Microlearning is the next big workforce trend—Is your organization ready?
Businesses are laser-focused on capturing tomorrow's opportunities, but are destined to fail if their workforces remain stuck in the past. How can you tell? Is your organization entrenched in outdated lengthy methods such as mandatory extensive presentations that don't align with today's pace of work?
Employees across generations are continuing to prioritize their professional growth and they desire opportunities to learn in the workplace. According to a report from my company, Seismic, a striking 96% of millennials and Gen Z professionals view access to skills development as extremely important. Organizations failing to recognize and respond to this expectation risk significant talent drain, with 61% of professionals considering new job opportunities if skill-building is neglected.
Microlearning addresses this urgency head-on by providing concise, impactful content that employees can consume flexibly throughout their day and between appointments. It's about meeting employees' needs, driving better engagement, behavior changes, and most importantly, tangible outcomes.
Let's examine the workplace. It's more demanding than ever, pushing professionals to juggle extensive professional and personal responsibilities daily. As a result, younger employees are increasingly seeking employers who are committed to creating a balanced and flexible learning environment and mitigating legacy training practices.
The evolving needs of today's modern employees are failing to be met, with organizations resistant to changing the status quo for traditional skills development. When most work was done in-person a few years ago, half-day training sessions in a large conference room were the most efficient way to deploy training to as many people as possible at one time. But now that work is largely hybrid and remote, it requires both a different format and more compelling, bite-sized content. While legacy thinking has maintained this training style despite the workplace evolution, microlearning is overhauling this approach. Modern professionals actively seek convenience, flexibility, and autonomy, with nearly one-third (29%) prioritizing these traits above all else. Further, their preference for visual, bite-sized learning is evident with more than two in three individuals (69%) favoring video-based content.
Microlearning responds to these preferences with self-curated experiences that fit seamlessly into busy schedules without hindering productivity. This approach has enhanced employee participation and significantly improved knowledge retention and performance in key enablement initiatives for all stakeholders.
EMPLOYEES' NEED FOR PERSONALIZED, ROLE-SPECIFIC EXPERIENCES
Workplaces are dynamic operating environments. Every professional and team is different, and all require distinctive skill sets. Yet, traditional training often presents broad, generalized content that is difficult to translate into immediate skill application. How frequently have you found it challenging to listen to and retain too much information shared?
Enablement utilizing microlearning allows organizations to restructure their development programs into highly personalized, targeted experiences tailored to specific roles, responsibilities, and current needs. Approximately 25% of employees emphasize that such personalized enablement significantly improves their ability to quickly retain and apply new information. Overhauling skill development programs with microlearning offers professionals greater autonomy and empowers them to manage and balance their growth alongside demanding work responsibilities.
Organizations must ensure that these smaller pieces of content are consistently updated and visited/completed/used to remain responsive to the changing marketplace. This agility not only prepares employees to manage evolving challenges, but also strengthens their ability to adapt quickly to change by prioritizing tailored, relevant content.
Generational preferences around skills enablement inherently have strife. Nearly 70% of Gen Z professionals actively engage with AI-powered enablement tools, yet 80% of Boomers remain disconnected from these innovations, posing serious risks to organizational cohesion and success.
Forward-thinking employers are turning to hybrid enablement models that combine AI-driven microlearning with human-led mentorship, which nearly half (47%) of professionals prefer. This immersive blend of models provides an inclusive learning ecosystem, effectively reducing resistance and promoting adoption of new technologies across generational lines within the workplace.
Organizations can intentionally lessen the generational gap by adopting a hybrid approach that facilitates smoother transitions to emerging technology. The key is ensuring that all generations are equally supported and able to contribute fully to the organization's growth and success, instead of approaching this solution as 'two-sided.'
To integrate microlearning, leaders must actively reassess current enablement and development programs, identifying opportunities to integrate concise, flexible, and highly accessible content in everyday workflows.
Tip: Enabled content is never still. To remain proactive, organizations must continuously refine resources, conducting a thorough checklist to ensure they remain relevant and aligned with evolving skills requirements.
Leaders who incorporate personalized and hybrid solutions such as blending AI and human mentorship will drive deeper engagement and enhanced skills retention across generations. It's time to abandon outdated methods. Especially amid skyrocketing innovation and future challenges, organizations can achieve the agility and skills readiness crucial to thrive with microlearning.
Now is the moment for organizations and their leaders to rethink enablement and skill-building strategies. To meet the immediate demands of today's workforce and business realities, leaders must evolve toward microlearning to drive critical team agility and skills readiness to lead in tomorrow's competitive landscape.
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"When you get older, you tend to have different perspectives on your friendships," she said. "You don't need your friends to know where you are at all times when you're older, because you probably have children, spouses, in-laws, there's just different relationships that bubble to the surface in my opinion," In my informal surveying, which also included several coworkers, millennials were the most likely to have very strong thoughts on location sharing. Some outright hated it, although still shared with one or two friends, and others felt no need for it, unless they were happily coupled and shared with spouses. Some said they found it to be strangely intimate. Olivia Bethea, 31, said she only shares with four people. She said she's noticed location sharing coming up more in regular conversations, with people offhandedly referencing that they checked where someone else was. She doesn't see herself expanding her location-sharing circle more. 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Meredith Finn, a Gen Xer in her 50s in Maine, said she thinks she missed the location-sharing bandwagon completely. It would've been more fun in college, on a night when all her friends were out at different bars. "I remember nights when we'd go from bar to bar looking for some of our friends, and we'd just miss them," she said. "And it just would've been kind of nice to be able to see where everybody was hanging out. Of course, we didn't have anything like that. We didn't even have cellphones when I was in college." She said that she'd probably be willing to share her location with a few friends. But if anyone came up to her and asked to share her location, "I think I would say, 'Why? Just send me a text and ask me where I am.'" Leslie Lancaster, a 47-year-old in California, felt similarly — she said she's shared location when she's navigating somewhere difficult to find on a map, or trying to find friends in rural locations. Lancaster said she can see the benefits of it, but also how it could become controlling in the wrong hands. "For myself, my husband and I, I don't need to know where he's at all the time. So that's why I probably wouldn't share my location with him, unless I were potentially off on a vacation or a trip where I was not with him," she said. Both Gen Xers said they could see its utility in a time when folks are struggling to connect or feeling more isolated. Lancaster said she could understand the impulse to see where your friends are, even if you're not actively communicating. "People are so isolated now. I mean, since the pandemic and a lot of work from home, a lot of people are just in their little bubbles," Finn said, adding that it's rarer to pop into your regular coffeeshop and run into five friends. "It doesn't happen the way it used to." Gen Alpha may come up with something even newer and more horrifying Like many technological advances, your thoughts on location sharing are a reflection of your own situation. It's at a crossroads of issues facing our social lives: The lack of third spaces has put them into our phones, social circles are shrinking, and we've had to use technology to fill the gaps. I'm sure Gen Alpha, born 2010 to 2024, will come up with something that horrifies and shocks me (they're already back on Snapchat). As I creep toward age 30, I am thinking about the ways the social contours of my life have changed; in speaking with other Gen Z peers, we all realized we had a few friends we'd fallen out of touch with who were still lingering on Find My Friends. Right now, though, it feels mean to pull the cord. "I predict that this is something that you're going to change your relationship with," Goldfarb told me. She added, "I think that it's more likely that it's going to be a more concentrated friend group that will need to know this about you."
