The 6 steps towards engaging microlearning content
Is it your belief that training your employees is essential to having a successful business? Good! Are you constantly looking for ways to improve your current training methods? Even better! Are you aiming to create fun and engaging content so that everyone will stay motivated and boost their own knowledge? Bloody perfect!
Teach them how to swim, not how to drown
Creating a well-structured training is essential but, unfortunately, it’s easier said than done, isn’t it? No worries though, we know the struggle is real. On the one hand you don’t want to overload your employees with tons of information, on the other hand there is just so much to tell.
Ideally, you want to create a training tool that covers the essential aspects of your company, a tool that will give your employees the chance to “swim”, instead of drowning in pages of complicated company facts and features. You want to make them feel empowered and more confident thanks to the knowledge you have shared! And of course, in a perfect world, it would take only a couple minutes a day to actually absorb all of that information in a fun way.
We’ve got you
What you are looking for is essentially microlearning:
Microlearning is bite-sized training content, offering just the right amount of knowledge to help a learner achieve a specific, actionable objective. In MobieTrain’s case, employees are provided with 5 minutes of mobile training daily. Not only does this improve engagement and avoid knowledge overload, it is also proven to improve knowledge retention.
We went on a mission to find the best approach to create fun and engaging mobile content for your employees and we came up with 6 easy steps to follow:
1. Set a clear goal
This is by far the most important step of the content-creation process and probably the most difficult one as well. Before you even pick up a pen or grab your laptop to start writing, you will need to establish the goal of your training:
- What do you want your employees to remember after this training?
- Do they have to know every detail by heart or is it enough that they know the essentials?
- Do you want to focus on more theoretical aspects or use practical examples like scenarios?
It’s important that you brainstorm about what you want to achieve with this training. By doing so, you will be able to create a clear overview of what you want your employees to know and remember. Write down key words, work with bullet points, create schemes or just use any method you prefer to create an idea of what you really want to achieve.
It’s always a great idea to ask your employees what they would love to learn! Maybe there are certain topics that they don’t really understand or just want to know more about. Ask for their opinion and what they expect and incorporate that feedback in your training.
2. Define expectations
Once you have established the goal of your training, you need to think about what you want your employees to be able to do once their training is completed:
- What do you expect to happen after they have completed their training?
- What do your employees need to do to impact the goal of this training?
Maybe you want your employees to become storytellers? Or do you want them to boost your KPIs and average sales? It’s all up to you, but depending on what you expect you will need to adjust your training and focus on specific items.
For example: If you want your employees to become brand ambassadors, it would be a good idea to focus on the history and values of your company. If you expect them to provide excellent customer service you might want to think about creating a customer journey training. Maybe you want both options and you can start thinking about making multiple learning tracks, each with their own goal!
3. Timeframe
This is the part where microlearning pops up: how can you provide your employees with all the knowledge they need in order to succeed, without overwhelming them?
The key is to keep it all brief and concise: you might have created the best training content on earth, but when your employees receive an endless training track they might just give up right there on the spot without even having a look at it.
Keep in mind that your employees will be reading the content on their mobile devices: the shorter and more compact it all looks, the better it will feel.
4. Create an overview
Now that you have an idea of what you want your employees to learn and how you want to achieve that, it’s time to make an overview. How you create your overview is completely up to you, but it might be a good idea to work from the top-down. For example, you could start with a level or a topic and move downwards by creating different subcategories.
Ask yourself: what is the bare minimum my employees need to know, and start from here. Begin with the basics and keep adding information where needed.
The golden rule is to maintain a logical “flow” for the user. In other words:
- Does your overview make sense?
- Is there a story for the employees to follow?
- Is there a logical beginning and ending?
- Once the very last topic is completed, will they know everything they need to know?
Don’t panic if your overview doesn’t look perfect at first sight. This process takes time and it might change a dozen times while writing your training, and that’s okay. Just make sure you have a clear starting point!
5. Keep your audience in mind
Always keep your target audience in mind! The content-creating process might differ for each group: the style of writing would be quite different for engineers as compared to your sales team for example.
Nonetheless, no matter who you write for, don’t overload your employees with overly-complicated content. The whole purpose of mobile learning is to get everyone on board in a fun and motivating way:
- Replace all difficult words with easier to understand synonyms.
- Keep it personal: Most of the time, it’s best to simply use “I”, “we” or “you” when writing content: “We believe that every single person can make a difference and it’s up to you to help us make a change!”
6. Content creation
Getting the right inspiration for writing good content might not always be easy. You can always base your information on manuals, online courses and the entire internet of resources. We have already talked about the importance of keeping your content brief and concise, but how do you do that when there is so much to learn? How do you turn pages and pages of texts into one fun an engaging learning moment?
Well, imagine that you would have to study this content yourself:
- Summarize your information in your own words: highlight the most important information and use only that.
- Work with bullet points: turn long sentences into listings.
- Start with a short introduction(video) where you explain what this topic is about.
- Use a variety of question formats: yes/no questions, multiple choice, multiple answers, ranking questions, swipe questions…. mix and match! Just don’t forget to keep it brief, don’t overwhelm your employee with too many questions.
- Keep it visual: sometimes it’s easier to show a video or image with the explanation rather than writing it all down. Luckily there are plenty of perfect videos and images available online (YouTube, Unsplash, Shutterstock).
Feedback please
Once you’ve created the content, always ask for your employees’ feedback, either through face-to-face meetings or a simple survey. Content creation is a continuous process of improvement and optimization until you find the perfect level of engagement.
It’s all about having the right vision: once you have a clear goal of what you want to achieve with your training and what you expect from your employees, you’re all set and ready to write!
If you have any more questions or if you would like some more guidance to create engaging content, we’ll be pleased to assist you. Please contact us at hello@mobietrain.com.
