What good Learning and Development looks like: Microlearning means better ROI and happier employees

HR teams face many challenges in our modern world.

Lifelong learning, development, and wellbeing are notable examples that have a significant impact.

For example, reskilling of employees ranked as the second biggest pain point in the IDC HR Leaders’ Road Map for 2025.

Add-in compulsory learning and development (L&D) for compliance and the tip of a large iceberg comes into view. Ensuring adherence to regulations can’t be sidelined.

In this article, we look at how to identify the core L&D issues your organisation may be facing—and what you can do to solve them.

Here’s what we cover:

Why Learning & Development struggles to win today

According to the Digital Learning Realities 2024 research report from HR industry analysts Fosway Group, 74% of L&D teams say building skills is becoming a high priority to the future success of the organisation.

Drilling down into this ambition, many professionals suggest employee-led learning is a way forward. Indeed, according to Gartner’s Leadership Vision for 2025, 61% of L&D leaders agree this is critical to success.

Unfortunately, this determination isn’t reflected in reality.

The LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report 2024, for example, highlights struggles around measuring return on investment (ROI) that may sound familiar: only 16% of L&D professionals measure specific business improvements that are tied to learning for new skills (per learner).

Elsewhere, research from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) suggests 25% of training materials are forgotten immediately by employees.

SHRM’s research adds that, from an organisational perspective, 35% of HR managers struggle to find the right training content to fit their needs, while 32% report difficulty in keeping content that’s up to date amid always-on workplace transformations.

This highlights a key issue facing HR teams and L&D: the pace of change continues to accelerate, requiring every working person to continuously improve their skills and meet compliance goals.

But catering to this can seem like pie in the sky if teams are struggling with even the basics.

Is your L&D team truly capable of being a strategic partner while being held back by legacy technology deployments?

Meeting Learning & Development challenges head-on

What challenges exist and where do they originate?

• Low engagement: Legacy top-tier learning management systems (LMS) or Learning Experience Platforms (LXP) are flooded with outdated content, difficult to navigate, and can be so complex and cumbersome that it takes employees minutes just to even start a course.
• Return on investment for training expenditure: L&D managers face challenges when trying to measure the ROI of their training spend, such as poor data availability, and having multiple learning technology solutions and delivery methods. As such, it can be difficult if not impossible to ensure alignment with business goals.
• Multiple and disparate solutions: Research has shown that the average number of solutions businesses have for learning, career development and wellbeing is just over 16, with half of organisations using multiple platforms to deliver training. Not only is managing and maintaining disparate solutions effectively creating extra work, there’s also no unified view of data.
• Compliance knowledge: L&D teams need to constantly produce and maintain several types of compliance training to ensure employees understand and adhere to relevant laws, regulations, and company policies. Yet some employees perceive the content as boring, irrelevant, and filled with jargon, leading to low engagement. Finding or creating content in a timely manner is also a challenge for L&D teams.

How microlearning is solving the L&D challenge

Microlearning is transforming the way L&D teams deliver training, offering a flexible and engaging alternative to traditional, long-form programmes.

Instead of requiring employees to block out hours for classroom sessions or lengthy e-learning modules, microlearning breaks content into short, focused lessons—often just five to 10 minutes each—that can be accessed on demand.

Information is also better retained by learners in this format.

Add in a mobile-first approach, which ensures the bite-sized content is available 24/7 for the employee—whether on a mobile phone during a commute or in between meetings—and this approach directly aligns with how we all consume information today.

It balances better with busy work schedules. Engagement is dramatically improved, as employees can control when and how they learn.

Microlearning also encourages a culture of continuous learning. By delivering bite-sized lessons consistently, L&D teams can reinforce a growth mindset and help employees build resilience in a fast-changing workplace. Staff can adapt quickly, stay current with new skills, and view learning as an ongoing journey rather than a one-time event—strengthening both individual capabilities and organisational agility.

Furthermore, with the ease of creating such short snippets, it’s easier to create bespoke training that helps bring your brand to life. You can celebrate a diverse culture and connect remote employees to your company purpose and brand.

What to consider when choosing the right L&D platform

With the above in mind, we can start to construct what an ideal L&D platform looks like:

• Microlearning: Examples of your content could include quick five-minute lessons and tips that help employees gain valuable insights from books, documentaries, and courses. As a result, speed-to-skill performance can be increased.
• Translation and localisation: If your organisation works across borders, look to ensure seamless global scalability is built-in, to help localise your resources. With the use of AI, translations can be instant and of a high quality.
• All-in-one solution: Cut costs by dropping multiple vendors and streamlining the L&D tech stack. Replace your complex array of tools—from LMS and Employee Assistance Programmes (EAP) to learning content and training providers. Look to ensure your L&D microlearning is just one component of a powerful, broad people-management solution. This not only helps maximise ROI because there’s no need to pay for costly disparate licenses, it also enables the easy generation and collection of metrics.
• AI analytics and reporting: AI is changing everything, and in the world of people management, it’s providing extraordinary insights into measures such as learner progress, compliance completions, and engagement levels—not to mention other employee measures.

Final thoughts

The path forward for L&D isn’t more complexity. It’s to be smarter and to simplify. This is also a route to better ROI and per-employee cost savings.

Microlearning is a modern and effective route forward and when implemented as part of a broader, all-in-one people management solution, it can bring meaningful change.

Next steps? Audit your current learning tools, identify content that can be repurposed into micro modules, and explore platforms that unify training, analytics, and wellbeing support.

By starting small and scaling quickly, you’ll lay the foundation for a culture of continuous growth and long-term workforce resilience.