content.

After organizing everything, you’ll want to sort learners by training need and role/department. For Facebook and LinkedIn, this can be easy by creating groups. For Instagram, either creating a message group or establishing a different sub-account for each training topic. With Twitter, you can create training-specific hashtags that your team can search for (just make sure to create long-tailed tags so they don’t get jumbled with anything else).

With training content ready, you can start sending it out! We recommend creating a training delivery schedule to keep track of when and where everything is delivered to your team. What’s great about social media platforms is that most platforms give you some form of interaction data. Want to test how your team likes a course? Have them thumbs up or comment to learn what to improve. You can also send validation through “likes” and fun images, recognizing individual and team success.

💡 Pro Tip: If you want to learn more about delivering training via social media, download our free ebook on training delivery methods! It’s packed with even more data and practices tailored to any training delivery method

Delivery with video or audio

Video and audio tools were two of the most used modalities of eLearning training models in 2020. Brandon Hall Group surveyed 219 organizations from small to large-sized and found that:

  • 🎥 Video training tools increased use by 19%
  • 🎧 Podcasts increased use as a training tool by 82%

That’s astonishing to see the growth in both new forms of training content consumption. It makes even more sense since both video and audio are great alternatives to traditional training that’s in-person and instructor-led.

For video, a great way to deliver mobile training is to create either a YouTube channel or other video hosting space to store company video content. This has to be a hub that’s mobile-friendly, so if you have to, you can break video content up into smaller pieces to upload on social platforms.

Video training

When creating training video content, try to be concise and keep videos to one topic with an end goal in mind. This could be a quick product demonstration or an update on communication policies. You can mix the content up between people talking, graphic media, and presentation style with or without screen capture. Making sure the video is adaptive for portrait or landscape view also helps with engagement. And you can measure success by views and how high your team’s knowledge retention is after watching.

Podcast training

For podcasts, we recommend going for generalized, big picture concepts with your training content. Once you have some planned out, you can use a platform like Wooshkaa to record, edit, and publish your podcast. Track listeners and analytics for engagement and send a quiz to follow-up on knowledge retention (Google Forms is a great way to do this for free).

💡 Pro Tip: For easy video creation that won’t break the bank, we recommend using a tool like Biteable. This video training tool is perfect for amateur videographers that want to make really exciting video content to train their team. It takes minutes to create a video that you can add training to and you can share it from anywhere once it’s ready.

Online training platform mobile delivery

The last and easiest way to deliver mobile training that’s engaging and effective is through an online training platform. These solve the problem we brought up at the top about creating mobile-ready training content. They also help you rapidly create, store, deliver, and measure training with ease.

If you’re using an online training platform to deliver mobile training to millennial and Gen Z staff, you’ll want to start at creation. What content can you create that leverages touch screens? How about content that leverages lots of mixed media like video and interactive text? Think about your training topic and plan the most effective training modalities to leverage.

Online training platforms 101

While creating training content, you’ll want to think about how to deliver mobile training to your team. Online training platforms can let you share training wherever your team engages most. Some examples include:

  • Sales training in Salesforce.
  • CS training in Intercom.
  • Marketing training in Asana.
  • Product training in Jira.

Delivering mobile training can happen even in communication channels like Slack or Gmail. The focus is where your team is engaged the most and delivering training to them in those spaces. The reason for this is higher knowledge retention through contextually relevant training. By sharing knowledge when and where it’s needed, you can dramatically improve the retention of the information.

Once you have a plan, start to deliver mobile training and get feedback from your team. Their insights can help you adjust the process to optimize it. As they engage with the training, you can also measure it from your mobile device. Most online training platforms have dashboards that give you deep training analytics which can be accessed from anywhere. You can even set up reporting to give you daily or weekly updates on training interactions. Now that’s mobile training that’s smart!

We hope you’ve enjoyed our best practices on how to deliver mobile training to millennials and Gen Z employees. If you follow these methods, you’ll be able to get training to your team that’s effective, engaging, and really good-looking. For even more tips on how to deliver mobile training to your team, chat with us today! Our experts have created hundreds of solutions for any use case and are ready to help you find the perfect fit.

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