By guest blogger – Austin Dressman
The past couple blogs have covered the rise of the millennial generation, their behaviors and how best to educate them on important issues. In the corporate world, there are many instances where training is needed. From company policy to compliance issues, your new age employees need to be in-the-know – but how? It’s time to change the old training methods and rise with the times.
Millennial Targeting in Politics
Take a step back for a minute and evaluate a current trend in millennial-aged learning. All political opinion aside, it is common knowledge that President Obama has made an unprecedented impact on millennial-aged voters. During his election in 2008, he reached the majority of millennial voters by creating an appealing brand. Through mobile phone apps, Youtube videos, and social media, he won over a hard-to-please, unmotivated group. Millennials accounted for nearly 80% of Obama’s national popular vote margin over McCain, turning a slight win into a significant seven point win margin (Civic Youth). To put it simply, he spoke to them at their level.
Pres. Obama recently used the same strategy to promote enrollment in the new healthcare program. He used a popular comedic web video series hosted by Zach Galifianakis to plug healthcare.gov. The series had millions of views before the Obama interview and is regularly promoted on websites and blogs frequented by millennials. In just over 24 hours, the video had 11 million views and had increased traffic to healthcare.gov by 40% (USA Today). The figures showing how many younger adults enrolled are not available but the publicity stunt was a major win for the Obama administration.
Training Millennials
By meeting millennials on the mediums they already frequent, companies can increase training success rates dramatically. Employees will be more satisfied with their training experience and will walk away having retained more information. In an age of what one might call “Youtube attention spans”, it is important to create your training on the right platform while keeping it short and simple. This strategy applies also to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. It can be a unique way to integrate training into familiar social territory.
“Millennials outpace older Americans in virtually all types of internet and cell use,” a 2010 Pew Research Report (Pew Research Report) on millennials said, “They are more likely to have their own social networking profiles, to connect to the internet wirelessly when away from home or work, and to post video of themselves online.”
This new social direction can be used to your advantage if you seek to understand your audience.
A few questions to consider:
How accessible are your corporate trainings?
How long do they take?