Microlearning: What Years in Workplace Training Have Taught Me
By Mboneni Stan Mulaudzi
I Have Seen Training from Both Sides of the Room
I have spent many years in the railway industry, and a considerable part of that journey has been connected to learning and development. What makes my experience interesting to me is that I did not begin my career looking at learning from behind a training desk. I was once the employee who had to learn the job, understand procedures, remember instructions and perform in an operational environment where knowing something and being able to do it were two very different things. Later, I found myself on the other side of the room as a trainer, curriculum practitioner, manager and eventually someone responsible for thinking more strategically about how workplace learning should happen.
Perhaps that is why my understanding of training has changed over the years. I have seen excellent training programmes, committed facilitators, beautifully prepared learning material and learners who performed very well during assessments. I have also seen those same learners return to the workplace and, months later, struggle to remember something they once knew. That experience taught me not to be too quick to blame the learner or even the training. Human beings forget, workplaces change and knowledge that made perfect sense in a classroom can become surprisingly difficult to retrieve when somebody is standing in front of equipment trying to remember what was said three months ago.
For many years, we have tended to treat training as an event. Employees attend a course, complete the required activities, undergo assessment and return to work. Administratively, everything may be correct. The attendance register is signed, the assessment is completed and the records are filed. Yet I have increasingly found myself interested in what happens after all those documents have been put away. The real test of workplace learning does not always happen while the facilitator is standing in the room. Sometimes it happens much later, when there is no facilitator in sight and the employee has to remember, decide and act.
The Workplace Does Not Wait for Training
One thing the railway environment has taught me is that operations have very little respect for our beautiful training schedules. We can prepare programmes, allocate dates and plan exactly how learning should unfold, but the operational environment has its own demands. Equipment fails, priorities change, employees work different shifts, urgent situations arise and people are sometimes required elsewhere. The workplace does not look at our training calendar and politely postpone reality until the course has been completed.
I have experienced this tension often enough to realise that training systems have to acknowledge the environment in which people actually work. We cannot simply insist that learning must always happen in one place, at one time and in one predetermined format. There are occasions when that is necessary, particularly where technical competence, practical exposure and assessment are involved, but there are also occasions when an employee does not need another full course. What that employee needs may be a short reminder of a procedure, a diagram, a checklist, a brief demonstration or an opportunity to revisit one specific concept.
This is where microlearning began to make practical sense to me. The attraction was never simply that it was shorter. I am actually cautious about the assumption that shorter automatically means better. The value lies in identifying a specific learning or performance need and providing focused support that the employee can access without having to revisit an entire programme. The research behind microlearning makes the same distinction: genuine microlearning focuses on a manageable objective rather than merely compressing a large course into fewer slides.
Sometimes the Learner Does Not Need Another Course
I have come to believe that one of the mistakes we sometimes make in workplace learning is prescribing a course whenever we identify a knowledge gap. Courses have their place, but not every performance problem requires three days in a classroom. Sometimes a person understands ninety per cent of the process and has forgotten one critical step. Bringing that person back for the entire programme may satisfy our administrative instincts, but it does not necessarily represent intelligent learning design.
Imagine an employee who completed training several months ago and now encounters a procedure that is performed only occasionally. The knowledge was there during training, but because it has not been used regularly, parts of it have faded. A short approved refresher immediately before the task may be far more useful than expecting perfect recall from something learned months earlier. A technician may need a two-minute demonstration before performing an unfamiliar procedure, just as a manager may benefit from a short guide before a difficult workplace conversation. This point-of-need relationship between learning and work is one of the strengths identified in the source material.
This has made me reconsider what accessibility means in learning. It is not enough for training to have been available at some point in the employee’s career. Useful knowledge should, where appropriate, remain reachable. There is something slightly unrealistic about teaching people once and then behaving as though forgetting is a disciplinary offence. I forget things. Everyone does. The important question is whether our learning systems recognise that reality and provide sensible ways of reinforcing important knowledge.
We Sometimes Give Learners Too Much
Years of working with learning material have also taught me that more information does not necessarily mean more learning. As training professionals, we can become attached to content. Every paragraph feels important, every procedure deserves explanation and every subject-matter expert has one more thing that simply cannot be left out. Before long, the learner is carrying the educational equivalent of luggage packed by someone who believes every possible weather condition may occur before lunch.
The difficulty is that people can process only so much unfamiliar information at one time. The source material highlights cognitive overload as one of the problems microlearning attempts to address by organising instruction into manageable units. I have seen this practically. Learners may sit through a long programme, understand what is being presented and participate enthusiastically, but by the end there has been so much information that the critical points are competing with everything else they have heard.
This does not mean that we should impoverish learning by removing necessary depth. It means that instructional design requires discipline. We should be able to distinguish between what the learner needs now, what the learner needs later and what may simply be useful background information. Sometimes the most professional thing a learning designer can do is leave something out.
Microlearning Is Not a Shortcut to Competence
I would be uncomfortable discussing microlearning without placing a large warning sign beside it. In technical and safety-critical environments, microlearning can become dangerous if organisations begin treating it as a cheap substitute for proper training. There are competencies that cannot responsibly be developed through a collection of five-minute videos. Complex equipment, railway operations, technical systems, safety procedures and practical occupational skills often require structured theoretical learning, supervised practice, workplace exposure and formal assessment.
The original paper makes this limitation clear. Some learning requires sustained discussion, supervised practice and an understanding of how several concepts relate to one another; fragmenting such learning too aggressively can prevent people from seeing the larger system. I agree with that completely because I have worked for too long in operational environments to confuse familiarity with competence.
If someone watches a short video explaining how something works, that person may know more than they did five minutes earlier, but that does not automatically mean they are competent to perform the task. Competence has to be demonstrated according to the requirements of the task and the applicable standards. Microlearning should therefore support competence rather than impersonate it.
For me, the sensible approach is integration. A structured programme can establish knowledge and principles, practical training can develop the skill, workplace exposure can build experience, assessment can verify competence, and microlearning can reinforce important knowledge afterwards. Once we stop forcing one learning method to do everything, the different methods begin to complement one another.
Forgetting Is Part of Learning
One of the things I have become more accepting of over the years is that people forget. Training professionals sometimes speak about forgetting as though the learner has violated an agreement. We presented the information, the learner understood it and therefore, somewhere in our imagination, that information should remain perfectly preserved for the remainder of the employee’s natural life.
That is simply not how people learn.
If knowledge is not used regularly, some of it will fade. The answer is not always to repeat the entire course. Short learning interventions can allow employees to revisit important concepts, answer retrieval questions or refresh a procedure after the initial training. The research in the paper points to spaced repetition as one of the areas where short modules can be particularly useful because learners encounter and retrieve information repeatedly rather than receiving it once and hoping it remains available indefinitely.
I find this especially relevant in workplaces where some procedures are critical but infrequently performed. An employee may not need the information every day, but when the situation arises, remembering it becomes important. In such circumstances, making reliable learning support available at the point of need is not an admission that the original training failed. It is an acknowledgement of how memory works and how workplaces operate.
Completion Is Not the Same as Learning
There is another lesson that experience has taught me, and this one has made me increasingly suspicious of impressive training statistics. We can report that 300 employees attended training, 280 completed an online module and 95 per cent passed an assessment. Those numbers have value, but they do not answer the question that matters most to me: What changed at work?
I want to know whether employees understood what they learned, whether they remembered it, whether they applied it and whether their performance improved. If the intervention was intended to reduce errors, did errors decrease? If it addressed a safety concern, did behaviour change? If it was intended to improve a procedure, are employees performing that procedure more effectively? The source material makes the same point: completion rates alone do not demonstrate that learning has occurred, and evaluation should consider understanding, retention, application and meaningful performance improvement.
This is why I believe managers and supervisors are essential to workplace learning. Learning and development professionals can design excellent material, subject-matter experts can ensure technical accuracy and technology teams can provide sophisticated platforms, but somebody still has to observe what happens where the work is actually performed. The workplace ultimately tells us whether our learning intervention worked.
Learning Must Live Where Work Lives
After all these years, I find myself thinking less about how many courses an organisation offers and more about how easily employees can access the learning they need to perform well. I still believe in classrooms, facilitators, learner guides, structured programmes, practical demonstrations and formal assessment. I have spent too much of my professional life working with these things to dismiss their importance simply because a newer method has arrived.
What has changed is my belief that learning should end when the programme ends. I no longer think the classroom should carry the entire burden of workplace learning. There should also be room for the quick-reference guide, the short demonstration, the carefully designed scenario, the mobile refresher, the checklist and the brief piece of learning that appears exactly when an employee needs it.
The original paper describes microlearning as most effective when it is purposeful, sequenced, reinforced and connected to real work rather than being treated as a collection of disconnected short videos. That resonates strongly with my own experience. I do not want organisations to adopt microlearning because it sounds modern. I want them to use it where it solves a genuine learning or performance problem.
If I were advising an organisation considering microlearning, I would therefore not begin by asking, “How short can we make the training?” I would ask a more important question: “How close can we bring the right learning to the moment when somebody actually needs it?”
That question, for me, changes everything. After years of working in workplace learning, I have come to believe that successful training is not only about what happens while people are with us in the classroom. The greater challenge is ensuring that, long after the classroom has emptied and the attendance register has been filed away, the learning is still available when the work finally asks for it.