The pandemic indeed came as a shocker for corporates and employees alike. It put major processes at a standstill, leading to corporations and employees feeling a sense of stagnancy. Growth was missing for the time period, and dealing with that situation post-pandemic is truly essential for moving forward. To truly accelerate into the future and compensate for lost opportunities, it is important to identify the point of collaboration between the interests of the employers and the employees. This point is the need to upskill and reskill employees to meet the demands of the current times. Microlearning has been identified as one of the key solutions to help businesses upskill and reskill their employees for better results. Let’s discover how microlearning can help meet these demands.
What is Microlearning?
Any type of microlearning solution provides educational content in short packages to help learners learn something new slowly and instantly within 3-5 minutes. These compact lessons help catch the attention span of new-age learners who have a small attention span and are easily distracted. These have shown more efficacy than traditional methods of simultaneously delivering a huge amount of information, leading only to confusion.
What are the benefits of microlearning?
Microlearning processes have much to offer regarding employee training through upskilling and reskilling. Some of the primary benefits are:
Flexible Learning: Microlearning solutions allow employees to learn anywhere they want to. There is no time and space restriction, which gives employees complete autonomy over their learning process. They can also learn at their own pace, which is highly valuable.
Better Engagement: While lengthier lessons can be distracting and hard to digest, smaller and compact lessons lead to better engagement as they are easy to learn. These lessons also motivate the learners to stay on track and keep learning more.
Higher Retention: Lengthier lessons focus on feeding a lot of information at once, which can lead to lesser information retention as attention won’t be drawn equally to all concepts. However, with microlearning, learners retain better as the intake of information is shorter and seamlessly matches the pace of the learners.
Scalability: Microlearning is highly scalable as corporations can quickly deploy lessons globally in multiple locations.
Ways in Which Microlearning Supports Upskilling and Reskilling
There are multiple ways in which microlearning can help upskill and reskill employees. Here are some of the significant ways in which microlearning helps:
Reducing Skill Gaps Instantly
By using microlearning solutions, employers can generate targeted lessons to address the gaps in specific employee skill sets. Whenever anything new is introduced into the folds of the corporate processes of a company, the employer can instantly generate microlearning resources to train employees on the usage of the same. This helps boost practical knowledge instantly without going through the time-consuming method of conventional learning.
Learning while Working
Unlike traditional learning methods, where employees have to take a break specifically to learn new skills, microlearning helps employees learn as they work. By using microlearning modules, employees learn in real-time while working with new introductions to reinforce their skills. These techniques help solve real-time challenges through effective and compact learning.
Personalized Learning Methods
Contemporary microlearning platforms use modern technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to customize employee training processes. These methods help tailor employees’ learning paces based on the job description, targeted outcomes, and learner skill levels.
Global Learning Methodology
Most large corporations have employees working across the globe in various locations. Microlearning can help manage employees across these locations to ensure continual learning. Teams can be provided easy access to the learning modules to create a uniform skill set.
Ways to Utilise Microlearning for Talent Management
There are various ways in which microlearning can be integrated into talent management to enhance the skill sets of the employees effectively and instantly for consistent learning. Here are the various steps that corporations can follow to incorporate microlearning.
Step 1: Understand the new skills required for employees: First, corporations must conduct a thorough skill gap analysis to identify areas where the workforce needs to improve collectively or individually. Based on these insights, corporations can create outcome targets for their workforce.
Step 2: Create engaging and interactive content: After understanding the unique needs, corporates can create engaging content accordingly by incorporating interactive elements like infographics, videos, quizzes, and simulations to make the learning process quick and engaging.
Step 3: Choosing the appropriate platform: Once the content has been thoroughly developed, businesses need to choose the right learning management system to deliver it to the employees and track their progress as they go.
Step 4: Promote a culture of continual learning: By hosting activities and workshops, businesses can inculcate a strong culture that engages employees in a collaborative upskilling process. Corporations can do so by streamlining microlearning into employees’ daily workflows and by awarding or acknowledging employees’ achievements through coupons or prizes.
Why is Microlearning Important?
With various obstacles to growth, like globalization, disruptive technology, shifting workplace dynamics, and more, microlearning helps find a solution quickly. Human Resources platforms can utilize microlearning to enhance talent management easily. Microlearning is the future of talent management and effective upskilling and reskilling. It has proven its effectiveness in developing skillsets to meet the demands of the modern world. It helps drive organizational success and future-proof the talent and growth of businesses. Corporations must find newer methods to make microlearning more and more engaging and effective. It is a highly scalable method. There must be a higher adoption of the technique as it is also cost- and resource-effective.
