By means of contrast, workforce training programs are often heavy handed in loading people up with concepts that they need to know, without the necessary tie to what they will be doing as a competency.
And while a talented instructor and good instructional design can definitely make a difference, the corporate training industry has come up with a couple of concepts over the past two decades that make a lot of difference when it comes to engineering meaningful courses, using microlearning and elearning.
Microlearning takes off
The idea behind microlearning is to isolate key concepts that are important and teach them in an encapsulated fashion, bringing new ideas to your workforce in chunks that they can digest and remember. For example, if you are learning about exporting, you might find yourself focusing on one aspect of export documentation that is important to know, before moving on to another aspect that helps you to build a clear picture of exactly what you need to be doing.
When applied holistically, microlearning can help your workforce not only understand a concept, but also retain it for a longer period of time. As the workday for many professionals is quite hectic already, introducing a concept, reinforcing it, and then extending it to your employees' work situation can increase the value that is added by having a trainer work with staff in the first place.
Elearning becomes indispensable
The flexibility that elearning brings as a part of corporate training programs has been proven again and again at many levels. With a mobile workforce in businesses of all sizes, it is important for training companies to be able to reach employees whenever and wherever they are working from. Consequently, major universities have done quite a bit of research in the past decade on how to incorporate elearning effectively, and how to make custom elearning as educationally stimulating as having a live instructor in front of you. The results of their work have trickled down through academia until they were adopted and adapted by most of the top training companies today.
So for employees that go online to study, there is a very good chance that they will have courses that are third or fourth generation in terms of how they were developed, giving them a much better chance of learning and retaining that learning than courses that came out when online learning was just starting. The logic behind much of the curriculum transition can be seen in a lot of places. Korea leads the world in the number of Phds that it produces on a regular basis. Part of the reason that they are said to have so many people capable of moving forward is that their education system takes advantage of their revamped alphabet/character set. It was simplified so that it became one of the most logical written languages around.
When you do the same thing with coursework, it pays employers back by increasing the amount of material that the average student will learn during a course online, making your corporate training programs that much more effective.
Microlearning and elearning have fast become embedded in the way that the top corporate trainers present to your employees. If you are looking at making changes or additions to your corporate training program, consider adding them as requirements as a way of setting yourself up for success. Finally, if you are the person responsible for training, sitting down with a consultant and having them show you the difference between traditional training and microlearning will help to make you an expert at communicating your potential success to your peers.
