Imagine you’ve been put in charge of your company’s biggest compliance training program. Before the training, you’ve set everything up just right: you conducted extensive research with your subject-matter experts, you spend weeks authoring the curriculum, your executive team signs off, and you deliver a stellar training experience. Everything goes beautifully, and everyone agrees the training was a huge success. Your work is done.
But back at the office, while you bask in the glory of your success, a dreadful thing is happening inside the brains of your employees.
Research on the forgetting curve shows that within one hour, people will have forgotten an average of 50 percent of the information you presented. Within 24 hours, they have forgotten an average of 70 percent of new information, and within a week, forgetting claims an average of 90 percent of it.
TRY THIS: If you are in charge of the training department for your organization, ask the instructor who taught the last training to send you a list of 10 questions that would serve as an exam. Ask a few employees who attended the training meet you in the office, and ensure that trainees don’t know that they’ll be tested. Make sure that there is a time gap of over five days between the training and the test day. Studies show that, depending on the level of difficulty of the questions presented, the retention rates seven days after a one-day training vary between 10–22%.
Some people remember more, some people remember less, but in general, the situation is appalling, and it is the dirty secret of corporate training: no matter how much you invest in the education and development of your employees, nearly everything you teach will be forgotten. Although corporations spend $171 billion dollars a year on training, this investment is like pumping gas into a car that has a hole in the tank. All of your hard work simply drains away.
Think of your last corporate training. How much money did your company spend?
Did you hire an outside consultant or use an in-house trainer? Did you have materials, books or software provided? How much did that cost? Was the training catered? Did the company rent the space and cover any travel expenses?
Sunk Costs include:
- Instructors Salaries
- Materials (books, software, handouts)
- Food and drink (trainings are often catered)
- Travel
- Space Rental
But these are not all the expense items! Trainees are often being paid a full salary while they are taking the training. Let’s use an average pay of $500 per day for VP — level employees. If you are training ten people, that’s $5,000 in salaries alone, for employees who aren’t technically working. Can you now estimate how much of an expense your last training was? An average one-day training for 10 VP — Level employees costs anywhere from $10K to $150K.
Is it worth it? Are you getting the expected return on your investment?
According to the recent study, only 21 percent of employees reported developing new skills in the past five years through formal training programs offered by their employers. That’s ONLY one out of 5 people.
Understandably, you probably don’t consider yourself responsible for your employees’ ability to retain training information. We generally assume that learning is a personal responsibility, based on a person’s innate abilities.On the contrary, our team at Executive mind found that a lot of employees experience extreme pressure to learn new skills quickly, and complain about a lack of support from HR and Learning Department.
Think like a farmer.
Before planting seeds, experienced farmers always make sure the ground in the crop area is fertile. If the soil is not mineralized, their seeds will die. Naturally, these farmers don’t throw expensive seeds into infertile soil, because they don’t want to waste their time and money. Let’s follow our analogy and magically transform training departments into farmers. After buying some outstanding seeds, these farmers would throw large bags of seeds over rocks and barren ground. If nothing grew, these farmers would blame either the seeds themselves for not producing, or their planting methods for not yielding any results. These "Training Departement Farmers" would set up a conference, where they would debate whether they should use Direct Seeding Techniques or Transplanting for better results. They would also publish a few research papers. “Increasing the ROI of farming with Powerful Planting Methods.” “Engaging Seeds — Better Results.”
Experienced farmers understand that the problem lies in the soil--not in the seeds or the planting methods.
For any training to be effective, two things have to happen: it has to be understood (received) and remembered (retained).
In order for a training to be understood, you have to have your employees’ attention. For training to be remembered, you have to have your employees’ awareness. When trainees become aware of how their mind works--how often they get distracted during a lecture,how soon they forget all new information and what it takes to remember — they change the way they learn, and ultimately retain more of what they’ve taken in.
Intentional thought about one’s own thinking (metacognition) is generally regarded as an essential component of successful learning. Studies show that “experts” constantly monitor their understanding and progress during problem-solving. Critically, their metacognitive skills allow them to decide when their current level of understanding is not adequate. This type of planning, self-monitoring, self-regulation and self-assessment not only includes general knowledge about cognitive processes and strategies, but also appropriate conditions for the use of those strategies, and general self-knowledge.
Research suggests that metacognitive skills cannot be taught out of context. In other words, one can’t just take a course on metacognition. It’s almost mandatory to prime trainees for learning before the seminar and set them up for success by teaching retention immediately after the seminar is over.
Are you doing that at your firm? Are you tracking the retention rates?
Now you know the truth about corporate training, and you can do one of the two things: contact us or stick your head in the sand.
Sticking your head in the sand is fine if you are an ostrich.
Original content by Katya Seberson
About the Author: Katya Seberson is a retention expert and corporate trainer in memory, speed reading and effective learning. Katya is the founder of ExecutiveMind Inc.