How to Train Your New Employees with Microlearning

According to a 2016 study, more than 40% of employees quit within the first six months of starting a new job. While a big reason for this is the disconnect that exists between their expectation and reality, the study also found that at least four out of ten employees felt actively disengaged at work.

Training your employees and actively engaging them at work is an absolute necessity that directly impacts retention.

The challenge however is in the pedagogical methods that are deployed in corporate offices. It is not uncommon for employees to be asked to undergo classroom training for various job-related lessons. Classrooms are great for imparting theory. This technique does not work well for a lot of positions. As a result, there is little to no impact of the training on the employee contributing to poor ROI.

Microlearning, or bite-sized learning as it is otherwise called, is regarded to be one of the most effective corporate training techniques. The objective of this training method is to break the lessons into short nuggets of 3 to 6 minutes each. Studies show that learners are more likely to retain their lessons when they are broken down into small, discrete components.

Building a microlearning module to onboard your new employees consists of the following steps.

Classify Employees by Their Roles

The first step in the microlearning process is to identify the kind of employees you will need to train. The purpose of this step is break down the roles and responsibilities of all the learners in order to identify the specific learning modules that need to be built.

For instance, an online insurance company will have employees that belong to various departments like sales, web development, customer support and so on. Both the sales and the customer support executives will need exhaustive lessons on the insurance industry while the sales and web dev employees may also need lessons on how their online portal works, the technologies that are being used, and so on.

This way, the trainer may identify the specific modules that need to be built for the onboarding process. In the example above, the trainer may need to build modules for insurance, portal, sales process, customer support process, and so on. These modules may be reused among various departments depending on what they need to be trained on.

Break down the modules

Once the modules have been identified, the next step is to break it down further into smaller components. As noted earlier in this article, microlearning involves short lessons that are not more than six minutes in length. It is thus important to break your modules down into small components that can be taught in a short duration.

Preparing the lessons

The next step in the process is producing content for these chapters. The ideal way to do this depends on the chapter and the learner. Lessons that need demonstrations are best provided with the help of videos.

However, if your learner is located remotely and may not have reliable access to the internet, you may instead opt for other visual learning forms like infographics. Producing content is the most time consuming activity in the microlearning process.

Building assessment techniques

The only way to ensure high ROI from your corporate training techniques is through assessments. Make sure that you have one assessment module associated with each of your lessons. Your assessment should test the learner on the practical applications of your lessons and focus very lightly on the theory.

The objective of assessments is not only to test the learner, but to also benchmark your course content. Poor performance among learners is an indication that your microlearning strategy is not working and needs better course content preparation.

Microlearning is an emerging corporate training tool and has proven to be one of the most effective onboarding techniques. The steps mentioned above should help a business build a solid training module that improves onboarding as well as ensures high retention of employees in an organization.