Tips on Effective Bite-Sized Training for Immediate Use
CoDo commonly receives inquiries about the best way to create micro-training journeys or bite-size training. Creating content can be overwhelming at first, so we’ve put together some tips to help you along your way.
Much of the dialogue on traditional training is centered on long-term upskilling and building expertise, but some training can also be basic, simple and compulsory. CoDo’s strength and focus is on this opposite end of the spectrum; we utilize bite-sized training to help quickly transfer necessary and helpful knowledge that can be put to immediate use.
Here are some essential tips that can help you create effective bite-sized training, especially for the sharing economy participants (we will call them ‘trainees’):
Be hyper realistic in expectation
Let’s face it. Your trainees won’t have long attention span with their busy lives. You have to admit that you won’t be able to pass onto them everything you mean to. Pick only the knowledge you cannot afford your trainees to miss, and be succinct. Less is indeed more in this case.
Keep it short and sweet
Ensure your trainees can easily absorb the information in 5 minutes or less. The strategy we recommend is to focus on one topic at a step and try to summarize in 5 bullet points or less. We repeat this process for 5–7 steps in a micro-course and wrap them up with a takeaway step at the end.
Example: The micro-course of “How to get paid without hassle” can have a few sequential topics/steps. The topic, “Enter your Payment Information”, summarizes the 5 necessary steps required to enter one’s payment information.
Curate a story
If you feel like things cannot be all explained in a micro-course, make multiple micro-courses and deliver each of them in an appropriate timing in an automated learning path. A monolithic everything-in-here course will only overwhelm trainees.
With your pool of bite-size topics, string along a few of these to create a coherent story or theme. The best part is that you can easily add or omit the parts that don’t fit.
Use visuals
Videos, pictures, and diagrams can be used to illustrate complex concepts and ensure that trainees understand the content better.
Make it interactive
Incorporate quizzes, games or polls to keep your trainees engaged and motivated. Asking a simple self-evident question even improves knowledge retention a great bit.
Make it real
Use real-life examples to make the content more engaging and help trainees apply the knowledge in practical situations.
Give feedback and incentivize
Provide feedback to trainees to give them a sense of accomplishment when they complete a task. To raise completion rate, you can devise incentives ranging from mandatory flow block (”You cannot get activated in the platform before finishing this course”) to preferential placing or badges, or even to branded swags to show off.
Remember that the best part about bite-size training is that you can always go back and easily iterate the parts that don’t work. By following these tips, you can create bite-sized training that will make the training experience more enjoyable and effective.
Please let us know how these tips work for your context. We are here to help you creating the most effective micro-training for your context. Feel free to contact CoDo for the strategy kickoff.
