INEFFECTIVE AND POTENTIALLY PAINFUL:

You know that sick feeling you get from eating too many Cadbury eggs or blowing your whole weekend binging on the latest Netflix series?

Once that sickness settles in, regret immediately follows and you ask, “Why did I do that?!” And sadly, we forget much of what we’ve learned. Similar to binging on just about anything, binge learning is an effort to consecutively absorb a considerable amount of content. Sitting through a one-time training event or reading a book in one sitting leads to a lack of retention.

As humans, we are not wired to memorize facts and content to recall at will. Experiments and human behavior studies made in the late 1800s by Hermann Ebbinghaus still hold true today. Ebbinghaus developed the forgetting curve. His curve shows that in 30 days, we forget 80% or more of what we learned. Don’t cry just yet, we have a solution.

MAKING YOUR TRAINING STICKY:

Spacing out our learning increases retention in ways that we all dream of and benefits the business and the learner. Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve shows us how our retention skyrockets with continuous reminders of important concepts over time. Reinforcing key concepts are crucial to maximizing the learning process. Many training sessions in a corporate setting have a learner take a Web-based training (WBT) or sit through an Instructor-led training (ILT) and then they are done. Imagine that we set the learner up for success with reinforcement training that continually reinforces the concepts to really make the training sticky. (or Alternatively, we can set the learner up for success by reinforcing the message to make things sticky.)

CONVERTING TRAINING TO BEHAVIOR CHANGE:

When we teach concepts in multiple ways, we produce a real return on your investment (ROI). Help the learner to understand the concepts and expectations. Motivate and excite them about what they will learn and how the benefits are impactful. Let them see how it is done and develop ways to practice. Continue the learning process in engaging ways that drive action, implementation, and internalization. Mixing training modalities that are set up with reinforcement is where the learning happens. The learning drives internalizing the concepts, and internalizing the concepts drives real change.  

Interested in learning how we can breakup your binge learning and create some reinforcement tools? Reach out, we’d love to talk shop.