The 8 Types of Microlearning Businesses Should Leverage
Microlearning is a way to deliver informative content that is more likely to be viewed because it is provided in bite-sized pieces rather than in a traditional long-form content. These short and concise pieces focus on a single learning objective.
This strategy is taking over the corporate sales and education world, and with good reason. 58% of employees prefer to learn with shorter lessons, and a simple example can show why.
Think about an auto brand that releases new models of the same cars every year. Microlearning is a great tool to keep dealerships up to date on the latest features in an easy to digest format so they can sell more effectively. This, of course, is just one example of many.
Read on to learn more about the types of microlearning that your business should leverage—and when to leverage them.
Where Can Microlearning Be Used?
Microlearning can be used in nearly every corporate educational situation:
Induction and Onboarding. Strong on-boarding training is key to your users’ success. By thoroughly learning about your business’s culture, its product/service, and departmental processes, users are empowered to start contributing quickly. With microlearning, your trainees can absorb this onslaught of new information as it becomes relevant to their new position.
Product/Service Training. For businesses that produce complex or innovative products or unique service offerings, it’s important that users know what is offered so they can help sell it more effectively. Microlearning makes it easy for teams to learn more about your unique product or service. For example, with the Concannon Business Consulting (CBC) solution, MercuryHub, some organizations opt to create quizzes on products to measure and test user knowledge.
Professional Skills. Professionals have sets of skills they need for their jobs, from Excel spreadsheet know-how to graphic design basics. With microlearning, you can help users improve or learn the skills they need, when they need them.
Soft Skills. Too often, users are trained in professional skills and not broader skills that can help your business function better. Microlearning is a great way to introduce users to soft skills, like communication and leadership.
Application Simulations. Businesses often stress the importance of third-party business applications without showing users how to use them. By focusing on how users navigate the ins and outs of a system with brief microlearning segments, you can increase user adoption of apps like Salesforce, Slack, and Zendesk.
Sales Training. In today’s fast-paced world, sales teams change their methods constantly. For example, because 90% of leads would prefer to be texted, many salespeople now use SMS as a primary form of communication. Microlearning is perfect for teaching the newest techniques.
Compliance Training. In many industries, like food and electronics, compliance is critical; one wrong move by a user and the government can fine or stop your operations. However, compliance regulations change often. In situations where new regulations need to be learned, microlearning is a great way to disseminate that information.
Change Management Initiatives. Organizational changes can be difficult for your distributed workforce to handle, especially if they aren’t introduced correctly. Microlearning is an easy way to update users on new organizational structures or similar items instead of needing to organize a large meeting.
How Can Microlearning Be Delivered
One of the best features of microlearning is that it can be delivered in many impactful ways anywhere — including mobile. These tools include:
Animated Videos. When a website has both text and video, 72% of people would rather use video to learn about a product or service. In your microlearning strategy, set up as many opportunities for videos as possible. It can be useful when teaching communications-related soft skills, and in onboarding, when you present a large amount of information at once.
Interactive Videos. Even more engaging than animated videos, interactive videos often implement mid or post-video quizzes to encourage active listening and engagement. Interactive videos work well for compliance training, which should involve some level of testing for user comprehension.
Interactive Infographics. The human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text. Infographics are best used to teach onboarding or change management content like organizational structures or workflows.
Interactive PDFs. Plain PDFs with excess text can be difficult to pay attention to, but the experience can be more immersive with the inclusion of items like buttons, movies, sound clips, hyperlinks, and page transitions. Interactive PDFs are great for teaching dense information, like complex product training.
Flipbooks. Modern digital flipbooks look like books, but don’t come with high printing prices. Flipbooks can be divided into short chapters to encourage microlearning, but are traditional enough to appeal to users who prefer familiar training methods. Like interactive PDFs, they are best used for teaching complex material, like product training.
Interactive Parallax-Based Scrolling. Interactive walkthroughs allow users to experience a guided, hands-on tour around third-party apps or software. They are particularly useful for complex application simulations.
Interactive Parallax-Based Scrolling. Interactive walkthroughs allow users to experience a guided, hands-on tour around third-party apps or software. They are particularly useful for complex application simulations.
Complex Branching Scenarios. Like the Choose Your Own Adventure books we used to read as children (or the more recent Bandersnatch movie from Netflix), branching scenarios are eLearning modules in which decisions that learners make early on affect what happens in later scenes. This interactive microlearning strategy works well for soft skills and sales training.
Interested in learning more about the types of microlearning? Download the playbook, “Creating Connected Team Knowledge That Drives Engagement.”
