The success of any business is very much dependent on the quality and performance of the people they employ. For this reason, it is important for them to place significant investment into training programs that help them do their jobs better by developing their skills and knowledge. However, as it’s human nature to forget a lot of the things we take in during the course of the day, it can be hard to commit certain pieces of information to our long-term memory. While forgetting things is unavoidable, for corporate businesses at least, there are some strategies you can adopt to help your staff members improve their knowledge retention after training. If you find yourself in a situation where your employees are not retaining the amount of knowledge you would like for them to perform their roles and responsibilities effectively, this post is for you. In it, we’ll provide some valuable insights about what you can do to enhance your team’s ability to remember what they have learnt and help keep their skills sharp over time.
Whenever anyone learns something new, this knowledge resonates in their short-term memory. However, it typically only does this for about 30 seconds, so unless you commit it to your long-term memory, it will eventually drop out. This was shown by Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, who discovered the phenomenon of the Forgetting Curve. It has also been supported by other research that suggested 70% of what the average person learns is forgotten within 24 hours of doing so and 90% within a week. Knowledge retention simply refers to the process of submitting knowledge to your long-term memory, which you can recall and use at a later time.
To help them do their jobs more proficiently, many companies spend thousands of dollars on cutting-edge training programs that are designed to improve the skills and expertise of their employees. However, the effectiveness of these programs relies, in large part, on the degree to which staff members remember what they learn. If they do not commit this information to their long-term memory, the exercise would have essentially been a waste of time, money and resources. Therefore, it is within the company’s interest to do all they can to ensure employees retain an understanding of as many of the key aspects of their training programs as possible. Doing so will help them maintain a competitive advantage.
So, how do you go about improving your staff’s levels of knowledge retention after training? Here are five strategies you should employ.
One of the best things you can do to improve your staff’s knowledge retention is to ensure that what you want them to learn is relevant to their job. If you are expecting your employees to partake in training for something they do not need in their everyday roles and responsibilities, they have no incentive to retain the knowledge. In fact, forcing them to do so could easily backfire as they might become frustrated at having to sit through something they see no value in - particularly at a time when they might have a heavy workload. For this reason, focus on identifying what skills each of your employees needs to improve to be able to perform their jobs more effectively, and create your training programs around that. If you do this, you should find that their levels of knowledge retention after training will be a lot higher.
People are more likely to want to do something if they perceive the benefit of doing so. Therefore, the more you can get your employees to buy into the training programs you want to offer them, the greater the likelihood of them completing them with an open mind. In this instance, communication is key, so it is important to let your employees know why the programs will be good for their professional development and/or make their jobs easier.
In the corporate world, many of us thrive when our competitive juices get flowing. Therefore, to tap into this instinct, businesses should introduce gamification into their training programs. These game-like features, such as polls, rewards, challenges and leaderboards, often require employees to compete against each other. This can result in higher levels of engagement, particularly if you offer the information in bite-sized chunks (aka microlearning) that is easier for them to digest.
Your training programs should not be one-off entities. Instead, you should make them accessible to your staff for reference whenever they want, after the initial training is completed. Using a good learning management system (LMS) will help you do this, so make sure your employees can learn in the easiest way possible, at any time and from anywhere.
Arguably the most effective way of combating the forgetting curve is to regularly reinforce the key pieces of knowledge you want your employees to remember. You can do this by providing them with regular exposure to the information in a variety of different ways, including the initial training session, online refresher modules, mentorship and pop-up notifications. At the end of the day, the more regularly and innovatively you reinforce what staff members learn in their training programs, the more likely they are to remember and apply it to their future work.
The whole point of running training programs for your employees is to make them more valuable and effective as cogs in your organization’s wheel. Investing a significant amount of money in developing initiatives that will provide your employees with a greater level of expertise and a wider skill set is one way to do that. But, ultimately, the single most important thing you can do is implement measures that will help them retain as much of the information they have learned in them as possible. If you can do that, your business stands to benefit exponentially.
Here are some answers to questions that are frequently asked by managers and business executives about knowledge retention after training.
There is evidence to suggest that a lot of the knowledge your employees take in during training programs is not retained for very long in the subsequent period after it has been completed. One study found that, within 24 hours, the average person forgets 70% of what they have learned. If they don’t do something to try and retain it, that figure rises to 90% by the time a week has elapsed.
Any company that invests in the training of their staff goes a long way towards improving their levels of staff satisfaction, motivation and retention. Doing this also has the knock-on effect of improving productivity and, potentially, revenue.