Microlearning For The Automotive Industry

The automotive industry is an industry which requires the training of a vast number of employees responsible for various different jobs. This ranges from blue collar workers working in the manufacturing plant, to white collar employees working in the corporate offices, to managers managing white collar employees in the head office.

Training hundreds of employees divided into groups according to their roles, each group requiring a different set of skills, can be incredibly difficult using traditional training methods. This is even truer in modern times, when employees in a single automotive organization can be (and usually are) spread across wide geographical locations. Because eLearning solves all of these problems, it is a learning approach far better than traditional training methods. But eLearning is rapidly evolving, and currently the best eLearning approach the automotive industry can employ to train their heterogeneous groups of employees is microlearning.

In this article, we will discuss reasons why microlearning is the best fit for employee learning and development in the automotive industry in current times.

1. Can Train Employees Wherever They Are

Microlearning goes hand-in-hand with mobile learning. A number of blue collar workers may not know how to operate a computer, however, most of them know how to operate smartphones. If not, they can be trained to do that using blended learning (a mixture of traditional classroom training and eLearning). Using smartphones, both blue collar and white collar employees can access their microlearning training modules whenever and wherever they want using their smartphones. What’s best is that they do not need to devote hours every day for training, as microlearning modules are a maximum of 3-5 minutes long.

2. It Can Be Personalized According To Each Job Role

As mentioned before, the automotive industry has a number of job roles and departments. Microlearning can be used to send modules to employees to train them in specific skills relevant to their job roles. Because eLearning is mostly audio-visual and typically does not contain much text, it keeps various types of employees engaged. Good authoring tools harbour a translation feature, allowing organizations to accommodate the needs of employees. EdApp, for instance, is able to automatically translate microlearning courses into over 100 languages.

3. It Can Be Used To Teach White Collar Employees Soft Skills

The white collar employees working in the offices of an automotive organization are quintessential corporate employees and every corporate employee needs excellent soft skills for a number of reasons. These include finding, attracting and retaining clients, providing excellent customer service, and creating solid relationships with colleagues, vendors and other professional contacts. Microlearning helps employees learn soft skills at their own pace and on their own schedule. It is also great for just-in-time learning, for example, learning meeting etiquette 5 minutes before an important meeting. Modern white collar workers have a natural inclination towards learning on the fly and microlearning gives them exactly what they want.

4. It Can Be Used To Teach Blue Collar Employees Hard Skills

While blue collar workers require soft-skills as well, the prime skills to develop are predominantly hard skills, such as mechanical skills to operate and maintain machinery, problem-solving skills to be able to work in all kinds of settings and find alternative ways to get a job done, as well as physical skills to able to assemble products accurately. Microlearning, particularly video-based microlearning, can help blue-collar employees learn all of the above mentioned skills in a step-by-step manner in a matter of minutes. Workers can also retake any of these modules as many times as they like on their smartphones to refresh any of the skills.

5. It Can Be Used To Teach Management Skills To Managers

Managers are constantly planning in the offices and factories, communicating with both white and blue collar employees, making quick decisions, solving both short-term and long-term problems, delegating work on short notice, as well as keeping employees motivated. Thus, skills such as planning, communication, decision-making, problem-solving, delegation, and motivation are essential in managers. To train managers in all of these skills, they need to understand and experience the real-life situations in a corporate office or automotive factory. The only way that can be done without actually learning on the job, is to give managers regular skill-training through microlearning, in addition to and more importantly, through microlearning simulations. Simulations can put managers in real-life scenarios in a virtual space, where they get to experience what they will be up against, without the consequences they would face if and when they make mistakes, and learn from them.

Microlearning is capable of meeting the divergent training needs of the automotive industry. Leading automotive organizations already use microlearning, and others will soon follow suit once the benefits are understood.

If you would like to learn more about microlearning for the automotive industry, or how to build the most effective employee training strategy!

If you’d like to know more about how EdApp’s mobile learning platform can help your internal training practices, get in touch at enquiries@edapp.com. You can also try EdApp’s Mobile LMS and authoring tool for free by signing up here.