Millennials came to the picture as trendsetters, market influencers, and let’s be honest, as weirdos too. Even if your company reached success back in the day using traditional methods, the digital age has come unapologetic. Not only millennials are the main consumers of products and services worldwide, they also represent 60% of the labor force.
Catch up with learning trends and Stay in the game!
Each generation has brought changes in learning styles terms, but Millennials have brought a revolution. You have possibly already discovered the multiple advantages -and disadvantages- of having a millennial in your team. Either way, we will not survive this demands unless we give them what they want! Like it or not, this world is theirs.
So let’s make some lemonade with human resources lemons!
Corporative Learning Trends in the digital age:
Condensed and concise:
Real focus time of human brain fluctuates between 10 and 20 minutes. That means that usually, long hours of continuous training may not be accomplishing your training goals.
Microlearning, which is normally based on videos, allows employees to have important and useful information at their reach. If relevant, it could help resolving problems and situations.
Bonus: Those little capsules can become a thing in your corporation and eventually become the ultimate newsletter -let’s be honest- almost nobody reads those.
On Demand:
Millennials -and the rest of us- have different peaks of yield during the day, different circumstances help us learn better and some others just make us almost incapable of paying attention. Sometimes we don’t even appreciate or find useful a tool or a determinate knowledge because we don’t need it at the moment or we have never used any similar before. Therefore we just forget what we read, listened or studied. Sound familiar?
If you want to use eLearning in your company it’s important to make it flexible, especially in terms of time and dates. If not, you would be making the same mistake that traditional forms of education have made before.
Video:
Regarding learning styles, there are few materials that can provide in one product, almost if not every possible form of content available. More so, videos are easy to pay attention to and can be very deep and comprehensive even if short. When we study through videos, more brain processes are being held than in any other kind of content.
Of course, that is if we include several of this components: Audio (music, voice over, dialogues) for more auditive learners. Text, for those who learn best when reading or seeing. Graphics and images, for those who are visual learners.
It’s important to keep the content relevant and current, to bring something useful to the conversation and with a close, simple language. And remember: be concise.
Competency-based:
This may be one of the oldest learning trends, but we have always needed to be competent. The only thing that has changed is that nowadays we are trying to figure out how to teach and learn competencies.
This is nothing else than stimulating your employees to develop skills that will lead them to solve problems with less effort and better results.
It does not mean that we should put aside content and hard knowledge. It means that we recognize that knowledge with no one to apply it successfully, means nothing.
Responsive:
Your company should provide time frames, adequate areas, and resources -such as computers and good internet-. But that does not mean that employees will always need or be able to use the learning resources in those terms.
Maybe they are in an urgent situation in a work travel , or their kids fall asleep early and felt like taking your online training. It is important that your team can access those important resources from multiple devices and in multiple times.
Relevant / current / coherent with reality:
As we said before, training and induction should provide opportunities to develop abilities that would lead to problem (situations, tasks, creation) resolution with lesser effort and better outcomes. And eventually busting your productivity and keeping your team safe.
- Provide examples and real life scenarios, you could even use your eLearning to create new products and services, as a focus group, or as an ideas lab. Learning is not just about studying the answers, you might learn more if you create them.
Personalized:
In order to make knowledge relevant, it’s very likely that you need segmentation, because, marketing and human resources won’t need the same abilities or knowledge. Of course, when teaching competencies, you could have some common grounds that could apply to all. Everything would depend on the nature and objectives of your learning program.
You should take into account your organization needs, values, and budget. If you want to know more about how to create your teaching-learning objectives you should check this: How to define your course objectives
If you are already investing in online learning, you should use part of your budget in checking profiles, particular needs and roles and functions of your team members.
Gamified:
It is important that education represents a challenge for those who learn, to provide opportunities to feel accomplished and to bust competitivity among your employees.
We have spoken of this matter before, maybe checking To play or not to play: That is the question and Gamification: No fuss, No muss?
