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How to use data-driven microlearning to train and motivate frontline employees to perform their best

Delivering personalized learning at scale

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Learning that’s personalized, delivered at scaleEveryone recognizes that personalized learning is better.It’s stating the obvious. Where things get trickier is how toaccomplish that at scale.

Next generation learning experience platformsset their sights on doing just that: provide personalizedlearning that engages learners, delivered at scale, resultingin meaningful performance improvements.

Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI), these systemspresent personalized training activities, determined byreal-time data-driven analysis. Along with that, employeesget personalized messages about upcoming training,nudges to complete exercises, even feedback to drivethem to engage with the learning more often toperform better. And it’s all done with automation.

Beyond that, the machine learning that comes from anAI-assisted process serves to continuously refine learningcontent, when it’s made available, and the way in whichfeedback is given. In addition, because the learning performance data is fresher, more relevant, and transparent, coaching sessions with managers are more productive.

This isn’t something to hope for. It’s here now, beingused by some of the world’s top companies to engagetheir employees to learn more, better, and faster toachieve peak performance.

Microlearning boosts knowledge absorptionInstead of taking employees off to conference rooms for daylong training sessions, personalized learning, at scale, is best achieved with microlearning. It presents bite-sized learning in the flow of work that’s absorbed, retained, and applied well.

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Microlearning is about collecting the right data about the audience (learners), segmenting them, and applying different rules and actions to ensure engagement in the learning, at the right level and context. The aim is to connect your employees with the right learning at the right time in the right way.

Microlearning requires less effort, delivers great results

Microlearning engagement drives greatreturns, letting you:

→ Deliver relevant retrieval practice and learning repetition

→ Trigger learning based on knowledge gaps and confidence levels

→ Deliver personalized learning feedback and enroll in new learning paths

→ Deliver superior performance support

Microlearning explained:“Relatively short engagements in learning-related activities—typically ranging from a few seconds up to a few minutes — that may provide any combination of content presentation, review, practice, reflection, behavioral prompting, performance support, goal reminding, persuasive messaging, task assignments, social interaction, diagnosis, coaching, management interaction, or other learning related methodologies.”

- Will Thalheimer, innovator in learning evaluation and presentation science

g g → Reduce admin time → Reduce manager labor → Reduce inefficiencies

→ Increase engagement → Personalize at scale → Drive business results

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Gets the right learning to the right employees at the right time Microlearning is about delivering bite-sized learning tolearners, whether in-class, for self-paced learning, repetitivepractice or performance support. In all cases, it facilitateslearning that is just several minutes long – from a numberof microlearning items in a classroom environment, to onebrief engagement daily (for learning repetition) in the flow ofwork; while on the job.

Since you’d be serving small bites of learning, the trick is toserve the right learning at the right time, and to do so in away that will keep the learner engaged.

Here’s an example:

→ Performance data coming from the CRM tracks sales of products A, B, and C for each salesperson.

→ Travis, a salesperson, doesn’t seem to be selling product C.

→ Is he lacking in confidence? Suffering from a knowledge gap? Having other issues?

→ Typically learning managers won’t even be aware of the issue, but if CRM data was used as an input to the learning experience platform, it could trigger a learning recommendation for Travis to address his knowledge gaps

→ Other inputs can be that Travis wasn’t any good at assessments involving product C or seemed underconfident when questioned about it. These are also inputs to the learning experience platform.

Identifying the right learning or the right time isn’t a trivialthing to do. It requires your learning experience platformbe able to “sense” what’s going on in other systems. Forinstance, the platform needs to “know” that a salespersondoesn’t know how to sell a certain product, or that a servicetechnician isn’t familiar with a certain process.

Often, this data isn’t available in any form within learningplatforms. That’s why a learning experience platform that draws on data from multiple sources, like your CRM system, to adapt to it in real-time to deliver personalized learning at scale.

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gReal-timeperformance

data

gReal-timesupportsearches gManager

feedback

gCustomerfeedbackgActual

knowledgelevels

gSelf

evaluation

gText

analytics

Learning experience platform “senses”

multiple data sources to drive personalized

learning

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The 4 steps of learning engagement automation

Define desiredoutcome

→ What would you like to happen

Select audienceand triggers

→ Define your target segments & events

Test & optimize → Did the trigger

have the desired outcomes?

1 3 2 4 Choose actions

→ What happens when the trigger occurs

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DEEP DIVE

How to segment learner audiencesImagine you’re a private tutor. To get the most from your tutoring sessions you observe your students’ resultsand ask questions to adapt learning to their needs. You will repeat points a student didn’t fully understand, and youwill ask for feedback to gauge sentiment. And, then, you adapt exercises to the student’s level of understanding.

When working with a larger group of learners you do the same thing. Here, as you’ll not have the capacity toadapt to each learner personally, you will ask questions and observe behaviors to segment students into groupsand deliver personalized learning.

Initial segmentation can be as follows:

→ Are they novices or veteran employees? What are the employees’ tenure in their role? What are their performance levels?

→ What position are they in?

→ What will they need the training for?

→ When must their training be completed?

→ What previous training have they had?

Additionally, audience segmentation takes the following into account:

→ How did learners perform so far?

→ What is their stance on training?

→ Are they engaged?

→ How confident are they in their knowledge?

→ What knowledge do they possess?

After a learning campaign is completed, you could ask more questions to see what further learning is necessary:

→ Are learners applying what they’ve learned on the job? Are they making errors? (From enterprise systems – for example, are calls logged correctly in the CRM)

→ Are learners who completed training applying it to work? (Are they selling the new product the way they were trained?)

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DEEP DIVE

How to set learning activity triggersBased on the information collected about your learning audiences you can now set triggers to automate actions. For instance, for learners that are knowledgeable but lacking confidence, you can send feedback and badges telling them their knowledge is correct and that they have high scores. Over-confident employees can get messages directing them to correct misconceptions. Triggers use guided adaptation: Provide employees with data, knowledge, and guidance needed to continuously improve performance.

When a learner achieves a certain performance milestone (or misses it) actions can include additional learning, suggesting a course of action or manager-prompted feedback. In general, actions triggered belong to the following four groups:

g g g01

Enrollment for

02Personalization

for

03Engagement

for

04Performance Support

for → Onboarding → Compliance → Product training

→ Retreival practice → Repeat training → Increase difficulty

→ Engagement messages → Drive manager intervention → Gamified competitions

→ Moment of need learning → Impove results → Adapt training for next batch

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ENROLLMENT – The right microlearning threads for the specific employeeBased on standard training requirements for different employee segments (e.g. new hires, team managers, etc.), youcan set triggers that add employees automatically to relevant courses or learning streams. A relevant triggerfor compliance can be set to review which employees completed certification training within the past 12 months. Inaddition to enrolling employees, the platform is able to trigger the sending of notifications to relevant employees andmanagers to let them know new learning materials are available and providing the time frame by which this trainingmust be completed.

PERSONALIZATION – Delivery of personalized learningSAT exams employ adaptive assessments – test difficulty increases based on the learner’s success. There is no wizardrybehind this and the mechanism is quite simple. Questions on each topic are pooled based on difficulty and once alearner answers enough questions from one pool correctly, the next batch of questions is automatically drawn from thenext pool. The same simple process can be applied to create adaptive corporate training.

These mechanisms can also be used for spaced repetition – identifying weak and strong areas and applying spacedrepetition accordingly prompted to give feedback to poor performers.

ENGAGEMENT – Encouraging and nudging learners to participate in relevant learning activitiesTo drive high completion rates and make sure learners are attentive and earnest in their learning activities you can useengagement messages.

Imagine your learning experience platform measures how many times each week certain employees engage with their training materials. You can send feedback automatically such as messages acknowledging learning achievement incompleting a learning campaign.

Group

03

Group

01

Group

02

10

Group

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Guided Adaptation:“Provide employees with data, knowledge, and guidance needed to continuously improve performance”

- Josh Bersin, corporate learning expert

Learning engagement sometimes requires the support of direct managers. Here triggers can help us empowermanagers to take an active part in their report’s training. We could, for instance, trigger notifications to the departmentmanager that a certain employee is falling behind in his regulatory compliance training.

PERFORMANCE SUPPORT – Delivering training on the job to help employees improve their workFor a holistic learning experience, advanced microlearning experience platforms can integrate with and draw real-time datafrom enterprise systems, such as CRMs, calendars, project management systems, and more. This will provide an extra layerof training triggered to provide performance support exactly at the moment of need.

Imagine, for example, triggering a 5-minute refresher session on a new company product automatically when asales agent is scheduled to hold a meeting with a prospective client. Alternatively, imagine employees whorecently had repeated safety incidents reported are automatically enrolled in a preventive safety training program.

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About CentricalAt Centrical our platform provides an engagement and automation layer for corporate learning. We are constantly involved in projects with several Fortune 500-type companies to either enhance and modernize existing LMS or replace them with a more personalized microlearning experience platform. As such, we support a wide variety of options for segmenting learning audiences and triggering learning activities based on data.

Whether you choose to implement Centrical or any other advanced platform, this eBook has provided you with the framework and some relevant examples to help demystify e-learning engagement automation to help you implement it at your organization.

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To learn more and see if a next-generation learning experience platform is right for youemail sales@centrical.com

or call (US) +1 800 538 4263 or (UK) +44 20 3318 6424

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