In business, the only constant is change. A customer changes expectations. A new technology rolls out. A process gets updated. Regulations change. Leadership shifts priorities. Your team discovers a better way to do something.
The problem is traditional training was built for an environment where change happened more slowly. Organizations could spend weeks or months developing a course because the information was likely to remain relevant long enough to justify the effort.
Today, that window is getting smaller. By the time a traditional course is designed, reviewed, approved, uploaded, assigned, and completed, the information is already outdated.
This doesn’t mean that companies need to stop training employees. When change accelerates, learning becomes even more important. But the way we deliver that learning has to accelerate too.
Instead of treating training as a separate event that happens after change, organizations can make learning part of the way employees respond to change in real time with daily microlearning.
Traditional Training Can’t Keep Up
Think about what it takes to build a traditional training course:
First, someone identifies a need. Then, a subject matter expert gets involved. An instructional designer develops the curriculum. Content gets written, recorded, and edited. Stakeholders review it. Revisions happen. The course gets approved. Someone uploads it into the LMS, assigns the right employees and communicates the rollout.
None of these steps are inherently bad. In fact, for complex training, many are necessary. The issue is using that process for everything.
LMS course designers spend an average of 48 hours creating a single course. Implementing an LMS course can take 12 to 29 weeks, depending on the scope of the content.
If a new issue starts appearing this morning, can you afford to wait three to seven months to address it? If crews discover a better process, should that knowledge sit with one team until somebody finds time to build formal training around it?
Before switching to daily microlearning with Tyfoom, Wheeler CAT experienced this expensive gap firsthand.
Michelle McDermaid, DOT Compliance Manager explained: “In the past, if we started seeing a disproportionate number of back injuries, we would say ‘Okay, we’re having a lot of back injuries. That’s some training that we’re going to need to develop next year’… but that’s a year later. How many more preventable injuries would occur in that time?”
When information moves faster than training, employees fill the gap themselves. Sometimes that works. Sometimes, it just creates a messy collection of knowledge that may or may not follow the company’s best practices.
Daily microlearning gives organizations a way to close the knowledge gap without sacrificing structure.
Stop Treating Every Learning Need Like a Course
Not every problem requires a course. Often, an employee needs to know one thing. That’s it. Why building a 45-minute module around a two-minute answer?
With daily microlearning, organizations can break information into focused lessons built around specific needs. When something changes, you don’t necessarily have to rebuild an entire program. You update the piece that changed and keep everything else intact.
For organizations constantly adapting to new technology, customer demands, processes, or business conditions, that flexibility provides enormous value.
Learning Should Happen in the Flow of Work
Traditional training often asks employees to leave work in order to learn. Whatever form it takes, training becomes a separate activity competing with everything employees need to accomplish.
Daily microlearning allows learning to happen within the rhythm of the workday. A short lesson can be completed after clocking in, between tasks, or during another natural break in the workflow. Employees receive a small amount of relevant information without losing an hour of productive time.
Financially, two-minute training in the flow of work saves companies thousands of dollars. For example, if 500 employees attend a one-hour training, you’re paying 500 hours of employee time for a lesson. That’s a hefty price tag for something they may or may not remember in two days.
Speed Means Nothing If Employees Forget Everything
Of course, we could make training incredibly fast by sending everyone a three-sentence email. Except speed alone isn’t the goal. Training has to move quickly AND stick.
Studies show that people forget approximately 70% of new information within 24 hours and 90% within a week without reinforcement. That means a massive training session doesn’t necessarily create massive learning. Employees may absorb a mountain of information on Monday and retain only a fraction of it by Friday.
Daily microlearning approaches retention differently. Instead of trying to teach everything at once, employees receive smaller amounts of information consistently. They have time to process one concept before moving to the next, while recurring lessons reinforce important information over time.
Your Employees Can Help Training Keep Up
There’s another reason traditional training moves slowly: Organizations often assume training can only come from the top. But some of the most valuable knowledge in your company is on the floor, in the field, at the customer site, or on the sales call.
Your frontline employees encounter problems and discover solutions every day. Yet if all that knowledge has to travel up the organization, become formalized into a course, and travel back down before anyone else can benefit, all you’ve succeeded in doing is creating a giant bottleneck.
Daily microlearning makes knowledge sharing much more agile by allowing subject matter experts and frontline employees to contribute short-form training content.
Imagine one crew discovers a faster way to complete a process. An experienced employee records a two-minute demonstration. After the appropriate review, that lesson can be distributed to employees across the organization. Suddenly, a best practice in one location can benefit teams everywhere.
On-Demand Learning Solves the “I Know We Covered This…” Problem
Fast-moving organizations need to distribute new information quickly, but employees also need to be able to retrieve information quickly.
An employee may have learned a process six months ago but hasn’t needed to use it since. Now the situation comes up, and the employee has three options: Guess, find a manager, or search for the answer.
When daily microlearning is paired with a searchable training library, employees can access information at the point of need. Instead of scrolling through an hour-long course to find one answer, they can pull up a short video focused on that specific task.
Employees don’t have to wait for someone to become available before they can move forward, and managers don’t have to repeat the same instructions. Empowerment keeps organizations focused and moving forward.
Fast Training Creates More Adaptable Employees
Daily microlearning not only saves significant time on course development, but also builds adaptability.
Markets, technology, and jobs change. The skills employees need today may look very different a few years, or even a few months, from now. Organizations can’t prepare for every possible change in advance. What they can do is build a workforce accustomed to learning continuously.
When training happens once or twice a year, change feels disruptive. Employees are suddenly asked to stop what they’re doing, learn an entirely new process, and immediately perform it correctly.
But when learning happens every day, adaptation becomes normal.
A company’s ability to adapt ultimately depends on its people. You can purchase new technology overnight, but the investment only pays off if employees learn how to use it. Your company only moves as fast as your workforce can learn.
Training Shouldn’t Chase the Business
For decades, workplace training has often operated reactively. Something changes, and eventually, training catches up.
Organizations need a learning model that can respond quickly, reinforce information consistently, capture knowledge from the people closest to the work, and make answers available when employees need them.
With Tyfoom, Wheeler now quickly creates videos to address issues as they arise. “We can zero in on back injuries, for example, and develop new training on ergonomics immediately and release it right away. That kind of rapid safety delivery system is an absolute game changer,” said Safety Manager Troy Worthen.
Daily microlearning replaces giant information dumps with small, focused lessons. It moves learning into the flow of work. It allows organizations to update individual pieces of content instead of rebuilding entire courses. And over time, it creates employees who expect to learn, adjust, and improve continuously.
The question isn’t whether your business will keep changing. It will. The real question is whether your people can keep up. With daily microlearning, learning can move at the speed of work.
Learn how you can use daily microlearning to build a better, faster, stronger workforce by scheduling a meeting to speak with a Tyfoom training consultant today.