6 ways microlearning keeps your business fit
Anyone who has ever done a HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) workout will totally get how microlearning works. Two very different things but the principles are the same.
HIIT is interval training that alternates short bursts of intense exercise with short periods of recovery. The idea is that you’re building up strength and fitness in minutes per day rather than spending hours in the gym. The attraction of less time and better results has made HIIT one of the leading fitness trends today.
Microlearning offers similar advantages for employees and organisations. With microlearning, the ‘exercise’ involves short bursts of focused learning that employees can do in just a few minutes each day. The learning is repeated and reinforced at spaced intervals until people absorb what they need to know and can confidently apply the knowledge on the job.
With today’s rapidly-changing and highly competitive business environment, the pressures and challenges on organisations have probably never felt greater. Businesses need to be strong and agile to meet these demands. Microlearning helps keep businesses fit for today’s changing world.
The challenges
At the start of the year, we wrote about the top 5 business challenges for L&D in 2018. These are:
- GDPR & cyber security
- Productivity & growth
- Customer experience
- Digital transformation
- Identifying, recruiting and retaining talent
Many of the challenges boil down to the same thing – your people. Specifically, employee skills, knowledge, behaviour and culture. This is where microlearning comes in. It’s agile training that strengthens the skills of your workforce and makes your business stronger as a result in a number of key ways:
1. Modern learning for the digital age
Digital transformation must include the way you train your workforce. For a start, employees want to access knowledge using technology. They’re happy to be on their devices and enjoy the flexibility of accessing learning at any time. They expect agile training and working – important in attracting and keeping talent. Using a microlearning platform like Axonify, employees can access daily learning when and where they want it.
“The ubiquity of mobile devices, along with the increasing acceptance of BYOD, provides L&D with an awesome opportunity to meet the employee where they are (physically and developmentally) with the support they need. Microlearning can maximize this tech evolution.” – JD Dillon, Principle Learning Strategist, Axonify.
2. It’s all about the bottom line
With the machine learning capabilities, Axonify works to ‘self-heal’ performance gaps by serving up real-time recommendations to frontline managers when a business target is at risk, while also automatically adapting learning to the employees that need it the most, in the areas that matter the most, whether that’s increase sales, decrease safety incidents or other business critical goals.
This type of microlearning isn’t just personalised, it’s adaptable. It finds gaps in knowledge and fills them. That means the learning is relevant, so employees only get the learning they need. Microlearning also allows repeated practice where learners must make decisions. And, because that learning is built around clearly-defined business goals, it directly impacts the bottom line.
The accessibility of microlearning allows you to get consistent learning to everyone who needs it, wherever they are in the world. That could be on a busy shop floor, out in the field, or in another city or country. No more gaps in learning, and no more gaps in who gets it! It’s effective – and cost-effective – learning for all.
4. A perfect fit for today’s workplace
Increasingly, there’s little time to pull staff away from their workflow. Microlearning fits into a work shift, so isn’t disruptive. The learning is also to hand at the point of need – a vital requirement in today’s hectic work environment characterised by high customer expectations.
5. A perfect fit for the future, too
Microlearning is adaptable, continuous learning. This brings obvious benefits. Continuous learning embeds the behaviours and culture your business requires. Moving forward, it’s also updatable, making your learning as future-proof as possible.
The Axonify Microlearning Platform is built for business performance and, as JD Dillon says in his article, it has a “merciless focus on results”. It works across industry sectors, business challenges and learning topics. We know this because we can measure the results. There are more success stories with real results here.