HOW TO MAKE YOUR TRAINING STICK
By Brannon Dreher
How Much Information Sticks during Training? Your company delivers an expensive new training program to employees and then, like any smart company does, spends the next few months measuring the effects. Immediately after sales training, you find that your newly trained salespeople are only using two of the six selling approaches that training presented to them. Or six months after you trained your front office staff, you discover that right after training, they started applying some of the customer-service strategies you taught them, but have now abandoned them and it’s back to “business as usual.”
Frustrating? Costly? Infuriating? Yes, it's all of those things, and worse. How can you get trainees to absorb more of the information you give them, and increase the chances that that information will “stick” and be put into use for the long term? Let’s take a closer look.
Cognitive Load Theory According to psychologists who have studied how people learn (like Prof. Ton de Jong at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, John Sweller at the University of New South Wales, and many others), the human brain can be expected to absorb a relatively small percentage of the information delivered in a learning situation—at times as little as 10%. But it is possible to improve that percentage dramatically.
To understand how that percentage can be increased, it is important to understand Cognitive Load Teory, which is a way of understanding the effect that sensory inputs have on your ability to process information and learn. When your senses are processing a lot of input, they filter how much information gets passed on into your short-term memory. As an example in training, your learners are dealing with a lot of input that is competing with the information you want to teach. Tey’re adjusting their eyes to see your slides, getting distracted by other trainees at their tables, trying to get comfortable in their seats, and maybe even getting their first gulp of coffee.
When information does get around that sensory/cognitive load, it makes it to your short-term memory, where you think about it. You judge it and if it is memorable, it then gets passed into your long-term memory where we can use it later.
To summarize - if a learner decides that information is important when it is in short-term memory, he or she will unconsciously transfer it to long-term memory. Tat information becomes what he or she learns because of training.
How Long Does Information Reside
in Short-Term Memory? Te answer to that question will probably surprise you, because new information only gets processed for between 10 and 15 seconds in short-term memory. If that information doesn’t stick during that time, it is lost. So, think of short-term memory as a kind of buffer zone that fills up quickly, and then empties as new information flows in.
What Can Help Get Information Passed from Short-Term Memory to Long-Term Memory?
• Mnemonic devices – Back when you were a student in high school, you might have memorized the sentence, “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas” to help you memorize the planets in our solar system in the order in which they appear from the sun. (Te words in that sentence stand for Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.) Acronyms are useful in training too. For example, the acronym AIDA (standing for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) is sometimes used to remind sales trainees of different stages of making a sale.
• Activities - Participation in shared group activities is another effective way to reinforce concepts and help them move into long-term memory. So are quizzes and self-tests delivered at key moments during training that reinforce concepts and skills.
• Resources to be used after training - A content library for trainees to use once training is done can be very effective in making sure key concepts move into long-term memory. For example, you can create an online content library for field technicians to access; it explains procedures and concepts that were covered in training, though probably not fully absorbed.
56 TPI Turf News September/October 2017
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