What Makes Conversational Microlearning The Future Of Professional Development?

Over the past two years, employees have witnessed a bizarre and uncertain experience. Now, it's time for workplaces to improve. It's time to prioritize employee experience. It's time to retain your employees.

Indeed, happy, productive and motivated employees are the pillar of successful and profitable businesses. In order to drive employee productivity and stay ahead of the curve amidst brimming competition, it is crucial to train your employees well. Because, a robust training and development program will help companies to increase employee retention rates. According to research conducted by Forbes, around 93% of employees are more likely to stay with their firm, if their employer invests in their professional development. Are you aware that an average human is less attentive than a goldfish?  The attention span of a goldfish is nine seconds; it is only eight seconds for humans. The question is how do we design learning that caters to such a short attention span and is still effective? In the age of digitization, it is advisable to switch from conventional and generic training methods to a more digital and personalized approach.  And that’s why CIOs across the world started to implement microlearning methods at their organization. Microlearning has recently emerged as a go-to approach for companies seeking to enhance training and development solutions without overwhelming their learners. With conversational microlearning, you can get your employees trained in many skills and lead them towards holistic professional development.

Conversational Microlearning: A Modern Approach For Employee Training

Microlearning is one of the modern approaches to digital learning where you can get your employees trained by providing them with limited training content. Instead of giving them lengthy manuals to read and making them take up courses that require them to spend hours at a stretch, microlearning involves providing them with bite-sized on a daily basis. This requires users to spend no more than ten minutes of their time every day getting trained in specific skills. Users can access training modules in engaging multimedia formats such as audio, videos, text, images, quizzes and tests, infographics, games, and eBooks etc.

Conversational microlearning is an innovative and effective way to empower, engage and upskill your employees and help them develop their skills without committing to long, dull courses.

This technology allows your employees to interact with dedicated AI chatbots to get trained. Based on the training sessions, your employees can ask questions, raise doubts, and get their queries answered by virtual assistants within seconds. Conversational microlearning helps you reach out to your employees working from any location simply by adding relevant training materials to your knowledge base. Such an approach to modern learning provides greater flexibility and scalability to the training sessions conducted by your organization.

Read More: Upskill your employees with conversational microlearning

Why Is Conversational Microlearning The Future Of Professional Development?

1. Personalized Training
   
   The use of conversational AI allows you to provide personalized training to your employees. The more a user interacts with the digital platform, the more the system grows and becomes familiar with their needs and preferences. This makes the chatbots provide lessons, solutions, and suggestions based on the strengths and weaknesses of your employees.  Implementing conversational microlearning within your organization is similar to assigning a virtual trainer for each employee. They keep track of every training session and ensure that the concepts of your employees are clear before going ahead with the sessions.
   
   
2. Catering To The Attention Span
   
   When employees are exposed to training materials that require them to dedicate hours at a stretch, they tend to get distracted easily. Also, they are likely to forget the majority of information consumed. With conversational microlearning, you can cater to the limited attention span of your employees and help them retain more information.  As the users are provided with limited information on a daily basis, the training sessions immediately become less intimidating. This makes your employees remember the lessons learned better, thereby increasing the effectiveness of the training sessions.
   
   
3. Integration With Modern Service Desks
   
   Some modern employee service desks provide users with the feature of conversational microlearning. This further increases the efficiency of training sessions as employees can get their issues resolved on the same platform, they use for getting trained. Here, the enterprise knowledge base is optimized to provide all the required information to your employees as and when they need it. 
   
   Read More: Enterprise Knowledge Management Is Crucial For The Sucess Of Organization
   
   
4. Integration With Collaborative Platforms 
   
   In the age of digitization, the use of collaborative platforms is substantial. Most employees working remotely and, in a hybrid workplace use these platforms to perform their daily tasks and stay connected with the team. Integrating conversational microlearning with a collaborative platform allows your employees to apply the skills learned to their tasks right away. Instead of switching between platforms while working, the integration allows them to work and get themselves trained on the same platform.
   
   
5. Use Of Engaging Content
   
   Reading plain text is never the best way of training your employees. Gone are the days when organizations could train their employees to succeed by providing them with lengthy literature. Conversational microlearning allows you to use engaging content formats to get your employees trained, including images, videos, articles, animations, infographics, and more. This, coupled with the limited size of training content allows your employees to get trained in a faster and more effective manner.
   
   
6. Reports And Analytics
   
   Conversational microlearning provides users (and the management) with detailed reports and analytics along with getting your employees trained. Just like a trainer would provide training reports to the trainees, automated platforms consider all the training sessions and provide comprehensive reports of the same. This helps employees and managers understand every user's major strength and weakness. 
   
   Moreover, conversational microlearning allows you to make your employees give tests and appear for quick quizzes to assess the knowledge gained through the training sessions. This helps the management make important decisions regarding the training to be provided to the employees.
   
   
7. Making Employees Self-reliant
   
   Conversational microlearning prevents your employees from being dependent on external trainers to learn the required skills. It allows them to get trained and obtain answers to their questions all by themselves. This boosts the morale of your employees and makes them self-reliant. Especially if you use conversational microlearning to train new hires, it adds to your onboarding processes as it makes the employees feel more independent and confident about their work. 
   
   Higher motivation and engagement make your employees more productive, leading to better and more wholesome professional development.
   
   
8. Encouraging Peer-to-peer Training
   
   Conversational microlearning is not limited to managers providing training content to your employees. Your employees can also use the technology to train each other. You can always make senior employees share valuable training resources with their peers in order to get them trained effectively. Simply by adding the required resources to the enterprise knowledge base, your employees can train their peers in specific skills. As no one knows their jobs better than the employees performing them, this further increases the effectiveness of the training sessions.
   
   
9. Teaching New And Relevant Skills
   
   In order to stay in sync with the dynamic trends across all major industries, it has become important for organizations to train their employees in modern skills and technologies. Conversational microlearning allows your employees to stay updated with these skills by keeping the training materials updated and relevant to the ongoing trends.
   
   

Conclusion: Microlearning Is The Best Career Path

These were some of the reasons why conversational microlearning is the future of professional development. Looking at the trends being adopted in the “new normal”, it is advisable to make the switch to digitized training methodologies like microlearning to make employee training more holistic.