Does your eLearning pass the Gen Y litmus test?
They might not be able to afford a house, but Gen Y loves learning — as long as it’s on their terms.
Generation Y, Millennials, the ‘stay-at-home’ generation. Call them what you will, but modern organisations are struggling to find ways to retain Gen Y talent. One of the more overlooked strategies is to give them training, and lots of it. In fact, 62% of Millennials say they’ll ‘stay with an employer as long as they are acquiring skills and training’. That’s nearly double the rate for Generation X (tsk-tsk).
eLearning is an excellent way to provide consistent professional development training across an organisation, but is your content keeping up with the whims of Gen Y?
Does your eLearning feel like the Internet?
As a card-carrying member of Gen Y, I can confidently say that we ♥︎ the Internet.
Modern web experiences differ significantly from content created as recently as five years ago. We’re constantly bombarded by high-quality, professional content, whether it’s video, interactivity, or an article on Facebook. This has set the standard of what we expect of a web experience.
Your eLearning needs to match up to our other digital experiences or you risk being relegated to the not-worthy-of-attention bin.
How?
Look at what’s out there. Be bold with your module design by basing it off the formatting of a popular blog or online magazine.
One of the simpler tricks we use at Croomo is to make our content fit the entire screen of a computer or device (16:9 in most cases). This feels a lot more like a normal website than a little window that fits within our browsers.
Have you satisfied UX baseline requirements?
Gen Y’s have become accustomed to a certain level of basic functionality when it comes to user experience. The quickest way to frustrate us is to make confusing or buggy eLearning content.
I would prefer a simple experience with a clear, consistent and functional user-interface and message over more in-depth content that is frustrating to navigate any day.
How?
Test your interface and user experience before you develop your entire module! It’s literally that easy. Give it to at least five people to test and ask them if they found anything confusing or frustrating.
Are you speaking our language?
No, this doesn’t mean rattling off pop-culture references or putting memes in your eLearning modules (although they certainly wouldn’t hurt).
Gen Y doesn’t like stuffy and impersonal. Show us where we fit into the organisation, and how and why our contribution matters. Give us examples we can relate to and make your scenarios realistic.
Most of all, be concise. We devour information and want to get to the point quickly.
How?
The way we work at Croomo is to break our content into its most basic components or learning objectives early on and then test and add additional information only as needed. Try developing a 3-minute ‘elevator pitch’ about your topic and seeing if that conveys what you’re teaching. Would you be satisfied if a learner was able to reiterate that short message after they’ve completed your module? More often than not, the answer is ‘yes’.
