Corporate microlearning & gamification: the perfect combination

Technology has radically changed how companies train employees within a company. Have you noticed? Gone are the hotel conventions, the endless and boring face-to-face training sessions, the reading of incomprehensible manuals.

These traditional training methods have slowly given way to other more modern formats, adapted to employees’ real context. Online courses and educational videoconferences are the order of the day, because they are shorter, more direct and reconcile more.

However, it doesn’t stop there. A new trend is signaling a turning point in online training, proposing a powerful and innovative combination of microlearning and gamification.

What are the benefits of this perfect combination? In this article you will find out how gamification and microlearning improve the performance of your workers. Keep reading!

Microlearning: a trend that’s here to stay

Several studies confirm that the average employee potentially answers more than 100 emails a day. However, they are unable to devote more than 24 minutes a week to learning. Hence, the importance that corporate microlearning has acquired in such a short time. 

It is a training methodology that involves breaking down the learning necessary for professional development into short, frequent and direct bursts, instead of using a long, complete course, which has been the case until now.

Normally, companies distribute these resources based on microlearning in open format, which allows employees to adapt their independent learning by choosing the most appropriate resource when they need it.

What do you do when you want to cook something and you don’t know how? Or when you need to fix a broken appliance? You go on Youtube and search for a tutorial that answers your question in less than 15 minutes. Microlearning is exactly the same, but adapted to the corporate setting.   

This guarantees that your corporate e-learning courses are better tailored to your employment needs. Their immediacy means that microlearning is typically associated with its dissemination through mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, where employees can carry out their learning experience anytime, anywhere.

The learning strategy of microlearning

The development of knowledge and skills through microlearning is based on these pillars:

1. Mobile technology for learning: your employees can use their mobile phone to learn, either at your business premises, or anywhere else. The schedule for training is not limiting, they can learn whenever it suits them best.
2. Varied learning resources: corporate microlearning uses multiple learning resources, coherently adapted to the mobile setting, such as videos, infographics, screencasts, podcasts, simulations and gamification, amongst others. The most important thing is that they are quick and direct.
3. Learning content in doses: it is not necessary to invest too much time in learning, because learning content is given in doses and each knowledge pill lasts between 5 and 15 minutes.
4. Capture the attention of your employee: the learning resources used are high impact, that is to say, very visual. In addition, because they are so short, they manage to completely capture the attention of the employee during the few minutes they are dedicating to learning.
5. Significant and constructive learning: the learning turns out to be significant and constructive because it has been chosen voluntarily to solve a problem. Thus, practical application is guaranteed.

E-learning gamification, or learning through play

Meanwhile, gamification consists in applying the techniques that game developers use in other contexts outside of training. This is done for the purpose of creating learning experiences that encourage motivation, commitment, fidelity and student participation.

In reality, what gamification does is transfer something that children do naturally to an adult setting. Have you ever noticed how your children learn? Exactly, they learn through play.

What gamification contributes to personal development

Fundamentally, gamification makes the learning experience more attractive to students, so that they better remember the acquired knowledge and for longer. But gamification also helps to achieve other goals:

• It increases levels of motivation to participate in and finish training courses.
• It improves the level of commitment.
• It makes the process of teaching-learning more fun.
• It simulates work situations so that people feel identified with their reality and practice in a safe environment.
• It encourages healthy competition.
• It enhances the learning process, avoiding content being forgotten.
• It acilitates learning in a way that promotes positive behavioral change.

Advantages of combining e-learning gamification and microlearning

Combining gamification with corporate microlearning turns out to be the perfect combination. Why? Here are four powerful reasons:

• Encourage participation in training: employees in general see corporate training as something boring and imposed on them, which creates feelings of aversion, anxiety and fear. This negative perception causes learning to become unattractive and with low participation levels. Remember that unbelievably boring teacher you had to listen to every day in class. You were hoping that time would pass quickly and the class would finish. Were you really listening? Not really, right? Meanwhile, the union of gamification and microlearning allows learning to be fun and thus desired, thanks to each employee learning at their own pace, in a more relaxed environment.
• Motivation through play: when employees are motivated, learning is successful. The union of gaming and microlearning fosters participants’ curiosity, motivating them to achieve their educational goals. Strategies are used to help the game along, such as competing against the clock, giving points or using wild cards. These strategies encourage the desire for learning in the student through self-competition.
• Greater retention of high performance work teams: adapting to technological change is necessary to maintain a high-performance work team. The new generation likes challenges, keeping themselves qualified and in constant development.
• Variety of subjects: the combination of gamification and microlearning allows working with any subject, including the most tiresome and boring (risk prevention, regulations).

Have you tried implementing these strategies in your company? For your company, it is vital to develop training plans which combine technology and the best learning practices, which allow you to create learning spaces which keep employees motivated and optimize employee performance. The integration of gamification and microlearning is the ideal combination to influence productivity in workers and create a favorable learning environment.