Enabling Millennial Learners – Here’s How You Do It!

All of us know who the millennial learners are. Millennials are a generation of people born between the 1980’s and the 2000’s. However, have we considered who these millennials are poised to be in the next 5 years, or more specifically by 2025?

Well, it is estimated that millennials will constitute roughly 75% of the entire working population by 2025. Now, this is something that makes the millennial population very important to understand. Born in the age of electronics and remote communications, millennials have for long been mistaken as entitled, spoilt, lazy, and straightforward. However, it cannot be further away from the truth.

Millennials are the most driven generation of people. They believe in growing aggressively within the corporate space. Venturing to start new businesses does not scare them. They are smart workers and competing to excel is something they are born to do.

Millennials would scoff at the onboarding processes that generations before them underwent. We are talking about the traditional employee handbook, which was the onboarding and employee training experience for Gen X and boomers.

Where Gen X and boomers worked solely for money and stability, millennials are notorious for working towards massive personal gains, fame, and towards making a difference.

So, when you ask these people about what they really want, you should not be surprised to hear words such as development at work, upskilling, and enablement. Which is precisely what we are going to discuss.

What is Enabling Millennial Employees and How Do You Do It?

Millennials are in Search of Instant Productivity

The outdated practice of enabling workers over long periods of time may not work with millennials. Because millennials want to get going from day one. They have a need to feel capable and confident in their jobs from the moment they step into their new position. Their aim is to quickly excel to the top instead of spending years before being recognized. Needless to say, millennials want that onboarding training as they join and anything else falls short for them. So, organizations need to keep this in mind.

Millennials are More Skilled Than You Think

Being from the digital age, millennials are more skilled at doing many things. Moreover, they are eager to apply their newly gained skills and prove themselves. As a result, the same old classroom training pitch will not work with them. These are people who believe in digital solutions, and they believe in training and development.

On-the-Go and Mobile

There is not stopping the jet-set lifestyle of millennials. And mobile phones and millennial are basically inseparable. This is to the point where some millennials use their mobile phones to do most of their work. Organizations need to realize that the mobile phone is not their enemy. Rather, with the mobile phones being a big part of the millennial’s lifestyle, organizations must push to enable the millennials to use their phones for training and knowledge sharing.

Quality Matters Over Quantity

It’s not about how much time and efforts you put into designing a 10,000-word, text-based training course. Or the efforts you take to plan a training excursion for 3000 employees. What really matters to millennials is how this training or efforts pay off for them. What does it give them? Does it benefit them in anyway? Is it a struggle to get around it? Rather, you could have spent a lot lesser time and efforts to develop a smart microlearning module that reduces the cognitive load and engages learners to actively complete their training. This is what matters to millennials.

Outlining an Opportunity to Grow

Millennials don’t want to sit around and guess how they should act in order to grow within your organization. Instead, they want you to actively engage with them in a conversation surrounding their opportunities to grow. They want you to be clear about what the possibilities are and what they need to do in order to get things going.  

Enabling Millennial Employees Should Lead to Empowerment

Enabling millennial employees will ensure that they commit to the growth of the company if they spot enablement strategies.

Reach out to us at contact@enyotalearning.com or fill a form for a free consultation call with one of our services experts. With over 15 years of experience and 100+ happy clients, we know exactly what your millennial workforce wants – to include some form of eLearning into their current mix, gradually turning the entire process of cost-intensive traditional training activities into a cost-effective eLearning program.

Organizations thus have to create dynamic learning initiatives that allow for proactive course correction when needed. This will give them the learning they will need to compete in real-world scenarios and give them the means to learn continuously. With more learning, they will feel more empowered to do their jobs better and hence will be more engaged at work. Given that the millennials are the best-educated generation in history, education and learning play a big role in their lives. Enablement thus has to be driven through education. It must help alleviate boredom at work and give them learning opportunities to pick up ‘what they want to learn’ versus training on ‘how to do your job’.