Microlearning Examples: How Are Companies Using Bite-Sized Training?
Is inadequate training an issue at your company? Perhaps your team isn't engaged in your learning program, or they don't even have the time to commit to it. If this is the case, microlearning could be the solution you're looking for.Tried and tested by corporate giants like Google, Cisco, and IBM, this article presents real-world examples of how microlearning accelerates employee growth.
🔬 What is microlearning?
Microlearning is a training method where learners receive engaging nuggets of information to digest in regular 5 to 15-minute sessions.
The goal is to motivate employees to quickly acquire and retain the skills they need to do their jobs.
🎬 5 Examples of microlearning content formats
Microlearning materials are regularly sent to learners, perhaps daily or weekly, for them to consume at a convenient time and on a device of their choice. Here are some of the most popular content formats.
🎥 Videos
Break away from traditional textbooks and stuffy course materials — the rise in visual culture means that video training is enormously popular, particularly with Gen Z employees.
Video microlearning works well as standalone content, perhaps explaining how to access a new system tool. But it's also helpful if you have longer course content that you need to split into several video modules.
Remember to keep your videos short: today's learners prefer content lasting no longer than 3 to 6 minutes.
❓ Interactive quizzes
Microlearning works best when it's interactive. This study examines the relationship between engagement, interactivity, and greater knowledge retention. It concludes:
"It is this instant-on or always-on interaction that makes the whole learning and teaching experience more enjoyable, measurable, and revisable where necessary."
Quizzes are the perfect interactive tool to offer within your microlearning module. For example, use a quiz following a video to check the learner has understood the course content correctly.
🕹️ Gamification
Gamification moves even further away from boring Powerpoint presentations, using a combination of animation and storytelling to train your employees. Some microlearning examples will also include a competitive element, inviting users to complete challenges or pit themselves against coworkers.
And the results? eLearning finds that gamification increases company productivity by up to 50% and employee engagement by 60%.
🎧 Podcasts
One of the many benefits of microlearning is employees can consume course materials on the road. And podcasts fit perfectly into this method of mobile learning. Training can be delivered while the learner is commuting, working out at the gym, or preparing for the day ahead. Use guest interviews for added engagement.
📊 Infographics
The infographic's combination of text and images presents an idea clearly and removes the tedium of giving hard data to learners. Use colorful graphics and visual flow elements to move the learner through the points you want to highlight. 65% of people are visual learners, so infographics are excellent microlearning material suited to most of your workforce.
🏢 15 Examples of how companies are using microlearning
Let's dive deeper into how major companies have firmly embedded microlearning into their corporate training programs and the results they've achieved.
Leadership and development
Google's learning and development team was looking for a new way to create a psychologically safe team culture across their organization. But they wanted to move away from relying on a traditional classroom environment to achieve results.
Their solution was to create a "whisper course," a form of microlearning - you send a nudge or whisper to a manager packaged as a series of emails. Each of these messages contained a suggestion for a manager to try during team meetings and 1:1 sessions.
For example, a whisper would include actionable ideas for doing this:"That's a really thought-provoking point that you brought up because ...."
Over ten weeks, Google managers improved their behavior in this area by 22-40% compared to a control group. Thanks to the program's success, microlearning has now been rolled out to cover other topics such as inclusion and coaching.
Inspired by Google's results, Freeletics teamed up with Zavvy to go even a step further.
Freeletics is an app-based AI coach whose people leaders lacked the time to dedicate to formal training. A common problem in the corporate world, the team were overwhelmed with daily business tasks and didn't have the hours to spare on growth and development. And for those who could attend workshops, the knowledge was quickly lost when employees didn't use it practically.
The company worked closely with Zavvy's learning experience team to switch to microlearning and overcome these challenges. By adopting a blended learning program, employees and managers received weekly notifications delivered to Slack or Teams.
These prompts motivated them to complete small challenges and lessons similar to the Google Whisper course. Freeletics loves the holistic approach to development, which is flexible and fits in seamlessly alongside their business operations.
➡️ Read the full case study here
Magellan Health's Talent Department offers extensive professional development opportunities for its individual workers.
Yet, only 11.5% of employees used the company's online learning platform.
To drive change, Magellan switched to microlearning, which involved curating existing content and delivering it in digestible chunks across the workforce. Training participation leaped by 80%, and the company trained 700 employees in less than six months. Better still, this has opened the gates to further learning opportunities, with employees routinely choosing additional training that hasn't been formally assigned to them.
Onboarding training
Asurint is a background screening tech company with a high proportion of millennial joiners who have little management experience. The company now uses microlearning throughout the entire onboarding process, including training on compliance, data security, HR, and industry-specific regulations. Once onboarding is complete, employees access training materials at their own pace to meet their individual growth and developmental goals.
The results? Asurint has reduced training time down from 6-8 weeks to just 4 weeks. And employee retention amongst new hires has increased by 100%. An additional bonus: 25% of the microlearning units are consumed voluntarily rather than by assignment. This proves that Asurint employees are just as invested in this training initiative as their employer.
🚀 If you're curious how to deliver a microlearning-based onboarding experience, check our onboarding solution.
Walmart is a retail giant in control of one of the largest distribution networks in the world. As such, it faces tremendous health and safety challenges in moving products from A to B without accident or injury.
Walmart switched to a microlearning program incorporating gamification. This allowed shift workers to spend 3 to 5 minutes playing a game based on answering questions about safety features. This also includes a competitive element, where team members can compete against their colleagues.
Voluntary participation in the microlearning program is as high as 91%, but notably, there's a 54% decrease in recorded safety incidents across distribution centers. This is the result of a 15% increase in employee knowledge and awareness of safety topics.
Similarly, US retailer Bloomingdale's required safety training to be delivered to 10,000 employees across 12 states. Their microlearning training includes 3 to 5-minute chunks covering safety topics like how to clean up broken glass and how to use ladders without risk of an incident.
The micro-units are available through mobile learning on tablets but also via a POS system on the shop floor. Gamification is a popular focus of the training, attracting voluntary participation rates of 90% and an 83% success rate in preventing accidents. In terms of financial value, the reduction in safety claims against Bloomingdale's has saved the retailer $10 million.
Digital adoption
Cardinal Health in Canada needed their sales reps to use Salesforce CRM. But many of their reps were mobile workers, so they didn't have the time to dedicate to classroom-based training sessions. For those sales team members who had completed the Salesforce CRM course, repetitive support queries indicated problems with knowledge retention following the training.
Course attendees' feedback found the training focused too much on why Salesforce was a good solution rather than demonstrating how to use it.
By switching to microlearning, this introduced sales reps to a series of shorter tasks that allowed them to learn the application at their own pace.
Customer service
Customer service is paramount in the leisure industry, and InterContinental Hotels Group needed to invest in training that would be sufficient for the complexity of customer requests. Previously, the hotel management for the chain had used infrequent classroom training, but customer-facing staff found it more convenient to switch to microlearning courses instead.
The units are accessed at any time and across a wide range of mobile devices, which has overhauled the training culture at IHG. Immediate results followed the launch of the new microlearning strategy, with 5,500 lessons accessed across five countries within the first two days.
Onboarding time now takes 2 weeks instead of 5, and employees are receiving higher knowledge test scores.
NextWorth is an electronics recycling company where customers trade in their devices in exchange for money. Initially, the program ran on the NextWorth.com website, but it expanded to brick-and-mortar retail partners like Target. Customers would bring their electronics in for an inspection, quote and payment.
As this was a large-scale operation, a NextWorth technician couldn't be based at every retail site, so this task fell to partner employees instead. But NextWorth discovered huge inconsistencies from impacted customer experience depending on where they traded in their products.
Microlearning was delivered to hundreds of associates, using short training videos to describe the trade-in program, including how it worked, its benefits, and the customer experience goal. The company experienced positive results within two weeks, reducing variance among retail partners by 50%. The trade-in accuracy also improved by double digits.
Sales Training
BH Media runs over 30 daily and 70 weekly newspapers, including multinational and multicultural sales teams, making it difficult to find a one-size-fits-all training solution. Prior to switching to microlearning, the company had challenges with training sales professionals resulting in variations in operations and processes across sites.
BH Media chose to offer micro units during onboarding training, ensuring that each session only lasted a few minutes and with gamification integral to engagement. 98% of employees found the content valuable and applicable to their daily roles, with satisfaction scores high from C-suite to entry-level employees.
IT Training
The Cisco Career Certification Program exists so that IT professionals can demonstrate their skills in Cisco products. But feedback from the Cisco course attendees was that the material and exam preparation was tedious. Additionally, the scope of the learning content was so vast that it was difficult to retain what they'd learned.
Now, Cisco has switched to using microlearning to prepare users for their certification exams. The company has launched the 'Cisco Learning Network,' including 6-7 minute videos, each dealing with specific IT concepts and acting as a quick refresher of core Cisco topics.
The video course material has been developed to appeal to those with shorter attention spans without the risk of them losing interest. But they're also long enough to explain a topic comprehensively.
IBM recognized that IT professionals and web developers had frequent questions about how to use the IBM Cloud platform. They found the best way to respond to these queries was by developing a microlearning program. This overcame the fact that IBM end-users often could not wait for a place in a scheduled training class when they were given a project or assignment.
The IBM Microlearning platform allows them to develop crucial skills in cloud technology at their own pace. It uses a quick and accessible exercise-based format, with each exercise based on a specific topic. Users can access the platform's training content 24/7 and pick up new skills whenever it's convenient to them.
Client training
ADP is a human capital management company providing payroll services and software to businesses. They have an extensive client base spanning 130 countries, each with employees in different stages of their careers. So they need to offer relevant training to everyone, from new starters to those nearing retirement. The company also has a global workforce, so the training needs to be accessible to people in different time zones and with varying working patterns.
ADP developed the Learning Bytes platform for effective training. The content is flexible enough to be adapted to the needs of each individual user and can be completed in bitesize chunks that fit around their work schedule. The platform uses a blend of PDFs and videos to consume in 5 minutes or less. Step-by-step guides are used to break down any topic requiring precise instructions.
ADP now has an average total training time of 7 hours per learner instead of 24 hours.
Employee training
Unilever, the consumer goods company, has a workforce spread across 190 countries. The company faced the challenge of committing to regular employee training without realistically being able to dedicate a day or two to refresh knowledge or upskill. The solution was to develop 'snackable' content that employees could access on-demand and in short bursts.
The solution was to develop a micro-learning platform that contains materials such as TED talks, social campaigns, instructional videos, and more. Training is available anytime for employees to progress their skills at their own pace.
At Home is an interior decor retailer whose previous employee training program involved team members providing an e-signature to prove they'd read a stale, formal handbook. Gamified microlearning was the core focus of the new approach to training. This was applied to several topics, including onboarding, health and safety, customer service, compliance, and leadership training. More than 3,000 employees across 100 stores now commit to gamified learning in short bursts, which has resulted in knowledge gaps quickly closing and essential topics reinforced.
- Onboarding time is 90% quicker
- There are 36% fewer safety incidents,
- and company-wide training takes 4 weeks rather than the previous 6 months.
➡️ Create a powerful microlearning program with Zavvy
If your company training program feels stale and outdated, Zavvy offers a user-friendly microlearning platform, making it a breeze to drive behavioral change within your organization.
It takes just a few minutes to set up your first course in Zavvy, either embedding your existing content using our drag-and-drop editor or setting up a new program from scratch with Zavvy AI.
Put simply: you'll save hours on course creation.
But what does this look like from a user perspective?
Here's an example:
- 💬 Your employees will receive a daily nudge, delivered to Slack or Teams, where they're already spending their time.
- 🎓 They'll then consume your course content in around 5 minutes, spending less time on training, yet supercharging their growth and development.
Want to know more? Contact Zavvy's training experts to arrange a live demo.