1. Before any training event, do you understand what the trainees know and don’t know so that you can focus the training and not waste people’s time?
2. During in-person training, do you engage the trainees to ensure focus and a more effective result?
3. After training, do you reinforce the training material in order to maximize retention?
OR …
Do people just show up for your training, take the training, get tested and then they’re done? This is old-fashioned training – check-the-box training.
It is well-known that if you don’t reinforce after training, trainees lose 80–90% of what they’re trained on within 30 days. If the typical company spends $1,253/employee (including the employees’ time not doing their jobs) in training their employees and if 90% of that training is forgotten, learning managers (and the c-suite) need to look at a better way to train!
Why spend the time and money training if the results are so BAD?
If the training was important enough to do in the first place, then the reinforcement, which is critical to people ultimately knowing the information, should be mandatory. The big knock on reinforcement training used to be the time and expertise needed by the training organization. Fortunately, that’s a thing of the past—today, technology makes it simple and cost-effective, and analytics show the impact. Reinforcement should be a mandatory part of any training program.
With reinforcement technology like Trivie, any training organization can improve retention rates dramatically. It only takes a few minutes a month for an employee to remember the training, and because of the adaptive learning workflow, the cadence of engagement is 100% tailored and personalized to each employee. Imagine the impact on your culture, on your results, on your employees’ job satisfaction!
Criteria for modern-day corporate training:
1. Must be intuitive
You don’t have time to teach a bunch of people how to use a training tool.
2. Must be easy to deploy
Training is dynamic now. Your training tools should enable deployment, not make it hard to get last-minute training done.
3. Must be simple to use
Don’t make trainers learn a language. Just add your content and who you want to train, and go. One word: automation. Or two words: adaptive learning.
4. Must be micro
Bite-size chunks, please! We live in a busy, low-attention-span world. Training must follow suit.
5. Must work the way the brain learns
We know how we learn and remember, so training tools should exploit this. See retrieval practice.
6. Must be social
We all know this increases engagement and enhances training. This needs to be part of any solution.
7. Must be able to see results in real time
Is it working? You should have analytics that show your employees’ knowledge gaps and retention.
In summary, as a digital culture who use five different apps to make a dinner decision, why are we hamstrung by one learning system and process? The research is there, the technology is available, and the ROI is certainly there. Training reinforcement programming should be mandatory for every type of training. If it’s not, you are wasting your time (and money) training in the first place.
