HR Management & Compliance, Learning & Development

Best Practices for Increasing Learning Retention (Part 1)

According to longstanding scientific research by German psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus, employees will forget up to 50% of what they learned within an hour if they don’t revisit the material they were covering. They’ll forget 70% of what they learned within a day. And they’ll forget 90% of the material they covered within a month!1 This suggests that learning retention and absorption can be a huge challenge for many employers when it comes to training their employees and administering their learning programs.

Learning retention happens when new knowledge “sticks”—when it remains stuck in a learner’s long-term memory. And as a learning and development (L&D) professional, it’s imperative for you to create learning material that “sticks” with your learners. Otherwise, you could be spending time and money on training and learning programs that simply don’t ensure your employees are learning anything at all, rendering the programs practically worthless.
To overcome the obstacle of learning retention amongst your employees, here are some best practices you can and should consider following as you design and administer your learning materials and programs.

Provide Context

Did you know that the brain purposefully rids itself of information it deems useless so that it can make room to retain information that it deems more useful?2 And the brain tends to label information as “useful” when it can place it next to information it already knows and understands. In other words, if you want your employees to retain learning material, provide context for them about the material so that their brains dub it as “useful.”
Explicitly tell your learners how a certain course will make them better at or develop their current roles—make it relevant to them and their career goals. And when designing learning materials, use well-known metaphors and story-telling techniques to encourage learners to understand material in terms they already know. Basically, always ensure learners are connecting how a course, program, module, etc., relates to their current role, and that they understand how it connects to their real-world career objectives.

Implement Microlearning

Oftentimes, learners won’t retain learning material simply because there’s too much new information provided to them at once. Learners can only focus for so long, and can only retain so many new topics and subjects at once. An all-day onboarding seminar covering five learning modules may seem like a good idea, logistically speaking. But when it comes to learning retention, it’s a nightmare.
To ensure participants are retaining, disperse learning material in smaller increments (lasting 30 minutes at most) that only focus on one topic at a time. This is called microlearning. For instance, don’t have learners learn how to write a memo and your company’s style guide in one sitting. Instead, divide the material up into smaller bits that are easier to remember. And during in-person classroom trainings, take short breaks every hour.
[Part 2 of this article will pear in tomorrow’s issue.]

  1. Westfall, Brian. “5 Ways LMSs Can Improve Employee Knowledge Retention”: Software Advice, https://www.softwareadvice.com/resources/employee-knowledge-retention-lms. Last Accessed 1/11/2018.

Chen, Angela. “Are you forgetful? That’s just your brain erasing useless memories”: The Verge, https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/21/15845378/neuroscience-memory-remembering-forgetting-artificial-intelligence. Last Accessed 1/11/2018.

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