Instructional Design Tips to Create eLearning to Train Corporate Millennial Workforce

“Modern Instructional Design can address the millennial learning needs and help you create an effective eLearning.” In this blog, we will discuss the modern digital learning needs along with the corresponding instructional design tips to create learner-centered corporate eLearning.

But What is the Need?

Retaining talents is one of the biggest challenges in the corporate world. Despite every effort, corporates now have a hard time to retain employees and achieve their strategic business goals.

In the current business landscape, Millennial generation also known as Gen Y represents a major proportion of the workforce. Typically, they keep on switching their jobs throughout their career. One of the major reasons for this could be the ineffective learning and development initiatives. And traditional training approaches may not address their learning needs and preferences. Therefore, it essential to assess, review and modify the learning and development practices to effectively develop Millennial talent. The best solution would be to devise online training based on modern instructional design.

But Who Are Millennials?

Millennials, are the most diverse, tech-savvy, confident generation who tend to be little impatient at times. And surveys suggest that the good work-life balance and appropriate learning and development opportunities could create an ideal job environment for them.

Characteristics of Millennials

How to Design Training for Millennial Employees?

As an instructional designer, it is imperative to understand the learning preferences of millennials and design the learning that better aligns with them. So, before we move further, let’s meet Mr. Jack, a young professional. Lets understand his learning preferences better along with the top four instructional design tips to create effective eLearning.

Are you ready?

Meet Jack, Gen Y, to Know His Learning Preferences

 I love relevancy: Well, I am driven by a strong sense of purpose. I feel disconnected when the training is no more relevant to me. I always wanted to know what am I doing and why am I doing it. So make the learning more meaningful, contextualized and personalized for me.

Bite-sized learning interests me: Though I am a quick learner, my attention span is considered to be short – less than gold fish. Bite-sized learning or microlearning strategy would be ideal for me because I can digest the short, sweet, succinct learning nuggets easily. So please do not dump the text-heavy content and increase my cognitive load.      Video-based eLearning can as well be effective for me to retain the information.

Encourage me during the training: Appreciations and rewards give me a sense of accomplishment during learning and this certainly motivates me to do better. I also need immediate feedback and direction to proceed. You can provide me virtual rewards such as badges, points and currencies throughout the course. Gamification can be the best strategy to completely engage me.

Traditional learning methodologies are boring: As an experiential and exploratory learner, I prefer active learning methods that incorporate more multimedia, gamification and collaboration. In one word, the learning should be interactive and provide me with immediate and continuous feedback.

Embrace digital learning technologies such as mobile learning, learning analytics, gamification, augmented reality and virtual reality to get the best out of online training.

Conclusion

So let’s adapt the modern instructional strategies as part of on-going training to meet the needs of ever growing digital millennial workforce. Hope this post would help you focus on the areas in creating an effective and engaging eLearning courses.

Please do share what other instructional design strategies do you adopt to bring the desired learning outcomes in the corporate online training.

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