Mastering microlearning: Why 7 minutes is the ideal length for employee training lessons

Microlearning in Compliance training is an important part of enhancing employee performance and maintaining an engaged workforce. But in order for your staff to be as effective as possible, your compliance training content needs to grab their attention quickly and keep them engaged from start to finish.

Recent studies on the human brain have shown that it only takes a few minutes for employees to learn, retain and apply hard skills like compliance. Known as microlearning, this new training approach breaks traditional compliance lessons into shorter, bite-sized chunks to make learning easier and more effective for everyone.

What is microlearning?

Leveraging the latest in cognitive science, microlearning focuses on delivering compliance skills and knowledge through a series of brief lessons that can be completed in minutes rather than hours or days. Instead of teaching general compliance skills over an entire course, microlearning teaches learners a single skill or topic to make the information easier to process.

An added benefit of microlearning is that it’s been shown to help employees retain information better during training, further improving your staff’s ability to make the right decisions when a compliance situation arises.

Microlearning in compliance training

So what does microlearning look like in practice? When it comes to compliance training, you can use microlearning to teach skills and knowledge effectively in the following ways:
• Create lessons that focus on one or two compliance principles, topics or pain points
• Provide different content formats, such as videos, quizzes, games and more to keep learners engaged
• Use real-world examples and on-the-job scenarios to help staff put their knowledge into practice
• Make training available from anywhere so employees can learn compliance concepts at their convenience and give it their full attention

Since microlearning is simply a new way to teach content, it’s quickly becoming an easy and effective for organizations of all sizes to meet their compliance training requirements. Whether you need a few compliance courses or dozens of them, microlearning makes it simple to deliver key skills and information without sacrificing training quality. It also means that your employees can learn at their own pace, making microlearning ideal for both formal and informal training situations.

Why 7-minute lessons work best for training

According to recent studies, there is growing evidence that the average adult has an attention span that lasts anywhere from 5-20 minutes. Naturally, this has led some researchers to suggest that the average human brain can only retain and apply hard skills effectively within that learning window.

Understanding that learner attention will peak after five minutes and begin to drop off a short time later, your compliance program will be most effective when broken into bite-sized lessons within this training “sweet spot”. Otherwise, it could lead to employee fatigue and frustrated learners. By keeping lessons short and focusing on one skill at a time, you can help ensure employees have enough time and attention invested to learn the information, without requiring them to focus longer than is necessary to get these critical skills and knowledge.

While there are many ways to train your employees, microlearning can be one of the most effective because it offers the best of both worlds; it’s short enough that you can cover a topic in its entirety, but long enough to ensure learning takes place. So when it comes to compliance training, you can use microlearning to help ensure your employees have the tools necessary to handle anything that comes their way.

Written by Christian Willis from Fit2Trade