Imagine this, your dishwasher stops working and there’s a red-light flashing. Do you pull out the owners’ manual online (assuming you can even find it), flipping through the pages to determine the best way to resolve this issue? More than likely, you’re no different than the rest of us and you find yourself seeking out micro learning – doing a quick Google search for ‘GE dishwasher not working, red light flashing’ to fix the problem.
Congrats! You too are what we call a “micro-learner”. In fact, we all are! We learn things in bite size chunks; micro-learning makes concepts easier to understand, remember and execute upon. It simply makes sense! This style of learning and application is logical, time efficient and quite effective.
Micro-learning concentrates on a specific skill, not an overall concept, delivering only the most powerful and relevant information. So how does this work in the multifamily world? You’re in the leasing office and you observe Suzy answering a lot of the phone calls. Although she seems to be hitting the mark on most areas of her presentation, you notice Suzy is not asking her prospects to set an appointment, which you know is important to moving the next phase. This is an example of where a micro-learning course is an effective way to educate and train Suzy as she works to perfect her telephone presentation. What micro-learning courses do is target a very specific area of improvement, keeping the content relevant and on point while also being short in length.
Historically, online courses are content heavy, more generic in nature and void of scenarios that our onsite team can identify with, much less address in their day to day responsibilities. But who has time or even the attention span (did you know that research has found that goldfish have a longer attention span than that of a human being – who knew?) to participate in long and tedious online courses? Is this traditional style of learning effective in today’s fast paced environment and easily distracted society?
Thankfully, a gentleman by the name of Theo Hug introduced the concept of micro-learning over 10 years ago, and many industries, including multi-family are just now accepting this learning approach as an effective way to educate adult learners.
Today’s learner not only needs to dedicate time to develop and fine tune their skills but they need relevant training that is going to make a difference in their day to day performance. The micro-learning approach centers around retention and application of the behaviors and skill sets needed in today’s competitive market.
