12 Dec 4 Corporate Training Tips to Boost Learning Retention

Even the best corporate training program loses value if employees don’t retain the information presented to them. The time and money invested in learning and development at any company need to be focused on creating a corporate training experience that is not only enjoyable, but also easily recalled.

Taking the time to approach the methods used in your corporate training program can greatly increase learning retention with these four tips:

Hands-on Training is Essential

Learned skills stick better with employees when they can apply them soon after training. Even skills that may not be essential to their day-to-day tasks need to be practiced in addition to being explained to have any hope of retention.

Build simulated situations and real-life applications of skills to your training program to address this. Hands-on experience doesn’t necessarily need to be led by a trainer. Adding applications of important skillsets as a sort of homework allows employees to get familiar with the skills while exercising critical thinking to address new challenges that may arise.

Engage Emotions

Our brains prioritize all incoming sensory information into three categories on the fly; data important to survival, data connected to emotions, and informative data. Content that is only informative is the lowest priority of the three, but content that connects on an emotional level is retained much more quickly.

Corporate training programs need to focus on keeping employees’ attention but also making sure they feel a connection to the situations presented. Building a learning path based on a narrative greatly improves trainees’ ability to recall information by following clear, logical connections.

Asking why trainees need information rather than what they need to know and conversationally engaging them to make training not only more interesting, but easier to follow and remember.

Spaced Repetition

Hearing information one-time can be challenging to remember. Education from childhood all the way into adulthood thrives on repetition. There’s a good reason for that too, repeated recall of information improves retention by up to 80 percent.

Tactics as simple as a question and answer style review at the end of a training day paired with a recap at the beginning of the next day can be implemented simply. This not only creates spaced repetition, but also engages trainees and focuses on information they need to be clarified.

Make sure information that is essential to your corporate training objectives isn’t presented only once. Present that information multiple times with space in between to build retention up even before the information has been applied.

Personalize Training with Microlearning

Building on the conversational structure of learning, corporate training can be broken down into bite-sized and personalized moments. When trainees ask clarifying questions, encouraging them to apply the skills they are learning to situations in their life personalizes the information.

This personalized information is not only easily recalled, but it presents important information in stages. Trainees can take the time to master the smaller pieces and build them into full-sized skills, allowing them to build future learning on that foundation.

Build employee retention and professional development into your corporate training. Contact ISC Technology Inc. to find professionals to enhance your corporate training and development programs.