Microlearning: Safety Training of the Future?

Workplace safety shouldn’t be taboo. In fact, it’s a legal requirement to protect workers and to abide by the regulations of OSHA and other risk management companies. That being said, the average safety training course can take at least one hour to conduct and can take even longer to retain. Though this time away from production is necessary and encouraged to complete safety training, it is costly to businesses. Lost production can cost millions each year, and can ultimately affect the businesses’ ability to meet deadlines on projects. How do we balance the need for employee safety training while satisfying production requirements? Microlearning.

What is Microlearning?

Microlearning is a new safety training method for employers to ensure safety competency while also minimizing lost production costs. The idea with microlearning is to educate by delivering training content as smaller, specific, individual modules. Doing so provides flexibility of what learners will retain, and the best time to retain it. Microlearning is typically conducted through online training formats; either video streaming or interactive training formats (e-learning). This flexible model of safety training has been proven beneficial for both employer time management needs, and employee safety training retention.

One of the greatest challenges in safety training is holding the attention span of workers to keep them focused on the subject matter. In turn, the main objective is to promote a synergized safety culture. But typical safety training videos can be long, boring and difficult to follow for a learner. Microlearning becomes the solution, as it is condensed to shorter burst of hyper-specific topics. Many times, microlearning courses are simple topic sections of a greater safety training course. These condensed topics can then be assigned for learners to complete.

With the growth of eLearning and other forms of online safety training, employers are looking to find ways to expedite the training process while also keeping it memorable and engaging. As we’ve seen in the past few years, companies are stepping away from the traditional means of training and are looking for streamlined, eLearning solutions. Microlearning looks to be the new move and, honestly, we can see why.

Benefits of Microlearning

To sum it up, microlearning is a new eLearning solution that focuses on more condensed style learning for employers to implement and assign to their employees or learners. With this comes rewarding benefits for both the organization and the workers:

• Compliments current training strategies in improving information retention
• Reduces impact on production due to less time away in classrooms
• Available through eLearning platforms (desktop, tablets and phones)
• Shorter training times help with employee engagement
• Helps with reinforcing specific topics related to recent incidents
• Allows the flexibility of training on one-off topics (Active Shooter, etc.)

With all these benefits, microlearning has become more and more adapted as a delivery of safety training content, because it not only carries essential benefits that ensure workers’ health and safety, it creates a sound workplace safety culture.

Where Can I Get Microlearning?

Atlantic Training continues to offer the most comprehensive safety training library around, and our microlearning solutions are no different. Our library spans hundreds of different safety training topics – such as Forklift Safety, Bloodborne Pathogens and Sexual Harassment – and our massive collection of new microlearning courses offers even more safety training options and solutions for whatever the scope of your company. Plus, they can be used in our learning management system (LMS), WAVE, or added directly to your own LMS (SCORM compliant).

At the end of the day, employees are the backbone of any organization, and safety training is one of the most important tools a company needs in order to protect them from preventable incidents. Time to ditch the taboo around workplace safety and make it a prominent fixture, and that can now be easily done with microlearning.