By 2020, 50 percent of the workforce will be millennials. Is your organization ready to tap into this pipeline of learners?
Millennials entering the job market are ambitious and sometimes impatient. This generation has a lot to offer and are ready to take on responsibilities in the workplace, but they expect a lot in return: Engagement, flexibility, and the chance to develop their skills. So, how can you create effective online training for millennials?
What do millennials want?
According to Forbes, millennials are “the best-educated… and most thoughtfully-raised cohort in history.” What they want is:
- Shared responsibility
- Support for a work/life balance
- Ethical organizations
- Feedback—input will lead to increased engagement.
Millennials have lived the digital revolution. They expect apps, multi-device content, and social media in all aspects of life. L&D teams have huge opportunities to attract, retain, and enhance leadership by embracing smart blends of digital multi-device learning and performance support.
Let’s now look at five best practices to follow when creating training for modern millennials:
1. Get digital, and go multi-device
The millennial audience are used to starting something on one device and continuing it on another. Help them out by making digital resources and learning that works seamlessly across all devices. Tap into the generation that learns on the move in short bursts. Embrace modern, digital learning, and your engagement stats will improve.
2. Make learning into bite-sized nuggets
Like sushi, bite-sized e-learning is a series of small, perfectly formed, and tasty units. Learners are satisfied for up to 15 minutes at a time, focusing on one or two clear objectives. Millennials hungry for development will lap it up because they are a generation of self-directed learners. Use social media, instant messaging, and email to alert learners to the new resources on offer.
3. Provide opportunities for millennials to learn
Create online simulations, scenarios, and other challenges that let potential millennials learn. These don’t have to be in a work setting.
- Harvard offers a Mount Everest-based simulation that might inspire your own development ideas.
- Authoring tools with built-in branching and scoring mechanisms can help you build challenges, output them to multiple devices, and track all-important scores.
4. Track learners
Track who’s using your learning resources to identify those with an appetite for learning. Personalize future learning based on what they are interested in. Track their success with challenges, games, scenarios, and simulations.
5. Offer digital diagnostics for self-assessment—and recruitment
Digital diagnostics can help new generations find out which skills they need to develop. Diagnostic tools can be knowledge-based quizzes or self-assessments. You can also use scenarios, questions, and decision-making choices to reveal what an employee or potential new recruit thinks.
For inspiration, check out The Open University’s To Lie or Not to Lie game that shows a quiz in action.
Training is changing, can you adapt?
Training was once a “time out” from the rest of the day, requiring blocks of time devoted to learning a job-applicable skill or set of policies. Now, millennials want to train while they are doing other tasks so they can keep pace with their responsibilities.
As baby boomers retire and the workforce is taken over by millennials who have grown up using technology, you will be forced to develop training methods that reach their increasingly distracted and tech-savvy workers.
L&D teams must embrace smart blends of digital multi-device learning and performance support. Millennials can no longer be ignored, they will soon make up over 50 percent of the modern workforce.
