Dave Derington: [00:00:00] Hi everybody. I’m here at, DevLearn talking with Carla Torgerson about microlearning. And in fact, today this is a micro podcast. We just learned some good stuff from Carla here. Actually going to apply this in our podcast, down the road, we’re going to practice what we preach. Okay. Carla, we didn’t tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do, company you work for sure.

Carla Torgerson: [00:00:28] Absolutely. So again, my name is Carla Torgerson. I’m a director of instructional design at both Sydney learning. That is a consulting firm that will create you learning micro learning, help you with your ILT. T, instructor led training, stuff like that. So we both do consulting for learning organizations that want to figure out what needs to be taught, but we also will help build materials for organizations that need some help with that as well.

Dave Derington: [00:00:55] Fabulous. And the sat in your session today on micro-learning and I can tell you that I’m going to be able to use this immediately, but I’m super excited about it. So probably I have some questions for you. And just to give you a little bit of background and why I’m here and why I’m talking to you right now.

along with Adam,  a friend of mine. He’s a cohost, that we run a podcast called CELab. It’s the customer education laboratory. So we come from a science background. So we break things down and really like to get into the details of things and help our audience. Now, what we’re focused on really is this customer education space.

I feel like it fits in to DevLearn pretty well, actually, because there’s so much we can learn about and our audience may not be aware of. What’s going on here and the kind of people that we’re interacting with. So what we’re going to do is take this back home and share it out in the podcast. So those of you are listening.

we’ll ask a couple of questions here in Carla, that you should be able to take and start working with right away. Okay. You had a question here for me about. The audience again, and basically my audience, what my audience is here for CELab. These are people that are predominantly come in from a customer success.

Now, customer success again is life cycle, account management. We’re worried about two things, keeping customers, unlike in a company where I have an L&D organization. The people might leave or come in and I have to train them, but they’re there. We have customers that have potentially a short attention span at first.

As they learn our products, they want to learn more, but we can’t guarantee that they’re always going to be there or we might lose them. So what our job here is to do things like making sure they’re aware of what the product does or how can it use it, whether it use cases are. So that’s the kind of thing that we’re coming after.

And what I wanted to ask you specifically about is even somebody brought it up in our session today about microlearning, what does this all mean? Okay, that’s a question. That’s kind of question number one. We know that microlearning is really getting atomic, getting down to that five minute threshold.

You have one topic, right? I won’t steal your thunder, but what can you and a customer education team, again, product facing externally facing team? How can they benefit from using microlearning in their education strategy? 

Carla Torgerson: [00:03:14] Yeah. So in my opinion, you guys know this world better than I, but my experience in customer education is that customers get to choose if, or when they’re going to consume that content and they get to choose how much time they want to spend on it.

And so it’s really difficult to get them to engage as fully as in a corporation, I can say this is required training, but you don’t have that luxury. And so to me, that’s where micro can really fit in. Can you create these small modules that have a particular targeted focus on something, that customer wants to be able to do, but can’t right.

And then keep it brief enough that they can consume it, use it and then apply it right away. Solve their problem and provide us something that was valuable because if you provide something that’s valuable, they will come back. They will come back for more. And it’s just, in my opinion, with this kind of training, it’s about figuring out what the right module topics are, and then just having them available and making sure that people know that they’re available and where to find.

Dave Derington: [00:04:16] So let me ask you this, then I have ideas of what I want to do now, after sitting in your session all day today. Yeah. But for somebody, let’s say that they’re in a customer success team, maybe they’re even a customer success manager, that’s playing double duty. And they hear micro-learning and they go, Oh, this might work for me.

What would, what could be one thing that you could share with our audience about micro learning? That could be an easy way to get started and help nets and benefits down the way. And again, the goal here is I’m trying to combat churn, or I’m trying to increase adoption of my product in a really sticky way.

Carla Torgerson: [00:04:53] I think, I’m at risk of oversimplifying. It strikes me that, an infographic approach could be actually really powerful because infographics can be consumed super quickly. And, assuming that you can explain a concept that quickly now maybe you need screenshots and you wouldn’t be able to, but if you could give me like an infographic, that was the whatever’s of the products, and just get me engaged. That might be a nice way to do it. 

Dave Derington: [00:05:21] I think maybe if this came up in the session today that there’s a bias to think that some micro-learning or all Micronesians video that correct. And that it actually, for me, I learned that today that I looked at the infographics, you were showing us good examples of it.

And I go, I actually, I have heard or requests that usually comes in from enterprise customers where they’re saying, can you have a lead behind a one pager, a job aid? Yeah. And it didn’t connect immediately. that’s what they mean. And I can have these surfaced in two completely disparate areas. One of them might be, Hey, it’s an e-learning campaign.

It’s a micro-learning campaign. It’s just something I can print out and put on my desk. And it would serve everybody regardless of the scale or how big the company is. 

Carla Torgerson: [00:06:05] Yeah. I could see that working really well. 

Dave Derington: [00:06:08] That’s fabulous. Okay. I don’t want to take a lot of your time again. It’s supposed to be a micro and I already failed.

anything else you’d like to say to the audience? Again, the audiences. Or customer education product facing. 

Carla Torgerson: [00:06:19] Yeah. I think one of the things for me about micro that I really love is that it really helps me think about my user. It really gets me focused on the user and their use case. And I think in what you’re talking about with customer training, it’s even more so it’s more paramount.

And so my biggest parting words of advice is really think about that user. What would they want and what would they use because they are going to vote with their time. That’s right. They don’t, you don’t get to choose for them. They’re going to have to take this and for you, you want them to take it because it makes them a more valuable customer and they’re going to want to use your product more.

And then, all of those reasons. And but at the heart of it, you also want them to just have a good experience using your product. So think about them, what they would want to use, what they would find helpful, maybe even the duration that would be most helpful to them and just move forward.

Dave Derington: [00:07:07] Sounds like there’s a survey and there’s somewhere for my customer base. All right, Carla, thank you so much for taking some time this evening. After a long day of training, really appreciate it. And definitely we’ll have those add some resources and connect our audience to you and your company, both city learning.

Again, thanks so much. And you have a great day. 

Carla Torgerson: [00:07:25] Kay. Thank you so much. 

Dave Derington: [00:07:26] All right, bye.