Grooming Millennials with Microlearning
Millennials already dominate the workforce in 2017, and if you look closely you would see the dominance more in the mid and junior level than the senior level.
But imagine 10-15 years ahead…
Millennials will dominate every corner room office and top floor cabins; holding the most important positions in most organizations around the world. The future is bright for a Millennial leadership.
With the increasing millennial workforce, organizations are re-evaluating their existing learning strategies to foster an environment of development for these Millennials. Traditional learning is something that baby boomers and Gen X relate to better, but when we bring Millennials into the picture, they require a much more engaging, interactive, gamified and quick form of learning, frequently known as microlearning.
But before we tie up millennials with microlearning, let us first understand what are those specific traits that millennials showcase that make them favour microlearning over traditional learning.
Some of the key characteristics of the millennial generation are:
Digital native and technologically sound: As the term suggests, millennials have grown up with the Internet age and are accustomed to tablets and smartphones, thus the proclivity towards digital learning.
Strong multi-tasking capability: They are quite efficient in handling many tasks at once, thus favour learning to be implemented in the same form.
Ambitious:They nurture high ambitions and look to make it big at a very young age. There is a great desire to learn and learn more in a short amount of time.
Short attention spans and easily distracted: They focus on many things at once, and their concentration keeps shifting from one place to another. It is easy to distract Millennials and rather tough to hold on to their chain of thoughts.
Need recognition and constant feedback: They relish the limelight and have a strong desire to be recognized for the smallest of their achievements. With the rise of search consoles, they are constantly reviewing and gathering feedback of their own performance and others.
Need flexibility: They don’t like rigid processes and feel at home when offered with the flexibility to do things the way they want to.
We can fairly agree at this point that Microlearning ends up making more and more sense for millennials than any other generation.
“In the next 10 to 15 years, we’re going to have the greatest transfer of knowledge that has ever taken place, making sure this shift goes smoothly will be the biggest challenge of the next decade for L&D.”
Chip Espinoza
Microlearning is a unique method that uses micro moments of learning to drive better productivity and development. It is not a method designed and curated specially for millennials; baby boomers and Gen X alike can also gain the same (if not more) knowledge from microlearning. Here is how
Short and Succinct Content
Millennials have accepted ‘distraction’ as a way of life. They expect information to arrive not in huge packets, but in a steady stream of tiny modules. Microlearning works in exactly this way. It takes only a small bit of the learner’s time and it is applicable in real time before the information slips off their mind.
Bite-size content is trending and search friendly
Microlearning’s bite-size learning modules meet the modern learner’s desire for searchable, habitually pulled information. Envision a training program doled out by managers feeling as normal and natural as searching something on Google. Microlearning brings this to life.
Greater Retention and Learning
Microlearning’s most providing quality is efficiency: small content leads to 20% more learning retention than learning with long-form material. Higher retention also leads to better application or learning transfer at the workplace.
Microlearning is mobile ready
As learning has transcended to microlearning, leisure has shifted gears to microleisure and Millennials frequently turn towards their smartphones for moments of microleisure. Microlearning requires users to quickly consume and interact with short content on the fly, while on the job. This exact nature is already pre-set in the way microlearning works.
More personalization in microlearning moments
Millennials anticipate that technology innovation will foresee their inclinations and wishes before they even start utilizing it. This is the reason why app personalization has grown 332% from 2014–2015. Microlearning makes learning more customized in two ways. In the first place, it makes accessible the exact snippet of data that learners require, the minute they require it. Second, it generates substantially more data than any legacy learning and development system did which enables L&D to implement analytics into learning for the very first time.
We have done great research and deep diving in the topic of microlearning and understanding the psychology of Millennials. Master-O is a microlearning solution that addresses the above discussed millennial challenge and implements small modules of gamified microlearning in the form of Microskills® for large scale learning transformation in organizations.