Training Retention and Follow Up

One of the more common concerns students and training managers have is the question of how to make sure students can retain the information they learn in the classroom. There have been various articles and reports claiming that 10% of classroom training is transferred to a person’s actual job (a completely arbitrary figure, by the way, and not based on any facts). Whether this comes close to being accurate or not, retention is still a concern for many organizations.


Example: an IT developer takes a 5-day, 40-hour course on C#.NET, and returns to his desk to find a week’s backlog of emails, projects, and help desk tickets. He retains the most important topics that he originally went to class to learn, but by the time he slogs through all of this plus ongoing work, 2 weeks have passed, and he has to crack open his courseware book to search in vain for the “one thing” he hopes to use on the next project. 3 months later, he is involved in another project requiring another tool he learned in the course, but has since forgotten.


Or, in another example, a team of ABAP developers take a course on SAP Production Planning, but in order to practice the topics they learned in class, they need to re-create the classroom exercises within their own test environment, a time-prohibitive venture. At the same time, working in their production environment to apply principles learned in class is not the preferred method, since they’re still learning, and potentially manipulating live data at the same time.


Or, a finance dept. employee takes an advanced Excel course, and 4 months later, has to employ a trend analysis feature they learned in the class, and is now completely re-learning how.


So, what to do?


Some organizations adopt a blended approach – supplementing the classroom training with an e-learning resource to help refresh their classroom instruction. This works pretty well assuming 2 things:


1) The learner has the discipline to use the e-learning course (most e-learning providers consider a 15% usage rate to be outstanding)
2) The e-learning course exists, which for many high level IT topics or soft skills courses as well as custom courses, it does not.


Most training companies offer refresher training (in fact, Microsoft requires it for vendors delivering their courses), but that requires the learner to sit through the entire course again, something they have neither the time nor the inclination to do.


Many professionals belong to regional user groups, where they can turn to other members of the group for their experience with a particular technology or topic.


Another option is social networking. We’re not talking about using Facebook for your company’s training environment (although that’s an option). Using internal resources such as SharePoint, or third party resources if you prefer not to host it internally, you can have your own mini social network, discussion forum, message boards, etc. up and running in no time flat.


First, plan ahead! If you’re going to use a social network, have it created, and all class members registered prior to class. Instructors should know that the network exists, and they should be a part of it, as a resource and to serve as a moderator for discussions, where appropriate. For this reason, we’d recommend using an external network so that any third-party instructors won’t have to access your company’s network in order to respond.


Second, make it exciting for students to participate. Even if the topic is interesting to them, giving an incentive will increase participation and the success of your program. For example, let students know you’re running a contest on the social network, so they must log in and participate in order to play, and make the contest prize meaningful ( I can recall one such contest where one of the prizes was a free soda from the company cafeteria – not the best motivator in the world).


Third, involve your training vendor ahead of time, and let them know this is part of how you conduct your training. Get it in the contract, and make sure the instructor is involved for a certain period after class.


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