Microlearning holds a great deal of traction in today’s fast-paced corporate training world, where convenience in terms of time, ease of access, and precision of the information, is of the utmost importance. It is particularly appealing to busy frontline sales & customer-facing executives, who can get essential and just-in-time information at their own convenient pace.
From a business perspective, microlearning is appealing because it is fast and affordable. Due to its short duration, microlearning costs less than traditional training methods and can be created, deployed, and updated quickly.
But, creating impactful microlearning is not an easy task. To make microlearning effective, small, relevant, and digestible content must be provided in an engaging format that closes immediate knowledge gaps.
Here are 6 ways how effective microlearning can boost your sales training content.
1. Know Your Salesforce (Personalize Microlearning Content)
It is important to know and understand your target audience before you select a learning strategy. In today’s digital world, the attention span of learners is diminishing, so effective microlearning needs to cut through the noise and drive engagement.
Requiring people to wade through irrelevant content is another great way of ensuring sales reps, or learners in general, have little appetite for more. One size rarely fits all and with microlearning and the right platform to deliver it, you could personalise content giving frontline reps exactly what they need to make them more effective at their job.
Techniques to deliver relevant microlearning content include basing it on a sales person’s current knowledge level, perhaps based on a previous assessment, their content access history, or pathways that other sales reps with the same or similar roles have followed.
2. Identify A Single & Precise Learning Objective:
Learning objectives are the outcomes that your sales reps achieve at the end of each course. An effective microlearning storyboard should focus on only one objective per asset. When developing microlearning initiatives, start by identifying the distinct types of content you want to develop and present. Define a type-set and avoid blending different types in a single piece of microlearning content. Avoid the tendency to create larger pieces that force people to filter and skim read to get to what they need.
3. Include Micro Assessments
You can do this by leveraging gamification & game-based assessments. Micro Assessments gives sales reps the chance to apply what they just learned by answering a scenario-based question or a multiple-choice quiz. Ideally, they also receive feedback on their performance. Since humans forget most of what they learn within the first 30 days, they’re more likely to remember it by spacing the learning out over several days. Researchers have discovered recalling information for a test improves knowledge retention by as much as 300%. Microlearning provides a system for spacing out the learning material and administering quick knowledge checks in fun and newer formats that can also mimic real work challenges for sales reps.
4. Take a Mobile-First Approach: More than 80% of the global workforce is now mobile, thanks not only to increasing technological competency and dependency but also to the ongoing global COVID-19 crisis. Making training available to your sales reps through mobile devices ensures that people working at their convenience in their own space and time, are not excluded from sales training & readiness.
Factoring for mobile-first learning in microlearning content development is, therefore, a very important consideration. Developing microlearning courses with a mobile-first approach helps when sales reps wish to learn on the go (self-paced learning) and need urgent access to performance support solutions.
5. Use Videos, Infographics & Interactive Games: Incorporating different multimedia elements like videos, infographics, and games is an effective way of ensuring knowledge retention and creating impactful microlearning. Videos, images, and graphics create a strong impression on the learner’s mind, while audio narration helps in the retention of information. Infographics create a powerful visual impact and help in visualizing and remembering information. Use engaging and visually appealing images to highlight key points of a topic that learners can quickly go through and keep in mind. Interactive games are also very effective for microlearning as they allow the learners to actively participate in the learning process. Simulations, interactive drag and drops games, give the learners the scope to practice their attained knowledge and retain information and provide business leaders with deeper & more actionable analytics.
6. Leverage Existing Content: Content for microlearning courses can often be sourced from the existing classroom training content. You can leverage existing training content like PPTs, classroom training videos, PDFs, manuals, and assessment questions for microlearning content development and convert it into bite-sized content by leveraging content authoring tools & microlearning certifications offered by Master-O.
Numerous factors are converging to ensure that microlearning has a key part to play in the future of workplace learning & more specifically sales readiness & training. When built in the right manner and delivered via the right platforms offering the right set of capabilities for storing, embedding, managing, tracking, and searching for microlearning content, you can gain the dual benefits of effective upfront learning, and a resource library offering performance support long after the initial training.
The most effective microlearning platforms will enable you to seamlessly deliver microlearning in addition to the more conventional, in-depth styles of classroom and online training.
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