Every year an uncountable number of hours and innumerable resources are spent on employee training programs. Whether it is initial training or programs designed to increase employee productivity, allow for advancement, or to help the company to expand, the more material each employee retains longer term, the more an employer gets for the training investment. Rather than needing to train and re-train an employee over and over, if an employer can optimize an employees’ ability to retain the information, less time and effort will need to be spent on both the employer and the employee’s part for the information to be properly learned.

How Memory Works

Humans have two types of memory: long term and short term memory. The average person can only hold approximately 7 pieces of information in his or her short term memory at any given time. Long term memory holds all the information a person can call forth. To remember information permanently (i.e. to “learn” the information) it must be transferred from the short term to the long term memory. If the short term memory is overloaded with information, a person will be unable to transfer that information from the short term to the long term. In other words, the information will be forgotten.

There are two ways to transfer information from short term to long term memory: repetition and learning via understating. For most types of information, learning via understanding is generally the preferred method of learning. There are some types of information, dates in history for example, that repetition or ‘memorization’ is the only way to learn the information. In the work place, one usually sees this as data tables or other similar information. Information provided during training in the work place is almost always information that needs to be learned via understanding.

How People Learn

It is fairly common knowledge that there are many ways of learning new information. How employers choose to present training material directly affects how much of the information is retained by their employees. Statistics show that based on the way that information is presented, information retention can be severely impacted.

Percentage of Material Retained (by presentation method):

Lecture only: 5%
Reading only: 10%
Audio and visual: 20%
Demonstration: 30%
Discussion group: 50%
Practicing by doing: 75%
Learning, then teaching others: 90%
Immediate application of learning in a real situation: 90%

While self-guided training is an appealing option, employees are likely to only retain 10% or less of what is learned through reading material only. It is important to use carefully developed training modules which contains ‘practice by doing,’ or interactive activities, that can significantly raise the retention rate of learning. ‘Teaching others’ and ‘applying what is learned in a real situation’ bring the highest percentage of memory retention. Both of these options can benefit from interaction between employees, in online or offline environments.

Ideas for Increasing Learning Retention

One of the newest ideas out there in employee training is to ‘game-ify’ the training process. Gamification”is the use of game design techniques, game thinking and game mechanics to enhance non-game contexts” (Wikipedia). This can including implementing things like achievement badges or levels, leader boards, progress bars, virtual currency/rewards for meeting goals, challenges between ‘users’, etc. One of the biggest ideas of gamification is ‘cascading of information’ – rather than throwing all of the information at an employee all at once, it is provided in stages, often in a way so that goals must be met at each stage before the next bit of information is provided – therefore not overwhelming the employee and allowing the employee to transfer the information to long-term memory.

Getting your Employees the Most out of Training Programs