The generation of people that has come to be known as the Millennials has received much attention in recent years. This is understandable given that they are now the largest living generation and are also making up an ever-growing percentage of the workforce. And while much has been said about Millennials in the workplace, businesses have been slow to cater to their needs. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the learning and training departments in corporations. It makes good business sense for employers to start focusing more on eLearning for these tech-savvy digital natives, but if they don’t tailor their eLearning efforts to Millennials, their chances of getting the desired results will be slim at best. One initiative in particular a growing number of employers are utilizing is gamifying Millennial eLearning. But what does that really mean, and what are the specific ways successful companies are making it happen?

Why Gamifying Millennial eLearning Works

Professionals who are older than Millennials can understand why gamification of eLearning has been slow to pick up speed. There are plenty of managers and leaders out there who think these young people already play enough games without purposely bringing gaming into the workplace. To them it sounds more like a recipe that would guarantee non-productivity. But this way of thinking is just a denial of reality: Millennials are steeped in gaming, they think it’s valuable, and gamification works.

Millennials, perhaps more than any other generation, grew up with video games, and not just in the form of dedicated gaming consoles such as Playstation, Nintendo and Xbox. They play games on their PCs and mobile devices as well. While just over half of American adults play video games (53%), that figure skyrockets to 81% among the age group that falls within the boundaries of Millennials (source). But besides the fact that gaming is hugely popular among Millennials, even more relevant is how easily they relate gaming to the workplace and skill development. As John Zogby noted several years ago in Forbes, 67% of Millennials think gaming teaches them how to establish winning strategies, 70% think it helps them become better problem-solvers, 63% say it enhances their teamwork abilities, and nearly a third have an online avatar. Gamifying Millennial eLearning will make them feel right at home.

But gamification in eLearning applies to more than just Millennials. Lots of people enjoy gamification, even if they don’t think of themselves as gamers in the same way Millennials do. Think about all the different rewards programs people belong to, from frequent flyer miles to a coffee shop loyalty card – these are gamification in action throughout your everyday life. Keeping track of health stats with a FitBit. The instant feedback you get on fuel economy based on how drive in some hybrid cars. These are all different ways that gamification is applied in everyday life, and people of all ages find that they enjoy it.

The neuroscience behind why gamification works isn’t hard to understand. Each time you reach a new achievement level, you feel a little rush of excitement and pleasure. Your brain gets the message that what you just did to accomplish something is worth pursuing. What’s happening in the brain and body is the release of various feel-good hormones and neurotransmitters, including dopamine, serotonin and endorphins. In the same way that people experience a “runner’s high,” gamification of eLearning can create lots of positive associations with learning and even training as learners are rewarded with each achievement.

With this understanding of how gamifying Millennial eLearning works, what are specific ways employers and learning companies are making it happen?

Gamifying the Deloitte Leadership Academy

Consulting and professional services giant Deloitte is one global company that has taken gamifying Millennial eLearning seriously by gamifying its online Deloitte Leadership Academy (DLA). Each learning content chunk is presented as a “mission” to be completed, and new participants begin with a short on-boarding mission to get the lay of the land. Upon completion, users receive a badge. They can then personalize their DLA experience by connecting to personal social media networks and uploading a profile and photo. This kind of customization increases engagement. Completing additional missions grants more badges, some of which are “secret” badges that pop up unexpectedly when certain conditions are met, and few things delight users more than a surprise achievement. The platform also has a leaderboard concept built into it, but it’s more than the typical simple display of the top ten user scores for the overall platform. Those can be counter-productive when the same superstar users dominate the leaderboard, which demotivates others who know they’ll never catch up or surpass those leaders. Instead, DLA users compete with others who are at their same overall level such that each level of participants has its own top-ten leaderboard. And all the leaderboards are reset every 7 days, which means everyone has a chance each week to be the top learner at their level, which helps prevent attrition when users miss a week or two for whatever reason. Results for Deloitte’s gamification efforts have been impressive: DLA participants are spending more time on the site, returning more often each week, are completing programs in ever-increasing numbers.

McDonald’s Gamifies Cash Register Training

Few things could seem more mundane or boring as being trained on how to use a cash register at McDonald’s. When the global fast-food giant rolled out a new “till system” as it’s called in the UK, it knew it needed to do something to make training more exciting and allow leaners to make mistakes in an environment that wouldn’t include real customers. Gamification provided the solution. McDonald’s partnered with City & Guilds Kineo to make the till training into a game that was fun, purposeful, and highly effective. The game is a real-time simulation of taking customer orders in a timed environment along with questions to assess knowledge. Game goals and awards include getting orders 100% correct, “3 on the bounce” (getting three orders correct in a row), beating the clock, and keeping the customer satisfaction meter high. McDonald’s was very happy with the results. It was the chain’s first attempt to gamify learning, and it worked. The game remains the most popular employee portal page ever, and 85% of users believe it really helped them understand the new system and helped boost their future performance. The business results included faster till service and high customer spends.

Gamifying the Company LMS

For companies that subscribe to a Learning Management System (LMS), gamifying Millennial eLearning could be as simple as switching vendors. Many of them have started incorporating gamification principles into their products, but the quality of these offerings varies widely. One of the best examples in this regard is The Academy LMS from Growth Engineering in the UK. It includes the basic gamification elements of points, badges, leaderboards and levels, but it does all of them really well. And the secret sauce is their use of a superhero theme and superhero avatars. Superheroes are hot right now with Millennials as seen with all the TV shows and movies based on comic book superheroes, and The Academy LMS manages to do it without it seeming overly cheesy. Just about everything in this LMS ties in explicitly to the gamification aspects, so it doesn’t feel like an “add-on” thrown in for good measure to satisfy a fad. Even content authors have their gamification in which to participant, which is a very novel aspect for any LMS. The vendor also keeps adding and modifying gamification features, keeping the gamification aspects fresh and ever-changing. And it even includes the capability to work in real-world rewards based on learning achievement. The sky is the limit here, from company swag to special parking privileges, a sit-down with the CEO, a day-off pass, gift cards – the more creative a company is with these offerings, the better.

Gamifying Millennial eLearning is more than the mere fad many have made it out to be. Far from it, gamification may very well be one of the most essential keys to unlock the door to Millennial engagement and retention in the workplace. When done well, gamification of eLearning can boost workforce productivity while giving employees a much-needed dose of fun even as they’re getting better at what they need to do. That sounds like a winning combination any business would be pleased to offer. Companies who aren’t at least thinking about this are already behind the curve. Those who proactively make it happen stand to reap multiple benefits that will have a positive impact on not just their learning and training goals, but their bottom-line operations as well.

The post Gamifying Millennial eLearning: The Why and How of Making it Happen appeared first on eLearningInside News.

In part 1 of this two-part series, a more thorough understanding of Millennials as a generation was established in order to lay the groundwork needed to identify how eLearning can be shaped and tailored in ways that will shed further light on how eLearning retains Millennials. After all, it’s not just any eLearning that will boost Millennial retention in the workplace. Companies trying to solve the Millennial retention dilemma need specific approaches and strategies to fully realize how eLearning retains Millennials.

As John Zogby wrote in Forbes back in 2014, Millennials “…simply see things and do things differently, want to be productive and learn, and bring new approaches to problem-solving and team production. Millennials need to be embraced rather than simply shoe-horned to conform” (source). A PwC survey from several years ago revealed that among Millennials, “excellent training/development programs” ranked third among desirable traits of employers, and the single most important benefit to them is “training and development” (source). Below are six major characteristics that describe the kind of eLearning that will help retain Millennials in the workplace.

eLearning Retains Millennials When it Shows High Production Values

This may seem obvious, but it’s worth highlighting when the focus is on Millennials. Learning content with lower production values that might be fine with Baby Boomers and tolerable for GenXers will quickly drive Millennials away. And they’ll feel resentment that the company they work for doesn’t find them worthy of a higher investment into better-quality content. Learning departments need to up their game significantly if they want to produce the kind of eLearning content that will help retain millennials.

eLearning Retains Millennials When it is Instantly Accessible in Small Chunks

One of the aspects of Millennials older professionals have the hardest time digesting and understanding is the effect of them being true digital natives. Millennials do seem to have rewired brains that make them different from previous generations. The scientific evidence probably does not support this rewiring idea. If anything, it’s just that Millennial brains have gotten much better at processing information much more quickly than everyone else. In this sense, it’s just a matter of where they put their time. Millennials are using digital media in various forms for up to 18 hours every day, and of course, much of that time is spent on social media. The way to translate this into eLearning for Millennials is through microlearning. This is learning content that is delivered in very short bursts, as in usually less than 5 minutes, rarely longer and never more than 10 minutes max. But this is a whole new way of thinking about eLearning. Keep the following in mind:

• One learning objective per chunk. eLearning professionals who are used to working on longer traditional courses might come up with a long list of learning objectives – all the various things they want learners to know or be able to do after having completed the course. Microlearning means carefully parsing out the content into very small chunks, and each of these chunks or assets as they are often called, can realistically only be assigned a single learning objective.
• Effective delivery mediums. Obviously, traditional face-to-face instruction would be silly for microlearning. After all, the whole point is to make it instantly accessible anytime, anywhere, so it has to be digital. And when it comes to Millennials, by far the most appealing medium is through video, with podcasts coming in close behind. Infographics are also a possibility but pale in comparison to video and audio.
• Keep the quality high. The need for high production values has already been mentioned, but just because microlearning content is short doesn’t mean it’s okay to take your eyes off this prize. If anything, production values need to be even higher the shorter the piece. It has to be compelling enough to grab a short attention span and make every minute count.
• Creative assessment. How do eLearning professionals prove learning has taken place within the context of microlearning? This is a real challenge but is also an opportunity to be more creative than just asking a couple of multiple choice questions. Find a way for them to demonstrate what they’ve learned and let them document it with their own video or audio recording.

eLearning Retains Millennials When it is Designed for Mobile and Wearable Devices

Whether it’s smartphones, MP3 players or smartwatches, Millennials use these kinds of devices to stay connected way more than desktops, laptops or even tablets. It may seem not that long ago when people started talking about responsive design, making sure online content was designed for more than just the large screens of desktops and laptops and would render properly on the smaller screens of mobile devices. But with the rise of Millennials into the workforce, what’s most appropriate is reversing the traditional flow of responsive design. Rather than designing for larger screens and then figuring out how to shoe-horn it onto smaller screens, eLearning retains Millennials when it’s designed first for the mobile environment. It needs to render perfectly on the devices they are most apt to be using to access it.

eLearning Retains Millennials When it is Gamified

Millennials are playing all kinds of video games like no other generation. The following statistics from a Zogby poll (same source as the quote in the opening paragraph of this article) show how important this is:

• 57% of Millennials play video games at least 3 times each week.
• 67% feel gaming helps them learn to create winning strategies.
• 70% say gaming helps them develop problem-solving skills.
• 63% claim gaming helps them build teamwork skills.
• 66% believe gaming helps them understand technologies that will be useful in life.
• Nearly a third have an online avatar or second life.

The question eLearning professionals should be asking is not if they should be gamifying eLearning, but how it will be gamified. The science behind this is relatively simple: Achieving a new level in a game releases the chemical messenger called dopamine, a neurotransmitter that tells the brain whatever it just did is worth doing more of. In this case, reaching the next level of the game or the next learning achievement level.

Because of how connected Millennials are to peers and colleagues, gamification can be used not only to incentivize moving through content but also to show learner achievements relative to others. In other words, try to work in a social component to the gamification.

eLearning Retains Millennials When it is Social

Speaking of the social aspect – it is so important to Millennials that it deserves primary focus when developing and designing eLearning content. If eLearning is to help boost Millennial retention in the workplace, it needs to meet them where they are (which is online) and in the way, they tend to interact with each other (social media). This is also an opportunity to incorporate the kind direct and immediate feedback Millennials crave in the workplace. The social media environment can be a very effective channel for delivering both coaching and mentoring.

eLearning Retains Millennials When it can be Personalized

Millennials want lots of development opportunities, but they also like being able to exercise some control over their own development. The more flexibility that can be built into the system to let Millennials choose the learning content they want or need when they want or need it, the better.

While it may seem like Millennials have just been a distant ship on the horizon, that ship has now come in. Millennials have not only arrived in full force to workplaces across the country, many have already risen beyond entry-level positions. Just eight short years from now in 2015, Millennials will constitute fully 75% of the workforce. In spite of this, research shows less than a third of companies are trying to cater to Millennial learning and development needs (source). In fact, another study showed that when employed Millennials were asked about what has shocked them most about being in the “real world” of work, their number-one answer was “lack of company support for training and development” (source). This is an unfortunate state of affairs for those employers and the Millennials who work for them.

Companies that choose a business-as-usual approach to learning and training while Millennials continue to swell in numbers within their ranks will soon find themselves perplexed by why they’re not getting the results they need. Ignoring the unique learning and training needs of Millennials will surely doom many of these companies to failure. Staying ahead of this curve is possible if employers are willing to put the time and effort into understanding how eLearning retains millennials when it is done right.

The post How eLearning Retains Millennials, Part 2: Doing eLearning Right appeared first on eLearningInside News.

How eLearning retains millennials is a topic that requires two main components. The first is understanding millennials as a generation. The second component then builds on that understanding to examine how eLearning can be shaped in a way that will help engage and retain millennials in the workplace. Part 1 of this two-part series focuses on the first component: Understanding millennials in a deeper, more thorough way that goes beyond the glib generalizations too often seen in the media and elsewhere.

Setting the Stage for Understanding Millennials

Millennials have become one of the hottest topics not only in eLearning but across all aspects of the corporate and social landscapes, and with good reason. After all, it was in 2016 when the Pew Research Center reported that Millennials had outstripped Baby Boomers to become the largest living generation (source). In addition to that, they are considered the first generation to be largely made up of “digital natives” for whom the Internet and mobile devices are second nature. How to define this generation, however, has not been an easy task. Most now agree that Millennials are those who were born after 1980 and on into the early 2000s. Even what to call this generation wasn’t clear at first. Because they followed on the heels of Generation X (roughly covering those born in the 1960s up through the early 1980s), there were those who first called them Generation Y. But authors William Strauss and Neil Howe had been using the title of Millennials back in the 1980s, and it eventually became the preferred name.

In 2016 there were 79.8 million millennials, whereas the Baby Boomers numbered only 74.9 million, and because Boomers are getting older, their numbers will begin to decline. Millennials, on the other hand, could continue to grow depending on how many younger immigrants are able to come to the US. In Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, Straus and Howe saw this new generation becoming one that is increasingly civic-minded, with a growing sense of local and global community. Others have been less charitable, such as author Jean Twenge who wrote in her 2006 book Generation Me that she saw Millennials becoming increasingly self-centered and narcissistic. But enough research has been completed by respected organizations to take a deeper dive into understanding Millennials.

Understanding Millennials by the Numbers

The group that has done the most detailed studies and trend-tracking is the Pew Research Center with a dozen years of articles on its Millennials page. In one the more substantial reports, Millennials in Adulthood: Detached from Institutions, Networked with Friends, the generation is described as “…relatively unattached to organized politics and religion, linked by social media, burdened by debt, distrustful of people, in no rush to marry— and optimistic about the future.” The following statistics give a number of valuable insights into this generation that will help in understanding Millennials:

Politics: Although 50% of Millennials call themselves political independents, their actual voting records are strongly Democratic. Among their progressive views of social issues are supporting an activist approach to government, same-sex marriage, interracial marriage, and legalization of marijuana.

Marriage: Millennials have been slow to get married. As of a few years ago, only 26% of those aged 18-32 were married, which is far behind previous generations when they were the same age (36% for GenXers, 48% for Baby Boomers, and 65% for the Silent Generation). Among the unmarried Millennials, 69% are interested but don’t feel economically secure enough to tie the knot.

Religion: This generation doesn’t have much to do with organized religion, with nearly a full third of them saying they have no religious affiliation at all.

Digital Technologies: Millennials are highly networked with friends, colleagues and various groups through social media platforms to a degree not seen in previous generations. On Facebook, the median number of friends for Millennials is 250, as opposed to 200 for GenXers and only 98 for Boomers. When it comes to the digital era of the 21^st century, Millennials are the first truly tech-savvy generation because they grew up with it, and 80% of them keep their mobile phones next to their beds while sleeping. All the digital connectedness seems to be rewiring the brains of Millennials, allowing them to increase the speed at which information can be processed.

Diversity: Millennials are the most racially diverse generation ever for the US, with 43% being non-white – a result of Hispanic and Asian immigration. This diversity may help explain their more liberal political views.

Employment: Millennials are keen on becoming entrepreneurs. They witnessed the fall of Enron, the meltdown among financial firms, and many have seen their parents downsized out of positions after many years of service. Two-thirds of Millennials are interested in starting their own business, and 27% are already self-employed. In 2011 alone, Millennials launched nearly 160,000 startups per month.

Workplace: The greater social consciousness of Millennials carries over into the workplace. Research from The Millennial Impact indicates that more than half of them were influenced to accept a job based on that company’s involvement with causes (source), 44% had volunteered their skills through their company to benefit a cause, and 94% of them enjoyed the experience of individualized, skills-based volunteering. According to Time Magazine, Millennials also bring a different vibe to the workplace. “They’re hyper-connected, tech savvy, entrepreneurial, and collaborative. They also favor fast-paced work environments, want quick promotions, and aren’t fans of traditional office rules and hierarchies.” They desire the same level of connectedness in the workplace they enjoy through social media with their friends. They have a strong desire for continuous feedback from managers and mentors. But they also want to be themselves and dress more casually at work than previous generations. They want a more flexible approach to hours and scheduling. If Millennials think they know a better way to do things from their bosses, they’re more likely to speak up. They had more intimate and frank conversations with their parents growing up and want that kind of transparency and forthrightness in the workplace. They don’t have much time for traditional hierarchies and all the rules and policies that tend to come with them.

Trust: When answering the question, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people – only 19% say most people can be trusted, as opposed to 31% of GenXers and 40% of Boomers who feel that way. This too may be a reflection of their diversity because any group that feels disadvantaged has a harder time trusting others.

Economics: Millennials have higher rates of poverty and unemployment, reduced income, less wealth and more debt (especially student loans) than the previous two generations when they were the same age. 51% of Millennials believe there will be no money at all in the Social Security system when they retire. Many Millennials were trying to enter the workforce just as the Great Recession reared its ugly head, forcing many to quickly “boomerang” back to living with their parents to make ends meet. 20 years ago, only half of recent graduates had college-related debt, and for those who did the average owed was $15,000. Now two-thirds of recent graduates have student loan debt averaging a total of $27,000 per person.

Outlook: In spite of all this, Millennials are surprisingly upbeat regarding the country’s future, with 49% saying they are optimistic, while only 42% of GenXers and 44% of Boomers feel the same way.

These are eye-opening statistics through which to view this new generation as it rises further into adulthood. Understanding Millennials is absolutely essential for eLearning professionals as they become an increasingly large percentage of the workforce as the Baby Boomers retire. The second article of this two-part series examines how these characteristics can be translated into eLearning that helps engage and retain Millennials.

The post How eLearning Retains Millennials, Part 1: Understanding Millennials appeared first on eLearningInside News.