Small businesses constantly face new challenges to conquer. These challenges include discovering competitors’ strategies, finding ways to increase sales, and improving current products and services. Additionally, they must tackle these tasks with limited resources, making the list of to-dos seem never-ending. Recently, microlearning has become an effective tool for upskilling existing employees without overspending on expensive hiring cycles. Moreover, small businesses can customize their training to focus on skills aligned with future growth prospects. In today’s rapidly changing market, they must understand market expectations. This alignment has become essential for their success and sustainability and to adapt successfully at all times.
Here are all the ways microlearning helps a small business grow:
Improved expertise
Expertise is the key to establishing your small business as a name in the industry. It shows that your business not only sells a product or service but also thoroughly understands it and your target market’s needs.
However, constantly changing market dynamics make staying updated and consistently challenging. Microlearning helps bridge this gap by providing easy-to-follow course delivery and learning modules.
Additionally, these learning modules target specific subjects, teaching complex topics without overwhelming individuals with information overload.
Whether equipping your team with customer management or product-related skills, microlearning courses can be customized for fruitful results. With adequate expertise, your business gains customer trust and increases satisfaction, whether through purchase or interaction with the brand.
Practical and affordable
Small businesses often operate with limited resources, making frequent course purchases for their team incredibly stressful.
While the ROI can be promising, the initial investment may deplete the finances needed for other immediate expenses. Microlearning courses, however, are significantly more affordable without compromising on information and expertise.
Moreover, technology allows customization based on individual learning patterns, enhancing the overall experience. This encourages employees to take on challenges more enthusiastically.
Highly flexible
Learning shouldn’t be confined to the workspace. Instead, it should transcend into allowing employees to access and learn at their own pace from anywhere. Microlearning can be easily accessed from anywhere on a wide range of devices. This eliminates the need to attend the course modules from a particular location or type of device.
It benefits your employees, as they do not have to take time out of their everyday activities to accommodate learning but instead integrate it into their everyday routines.
The freedom reduces stress and encourages individuals to review the study material at their own pace. They are more likely to engage with the content, finish their learning, and put their newly acquired knowledge to the test.
Engaging and straightforward
Small businesses usually deal with unique, new, and innovative ideas. As a result, they need extensive involvement in learning as part of their everyday working methodologies. Microlearning cracks the code in delivering relevant knowledge without stressing individuals.
These courses are divided into smaller segments, making them easy to grasp and remember. Additionally, most technologies use AI (including natural language processing and machine learning) to significantly simplify complex topics without sacrificing the essence of the subject.
Microlearning also uses reinforcing data, adding surveys, quizzes, and gaming elements to make information retention seamless and lasting. It is excellent for organizations that require their employees to retain critical information.
Productivity oriented
Microlearning aims to equip employees with skills that help them spend less time understanding a problem from scratch and more time finding a pragmatic solution. It drastically increases the time spent implementing changes, optimizing for performance, and monitoring results.
The technology also helps individuals understand the methodologies used in their industry and how they can use them to their advantage. Aside from these, distractions in the workflow can make it challenging for individuals to refocus, eventually preventing them from maintaining consistency in their work.
Microlearning also saves time that would otherwise have been spent on completing long-form content. Due to this, learners are often more delighted to start with microlearning, as it ensures they can upskill without losing out on precious time at work.
5 Mistakes to avoid when implementing microlearning in your small business
While microlearning can propel your business growth significantly, getting it right is crucial. When implementing microlearning in your business, make sure to avoid the following mistakes:
- Not aligning the microlearning objectives and intentions with your employees, missing out on covering any knowledge or skill gaps.
- Extensively using microlearning for every department makes it challenging to grasp information that otherwise would be easier to understand with long-form content.
- Not optimizing the content’s delivery and presentation results in dull and excessively informative content that is hard to grasp and retain.
- Not creating universal content for different learning purposes, limiting the scope of application and the life-cycle of the content.
- Not checking the effectiveness and correctness of the content with current market standards will limit your employees to knowing (and practising) outdated information.
Bottomline
Microlearning can be of incredible benefit to small businesses that constantly upskill their teams to match the changing needs of the demographic. Its practicality and affordability make it easier to get started with and implement. However, you must focus on the uniform implementation of micro-learning modules while constantly monitoring performance to make sure the results are in your favour.
The technology uses pragmatic AI (including machine learning and natural language processing) to create easy-to-understand and retain content. The courses created are broken down into multiple smaller parts to prevent information overload and increase productivity. Moreover, as most microlearning platforms come with a versatile dashboard, these courses can be accessed from anywhere, regardless of the device. Knowledge can be immensely powerful as a small business constantly attempting to become the next big thing. If your business wants to grow without breaking the bank, microlearning can be the way to get started!