Imagine being surrounded by live electrical wires, natural gas lines, heavy machinery and busy roadways every day at work. For utility crews working in the field, these conditions are a reality in their daily lives. The tasks utility workers perform may have risks but are necessary to maintain and improve our nation’s critical infrastructure and ensure communities have access to essential services. To protect this vital workforce, innovative tools and training methods can help ensure employees have the knowledge and skills to safely address situations they may encounter in the field.
Effectively training and educating team members dispersed throughout different job sites, cities and states is critical. By tapping into the power of technology as part of an integrated safety and training plan, companies can bridge the distance gap through strategic communication and engagement. When company leaders invest in innovative tools and apply a proactive and continuous evolution lens to their safety efforts, they can successfully engage field employees in training courses and build their safety skill sets.
A rapidly growing tool and training method that companies can leverage to help mitigate risk and improve safety is microlearning. This emerging learning approach taps into the power of technology to deliver consumable lessons to bolster employee engagement and knowledge retention.
Take a moment to think about the training courses you have led or participated in throughout your career. There is likely one instance you can remember that involved a dull lecture, never-ending PowerPoint or overwhelming test at the end. Research shows that when individuals consume a large amount of information at once, they are less likely to retain it over time. Microlearning aims to solve this problem by transforming how information is delivered and received.
Microlearning is an engaging and educational method that delivers customized content to participants in three- to five-minute modules. The bite-sized lessons can be accessed through an app on a smartphone or mobile device and completed from any location and at any time. Because of the convenience and flexibility microlearning offers, it is an ideal training method for field employees. Plus, breaking information down into consumable key points helps to increase knowledge retention as well as employee engagement and participation.
Microlearning is mutually beneficial to employees and companies. The positive effects microlearning can have on educating employees, mitigating risk and enhancing safety training for field employees should not be overlooked:
Customizable content relevant to your workforce. Often, companies and safety departments have focus areas that require them to train employees on specific topics. Whether sharing new methods or creating lessons to refresh employees’ knowledge on previously covered topics, microlearning modules can be customized to achieve an organization’s individualized goals and ensure the information is relevant to its workforce. The ability to create custom content and test employees’ knowledge through a microlearning course can also be used to address performance concerns in the field.
A variety of formats that make learning engaging. One of the many benefits of microlearning is that it can make learning fun for employees. When creating microlearning courses, company leaders and safety professionals can choose from various formats and multimedia options. From short summaries and images to brief videos and music clips, microlearning courses can be designed to be appealing to employees. Quizzes, flashcards and other interactive features can be incorporated to gamify the learning experience. By making learning engaging, utility companies can increase participation, knowledge retention and long-term adoption among their field personnel.
Insights into your workforce’s strengths and weaknesses. While microlearning makes training convenient and interactive for field employees, it also provides leadership with valuable insights. Many microlearning platforms have a back-end dashboard that company leaders and safety departments can access to view course completion, scores and engagement rates. Evaluating this information can offer insights into which topics employees fully understand and areas that could be improved. Using this information, leadership can also develop future microlearning courses that address the workforce’s individualized needs. When microlearning is layered with traditional training methods, such as hands-on efforts, companies can improve safety, compliance and the quality of their work.
Cost and time savings. Because microlearning courses are created digitally and distributed via an app, companies save time and money. Modules take less time to create compared to traditional training methods, are easy to update as company practices evolve over time, and can be completed at each employee’s convenience, minimizing disruptions to the workflow.
In 2022, my company, Flagger Force, implemented microlearning to expand our existing training programs and help employees improve learning retention. Within three days of launching our microlearning app, 84% of employees voluntarily logged in and completed their courses. To date, we have created more than 170 courses on a wide range of topics and have achieved more than 51,000 completions. When surveyed, 90% of our employees said they find the learning format useful.
Microlearning can significantly increase the effectiveness of employee training programs across the utility industry and beyond, especially when it comes to training dispersed and deskless team members. With proper implementation and a strategy in place to guide course designs and concepts, microlearning can drive value and have measurable effects on safety.
Flagger Force is a Safety-Driven®, short-term traffic control company with operations that support the nation’s expanding utilities, telecommunications and other infrastructure-centered needs.