Let’s face it—we all forget things—from the name of someone we’ve just been introduced to in a meeting to the reason why we walked into the kitchen. Our senses are frequently bombarded with visual and aural information, and we can often feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data that we experience each day.
According to the forgetting curve theory*, information is lost over time when no attempt is made to retain it. In fact, within one hour, people have already forgotten fifty percent of the knowledge presented. The decline in learning retention only increases over time, with seventy percent of information forgotten after twenty-four hours rising to as much as ninety percent with a week.
Organizations that need to train their employees can find this reality particularly frustrating. After all, companies devote considerable time, money, and resources to ensuring that their employees are provided with the knowledge they need to succeed in their positions, meet regulatory requirements, comply with SOPs, and contribute to the bottom line.
What Can Be Done?
Modern learning organizations are addressing the problem of forgetting in several ways. One retention strategy is competency-based learning, which targets the learner’s current job and/or a role they want to qualify for in the future, and is more effective for career development. Its objective is to help learners be better prepared to succeed in their current job, advance up the career ladder, or start work towards a new career path. A 360-degree assessment, comprising self-evaluation, peer review, and supervisor review, effectively determines the learner’s areas of strength and identifies topics or competencies where additional training is required.
An on-the-job training checklist is another effective tool against the forgetting curve. The immediate feedback provided by a colleague observing the learner’s completion of tasks can better address skills gaps and allow for immediate correction by the person assigned to the role of observer.
Additionally, fostering a solid mentor-mentee relationship (if unfamiliar, find the meaning of mentor and Mentee) between a senior member and a junior member could, over time, help retain knowledge through constant communication and teaching. In such a relationship, there tends to be an openness to learning and a camaraderie that forms between the mentor and mentee, which can aid both of them in learning and improving.
Other approaches to enhancing knowledge retention include refresher training, which is scheduled after a learner has completed an initial course. A microlearning curriculum with short-form content is another great way to reinforce the information and concepts shared in previous training sessions.
Survey Says…
Post-training quizzes and coursework, discussions, and surveys sent immediately after training are another way to reinforce learning content. Many organizations also use secondary surveys post-training to ask learners how they have changed their behaviors as a result of what they learned. These additional prompts, asking the learner to consider how they have – or need to – apply what they have learned, can prompt recall or encourage an employee to revisit a knowledge resource.
Survey results also provide instructional designers with valuable feedback that can help them improve existing content, consider various resource retention strategies, and ultimately create more relevant and impactful training in the future.
Learning is an Evolution
One of Meridian’s clients said it best: “Learning is not just a single event- it is an evolution.” Organizations continually create new content and discover new information to share. Learning should be touted as a resource. Companies need to create a culture that encourages staff to view training resources as a vital means to achieve their goals and advance in their careers.
It doesn’t matter if training is happening formally, such as launching a course from the learning management system, or informally, such as sharing information in a meeting or over lunch; learning is constantly happening all around us.