What you need to know about Micro-Learning with Julie Watson

If you’re involved in the learning or training space you’ve probably been hearing a lot about micro-learning recently. But how much do you actually know about what it’s all about, or how to to start implement it into your next training program?

To help you understand more we asked micro-learning expert Julie Watson to come in and walk you through the basics, as well giving you a stack of tips that you can apply directly to your training programs. With more that 20 years experience in developing more productive behaviors, Julie provides some great insight into how you can take your training to the next level.

This discussion covers a range of topics including how you can get started with micro-learning in your organisation, how some major banks have implemented successful programs that have resulted in a dramatic culture change, embracing informal learning, and the key elements required to make gamification work.

One of the key elements to making any learning program successful is having buy in from all members within your organisation, and to do that you must make learning fun and experiential says Julie.

“Embrace the values of the organisation, as well as the individuals.”

Getting started with micro-learning takes time and planning. As Julie says, “Just because it’s micro, that doesn’t mean that it’s just going to happen.” Company Leaders need to invest time into developing programs and creating a culture of learning and development amongst their employees. Having individual teams taking ownership of their training is a great way to get everyone involved.

Micro-learning can easily be utilised for all elements of training within a business. It’s especially great when coupled with workshops, and used as the underlying continual learning process to keep employees engaged on a periodic bases. It’s not there to replace traditional learning elements, it’s there to support them.

It’s less intrusive nature means that providing sustained training is not an intrusive and time consuming experience like it may have been in the past. Where training programs of the past may have required large chunks of time sitting in a boardroom, we can now drastically reduce the length of in person training, and provide a blended learning solution to allow a micro-learning solution to continue the learning process once the workshop is complete.

With gamification being one of the biggest buzzwords in the learning industry at the moment, Julie gives us her top tips on how to create a successful gamified learning program by maintain relevance and not rushing learners through the process.

We hope that you get some useful information out of the discussion and would love to hear from you if you have any tips that you’d like to share with our readers!