Breaking employee education into bite-sized nuggets can be efficient and cost effective.
By Brigg Patten
Want to propel yourself far ahead of your competition? Then it’s time to make use of new training methods for both yourself and your employees.
This includes mastering microlearning to ensure training programs are effective and engaging. Microlearning reorganizes training programs into several short courses. These bite-size lessons help employees train for specific jobs and implement skills immediately.
The possibilities of new learning techniques are immense and can be cost effective. Even better, mobile is the perfect platform for microlearning.
Learning Via Video
Diverse online training and increasing number of online courses have brought a whole new way of learning. Visual learners have been found to be more effective and can retain content better, considering 80 percent of learning has been found to be visually based.
Combining audio and video can be an effective technique to teach new material. As computers are used in coming up with training videos, lots of learning via video is taking place globally both in the conventional learning settings and online.
Training Based on Competency
In virtually every area of education, competency-based learning has become popular. Gone is the need for company-wide training sessions where employees walk through the same dull material.
Instead, training courses can be reorganized according to competency. This method is best for companies battling skills gap and can help them cope after the training.
Diverse New Formats
There was a time when training had to be delivered in a specific way — such as through eLearning or training with the help of an instructor as tutorials or in a seminar.
Now, employees can use their own tablets, laptops or smartphones, even at work. These new training formats — apps, interactive websites and video tutorials, to name a few — are better tailored to different learning styles.
The move towards responsive design blends courses by ensuring the content is easy to read on virtually any operating system or tech device you can think of.
Social Media in Training
Of all the controversial topics in training, social media is one of them. Companies have to grapple with proprietary information privacy and using a new technology that keeps on changing frequently. Many companies are still skeptical about the efficacy of social media in learning even as it continues to drive employee engagement ideas.
In fact, rather than leverage on social networking sites like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, most organizations stick with document sharing, blog posts and discussion forums only. Most ignore the effectiveness of microblogs (where users can post short text updates) and video — even though studies continue to confirm these methods effectively enhance learning functions.
An unfortunate side effect of increased access to technology? Decreasing attention spans. As a result, new technologies come in handy to help mitigate this through microlearning. Microlearning solutions offer employees very short yet usable content they want and on their terms. As such, this has a positive effect on employee engagement and productivity.
Furthermore, microlearning can set your business ahead against the competition by saving time and money. This is especially vital to tech startups with high level programs, as microlearning can help employees learn job training at a faster and higher quality level as well as increase job productivity. As your business continues to grow, consider cost effective solutions to job training, such as microlearning.
About the guest blogger: Brigg Patten writes in the business and tech spaces. He’s a fan of podcasts, bokeh and smooth jazz. His time is mostly spent learning the piano and watching his Golden Retriever Julian chase a stick.
