How microlearning can support soft skills at your organization

What is microlearning?

Microlearning refers to short and focused pieces of learning content that deliver knowledge in quick bursts. It can come in a variety of formats, ranging from one-page resources to short videos. The bottom line is that microlearning content should be quick and easy to consume, requiring very little effort from your learners. It’s the ideal solution for training busy employees or anyone who’s looking to gain specific knowledge in just a few minutes.

Check out some examples of microlearning.

What is soft skills training?

Soft skills refer to our ability to participate in social situations. Unlike technical or hard skills, soft skills are more likely to reflect who we are as people and how we interact with others. Because of this, soft skills are – by nature – harder to teach, since everyone has unique characteristics, personalities, and emotional reactions. For the same reason, it’s also harder to measure progress when it comes to soft skills training for employees. Still, equipping your team with these skills is essential to growing a successful organization.

Common examples of soft skills include relationship-building, teamwork, communication, problem-solving, and leadership.

Learn the importance of e-learning in soft skills training.

Benefits of microlearning for soft skills training

While it isn’t the ideal solution for every learning need, microlearning work well for delivering soft skills training. Let’s go over some key benefits:

• Ideal for employees’ busy and differing schedules

  Did you know that – in general – modern employees have an average of 24 minutes a week for training activities? When a full e-learning course takes about 20 minutes to complete, there isn’t much room to fulfill too many training requests. Yet, because of the personable nature of soft skills training, employees are more likely to benefit from a self-directed microlearning approach rather than synchronous training sessions.  Not only will microlearning allow them to save time, but also to engage in the training content asynchronously, according to their unique schedules.

• Keeps up with short attention spans online

  Moreover, research shows that learners’ attention spans are shorter in online environments, making the case for microlearning especially compelling. And microlearning content isn’t just short. It’s specific. That means learners won’t be bombarded with irrelevant information and can, instead, focus their cognitive efforts on key takeaways.

  Do not make these mistakes when teaching soft skills online.

• Keeps up with the speed of the business

  Job descriptions continuously evolve. Naturally, so do learning needs within a business. Instead of delivering lengthy training programs each time your employees need to learn something new, leverage the focused nature of microlearning to teach them exactly what they need to know in a short amount of time.

• Allows learners to immediately apply soft skills

  And when learners can internalize essential knowledge quickly, they’ll be able to apply it much sooner. When soft skills are essential to a job, microlearning is the way to go.

Have a look at microlearning benefits and types.

Create soft skills microlearning content with Easygenerator

With a user-friendly authoring tool like Easygenerator, it’s easy to create microlearning content for soft skills training. With our How-To guide and Checklist creator, you can generate quick- and easy-to-consume resources for performance support, allowing employees to fulfill their learning needs as they arise on the job.

For example, you could create a short how-to guide for customer support professions on communication tips for handling customer phone calls. You could even create a checklist for your sales team to remind them of the various ways they can respond to pain points when chatting with prospective clients.

And our tool is built for subject matter experts. That means you won’t need to go through a central learning department to fulfill every soft skill training request. Instead, Easygenerator enables any employee to share their soft skill expertise in the form of engaging microlearning content — an approach known as Employee-Generated Learning. That means heads of departments could create training content directly for their team members, among other subject matter expertise in your organization.