By Jeff Fernandez
Next-Gen training for rapidly changing business environments
The Association for Talent Development (ATD) reports the average time spent training is over 30 hours per year per employee (higher for larger companies), and that’s actually five hours longer than it was a decade ago. And even when trainers strive for brevity, their aim has been to consolidate content down to a day instead of a week, or reduce to 90 minutes what used to be a three-hour-long training session. That’s quite a bloated meal for an audience who’d do better with snack-sized content they can take back and consume on the job.
Simply put: attention spans are dwindling, video consumption is up and technology is turning over so rapidly that traditional L&D training methods can’t keep pace. Why? Old school training is expensive, time-consuming and simply can’t be produced fast enough to react to a constantly changing work environment. Not only do digital skills need an upgrade every few months, they need an overhaul every few years: Deloitte recently estimated digital skills have a half-life of just 2.5 years for any given role.
Microlearning – defined as learning in short, digestible, bite-sized units – is next-gen training for an audience seeking curricula that matches their own rapidly evolving tastes: short, necessary and results-oriented. Microlearning is all of these things, and it’s beneficial to both learners and trainers in a variety of ways.
For learners, the chunks are easily understood and consumed on a worker’s own time, facilitating “just in time” learning (i.e., when a worker needs it, when it’s relevant to their work and when they’re the most receptive). Because if you need immediate, on-the-job training, you can’t interrupt the work for long – which means it’s just as viable as a performance aid as it is a training tool.
It’s also ideal for trainers, because the content is quick to create, manage and distribute – and perhaps most excitingly, far more affordable; some estimates say you can cut your training budget in half (leaving plenty of room for experimenting with different formats and far higher production value).
Last and best of all, microlearning is more effective than traditional models. Distributed practice aids in retention (or, if you think of it in terms of nutrition, aiming to eat fairly well at every meal is far better than a weekend of crash dieting). And while traditional training often yields few long-term takeaways (90 per cent of new skills are lost within a year, research suggests), estimates say a microlearning methodology consistently yields four to five learned takeaways per course.
If that’s not enough, microlearning works well for both new and veteran workers, since the longer somebody’s on the job, the more directed their learning requirements are over someone new (they can orient themselves in the course content, only spending time on what’s necessary). Microlearning is also ideal for global training, because small segments are easily translated for different cultures.
With workplace technology moving at the speed of sound, HR professionals need a way to ensure their workforce is at the forefront. Microlearning allows companies to adopt the specific techniques needed for their own organizations to streamline any and all training programs.
Jeff Fernandez is the cofounder and CEO of Grovo.