The Challenge
Creating a strong culture of learning and professional development within your workplace increases morale, reduces turnover and generates higher productivity. However, most busy professionals don’t find time for these important development opportunities. Leaders don’t want to spend more time in meetings, issue mandatory training or have employees take too much time away from work.
We were asked by a large public interest agency (Burness) to create a professional development experience that felt natural, engaging, and valuable—not like another item on a to-do list. The goal was to help participants grow skills directly related to their work, while also strengthening the organization with increasing team cohesion, confidence and job satisfaction.
Here’s What Happened:
We decided to experiment with microlearning, or drip learning, as an opt-in experience for the team, designed to fit into the workday, not compete with it. Microlearning provides bite-sized content for up to 7 minutes a day of focused learning on one concept or topic.
Our team has been designing and leading professional development workshops for nearly a decade, as well as creating and teaching higher ed courses. This was our first foray into a short, digestible, asynchronous learning format.
Step 1: Listen First
We began with a focus group made up of potential participants from the company (Burness). We wanted to understand what they actually wanted from a professional development opportunity. The feedback was clear:
- No more one-off workshops or hour-long lunch-and-learns.
- People preferred short, engaging formats—videos, podcasts, along with reading content.
- They wanted flexibility and relevance to their own work.
Step 2: Partner with Management
We worked with leadership to identify the people that might benefit most, but participation was never mandatory. This was about creating a culture of curiosity, not compliance. We also selected two topic areas where the team felt they could use evidence-based theories to do their work.
Step 3: Design for Real Life
We decided to build a microlearning curriculum for the team. We chose two topics, and created two-week courses for each of the topics.
Inspired by platforms like Duolingo and LinkedIn Learning, we set up the content in Slack, a platform the Burness team already used daily. That familiarity allowed us to build something where the team was already spending time. We didn’t ask them to go to a separate learning management system. We created a new Slack channel for the course and invited selected team members to join. Using the Slack Workflow feature, we scheduled the interactive content in various formats to appear each morning at 8:30 ET. We included readings, videos, GIFS and even podcasts, which we generated from our own blog content through NotebookLM. We also included interactive elements to test knowledge acquisition with polls, quizzes, and small challenges. Learners could move through the daily lesson at their own pace and on their own schedule each day.
For those who wanted to go deeper on any one piece of content, we included links to case studies and examples that let them “go down the rabbit hole.”
The Impact
Results from a post-course self evaluation found 100% of learners overall felt comfortable explaining and applying the skills and concepts after they took the course. The pre-course evaluation found that 60% of respondents were not familiar with the concepts or skills. Results from the post-course user experience evaluation found mixed reviews. This was the first time we used Workflows in Slack and so there were some noticeable programming glitches which led to frustration for some learners. While all respondents found it convenient to receive the content in Slack and liked the interactivity of the videos, quizzes, podcasts, some felt there was too much information in the short format course.
