It would seem we've lost patience for a lot of things lately. Attention spans are growing ever shorter and the list of tasks and decisions we face each day in mobile, global, always-on workforces can seem to form a never-ending list of compromise.A colleague of mine recently sent me an article from Josh Bersin, on the Growing Role of Microlearning and reading it got me thinking about the effort it takes to create genuine engagement when your audience is known to flit between several screens and umpteen communication channels in a single day and spend an alleged five hours a day on their mobile phone.When faced with competition like Buzzfeed, Youtube and Distractify it's nigh impossible for L&D to compete with what's left of people's daily attention span. It isn't just a generational thing either or about learning departments catering to millennial tastes. Honestly, who isn't guilty of skimming headlines, and missing some of the detail when surviving the home stretch to Christmas?It's true, L&D departments aren't always popular. According to Degreed, who undertook a survey with 500-plus respondents, people rated their training departments with a scorching minus 31 percent net promoter score. Okay, it's true, we could be doing better, but credit where it's due, if they liked us as much as buzzfeed, they probably wouldn't be learning anything. Call me crazy, but I'm not convinced that learning, which so often links to compliance issues, can really be measured quite the same way as how much people enjoy their coffee or spending time sharing pictures of animals in seasonal knitwear.As Josh Bersin puts so well: "While we still have long e-learning courses, they are most often used for compliance training. We are too impatient and twitchy to sit still for long, and it's getting worse. We want entertaining videos that make a point quickly; and we want systems that let us find and consume content with the click of a button."There is little choice in this environment but to rethink and find ways to give workers exactly what they need, when they need it. There just isn't time or headspace anymore to press everyone through the same old training mould.In L&D these days, it isn't about scheduling training that's outdated as soon as the course is set, it's about knowing where to put things so that people are sure to see them and know where to find what they need.So what is Microlearning and can it really solve the problem?Microlearning is exactly what it sounds like. It involves delivering content to learners in small, very specific bursts. A single message or reminder, an update or a how to on a specific task that they need to know for their job. Like YouTube, learners can search for the content they want, subscribe, choose how they engage and are in control of what and when they are learning.It's like giving people a brightly coloured box of Lego instead of a book. The challenge for learning facilitators is no longer in making sure everyone reads and interprets the story correctly, but in making sure people can find the pieces they need for what they are trying to build and accepting that some people will build rockets to get where they are going and other people might prefer to follow the manual. Either way, it's awesome.For those individual pieces though, there is a formula that helps it all hang together. Individual pieces of content all need to be:To the pointDelivered in an engaging format (video is ideal, just in case you were skimming)Have high production values (within reason)Take less than 5 minutes to access and consumeWhile this change will be seen as problematic for some, a cheapening of learning programs and pandering to shorter attention spans (and this is true to an extent). Micro learning can also represent an important distillation and mental decluttering process for companies. We have to refine, refine and refine some more to get as close as we can to what people need to know and make those "need to knows" memorable. It's also about equipping experts in your learning communities to generate and post their own pieces for people to build on.Upping the production quality of DIY videos can be as simple as having a few clip on ring lights in the stationary cupboard and rededicating some of that labour intensive eLearning course production time to recording and video editing.Our favourite platform for micro learning is Fuse and of course if you'd like help along your own micro-learning journey, our team would be delighted to help.
