How a Microlearning LMS Helps Companies Become Competitive

The corporate training market is valued to be around 30 billion worldwide. This market is slowly being disrupted with corporates moving from traditional Learning Management Systems towards digital learning tools.

A recent Deloitte research among HR and business professionals gave the corporate L&D a Net Promoter Score of -8. This is because learners are offered a wide choice  of free instructional content on the Internet but have no such options within the corporate learning environment.

The age-old page-turning courses have now transformed into a variety of videos and microlearning experiences that run on mobile apps and adaptive learning platforms.

Employees today are looking for five minutes of training at a time to reflect on the learning. They then spend another five minutes the next day to retain these concepts to memory.

In the last five years, some corporates have begun using a variety of tools to build externally curated content or massive open online courses (MOOCs) internally to deliver adaptive, microlearning content.

These types of interventions are helping corporates to deliver learning on-demand and recommend content based on the tasks involved. This is helping employees up skill faster and, thereby, helping corporates become more efficient in the competitive market.

So, how does microlearning help corporates?

Focus on business results

Traditionally, corporate training was confined to onboarding and compliance. But with the rise of microlearning, this has expanded to include the ever-changing knowledge and skill requirements of employees.

Microlearning has become a tool to solve business problems by enabling employees to improve their knowledge and bring in a behavioral change. Microlearning has helped businesses to keep pace with their priorities by ensuring their employees are ready to execute new tasks.

In sectors like sales, retail and call centers, the differentiating factors are people rather than technology or products. Microlearning can help strengthen this differentiation in methods that traditional training strategies fail to do.

Part of the work schedule

Training can be disruptive to the work schedule since many corporates hire just the right number of people to perform the task. Pulling out these employees to attend traditional training for hours together would mean lost revenue. For the management, there is no value proposition for volunteering their employees for this “unproductive downtime”.

Hence, microlearning addresses this issue by building a structured learning habit into the employees’ workflow. Instead of spending 2 hours on training, the employee gets to focus on just 5 minutes of the targeted learning activity that can improve knowledge and bring behavioral changes in the long run.

Return on Investment

There are plenty of real-world examples of how microlearning has improved profit margins to reduced customer complaints. Microlearning is also delivering results in the areas of sales, productivity, and risks. It offers an alternative approach that fits within the operation and focuses on two things: results and people.

Strong value proposition

In the ever-changing marketplace, microlearning is making all the difference between closing or losing a deal in B2B companies.

A strong value proposition is required to stay ahead of the competition. But that alone will not suffice as a knowledgeable salesforce should know how to leverage that value proposition to beat the rivals. The best way is to use bite-sized modules that are accessible anywhere and anytime.

So, what are the best practices to ensure all these happen?

Understand the challenges

Every digital training initiative has a unique challenge. Some may want to deliver just the ‘need-to-know’ content while others may want to provide support for revisions. Depending on the usage, one needs to create the right amount of information through microlearning.

Games, videos, infographics

Games are a great way to impart knowledge within a limited period. Employees need to play the game to gain knowledge embedded in the content. Microlearning modules are known to create maximum impact and help retain knowledge. The greatest challenge in microlearning is to keep the duration short. This can be done by infographics that can compile pages of information in one screen. Videos too can break complex topics into small and easily understandable information.

Microlearning is a great digital learning strategy for effective knowledge transfer. This will not only cut training costs and increase employee productivity but will ultimately help corporates become competitive in the market.