Microlearning Examples Are Everywhere

Successful microlearning can revitalize your corporate training efforts and produce incredible results. The huge growth in microlearning for business is due to its appeal — to learners, to managers and to training developers and administrators.

Microlearning examples are everywhere because micro-sized training shines in various use cases and throughout an employee’s learning journey.

Microlearning courses for every stage of learning

Pre-training

Deliver a microlearning course of video to prepare learners for in-depth training. Short introductory modules can introduce concepts and terms and ensure that all learners begin an instructor-led course with the same foundational knowledge.

A successful microlearning course can do double duty, serving as a review module and reference module throughout training and beyond.

Post-training and retention

Once learners complete a comprehensive course of training, you want them to remember and apply what they’ve learned. But the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve shows that learners have increasing difficulty recalling information as more time elapses after training.

Microlearning offers a perfect knowledge retention solution.

Spaced retrieval practice asks learners to recall and use the concepts and skills they covered. Many microlearning for business platforms allows managers or learners to determine which content they want to review, how often and at what interval.

Mastery of information-dense content

Microlearning is great for initial training, too. When learners need to master and remember a large amount of factual information or product features, for example, a microlearning app that drills them daily — for a few minutes at a time — is a highly effective way to ensure that they master all of the content. Mastery can be achieved quickly if you use the power of spaced repetition to automate the training the user sees. If they have prior knowledge of a topic, it is brought up less frequently; if they need more practice, they are called on to exercise the knowledge more frequently.

Performance support in the workflow

Concise and focused, a microlearning video, infographic, short course, gamified content or brief text is an ideal way to support learners as they apply their knowledge on the job. Searchable, mobile-friendly microlearning makes for a perfect performance support tool. Using microlearning as the solution, it's easy for the employee to find and reference when they need to be reminded of how to do something or can’t recall a specific piece of information from their training.

Microlearning for business — from onboarding to preparing for promotion

Examples of successful microlearning are found in every industry and for a broad variety of use cases.

For sales training, onboarding new employees, hitting compliance training targets while ensuring that learners master and retain the necessary information — microlearning is a valuable addition to your training toolbox.

• Use microlearning to guide new hires through onboarding. Shepherd them through signing up for benefits, teach them the company culture and procedures and provide the basic role-related skills training they need.
• Replace dreary and frustrating annual compliance training with continuous mastery and knowledge retention training using a focused microlearning for business platform and content tailored for your needs. It’s easy to update and ensures that the required knowledge is accessible to learners at all times.
• Teach new skills, whether preparing a star employee to move up the ladder, getting your entire sales team up to speed on new products and features or helping employees master the ins and outs of new technology. Microlearning fits into their workflow and is available on-demand, whenever they need the information.

Explore many types of microlearning

Microlearning is how people learn, all day every day. Examples of microlearning in consumer life include looking at how-to videos, search for articles on healthier living or soothing a sick child and even studying an infographic that explains the dynamics of an approaching winter storm.

Read We all use many types of microlearning to dive into the formats and applications of successful microlearning in a corporate training context.

Whether a game or app, a podcast or video, a short text or infographic, common features of microlearning include brevity and immediate availability at the moment of need.

It’s not just short content

Knowing how to develop microlearning is essential to its success. It’s not just a matter of chopping up your existing long-form eLearning into shorter units. Microlearning design is a science, based on how adults learn.

It starts with clear, performance-based learning goals and includes using a proven microlearning design model.

How to Design Effective Microlearning walks you through the design and development of successful microlearning.

Understanding the appeal of microlearning

A flexible and versatile approach to training, microlearning is popular because it works for so many training scenarios. Why Microlearning Is Huge explores use cases in greater detail and spells out the benefits to learners, their managers and the training developers who create and administer eLearning. 

For more use cases and real-world examples of how microlearning can fit into and improve the training outcomes at your organization – speak with one of our microlearning experts!