You tell them, and you tell them, and you tell them again, and they still don’t learn.
Sound familiar? Have you ever uttered these words to yourself after a training session?
If so, you may need to remind yourself of some old cliches:
So if you hold training sessions, and your employees seem to forget the training immediately, it may be time to quit blaming them and turn your thoughts inward: what can you do to create more memorable training experiences? How can you help workers remember and apply what they learned during training when they're back on the job?
To that end, we're going to give you a quick overview of how people process, store, and later retrieve information. This is the first step to making training that's more memorable.
But why, you ask? Why can’t I just tell a person something once and assume they’ll understand, remember, and then later use that information when it’s needed on the job?
To understand that, it’s important to know and understand five steps that explain how people learn during training and later apply that information on the job. Those five steps are listed below.
Here's what that looks like, metaphorically:
There are two points in mentioning all this.
First, as we mentioned earlier, because simply telling something to someone isn’t the same as training that person.
And second, because there are things you can do as a trainer to help your learners with each of the five steps above. Do it well, and your training will succeed. Do it poorly, and your training will fail. So it pays to be aware of these steps and to create training that helps your learners through all the different parts of the process.
For more on this general topic, consider reading some of these articles:
In addition, here are some more articles that follow directly in this series:
And here are other articles related to effective training:
And don't forget to download our free guide to manufacturing training, below.