Setting the Gold Standard for Training

There is no surprise that more companies are chanting the benefits of change and are looking for the most effective and efficient way to do everything. Training employees has somehow taken the backseat of importance and HR departments are comfortable with pulling everyone into one room for a full day of training and getting the entire thing done as quickly and painlessly as possible. Much like many other things that have been done the same way for some time, no one asks for metric performance reviews for the effectiveness in those methods being used because, it has always been done that way. I can tell you hypothetically, finely tailored business simulations and e-learning courses can increase retention up to 35% in trainees. In other words, employees will understand and remember more from learning by a different method. This can directly improve ROI– finance guys, did you hear that? There is a world of performance measurements supporting the abilities of e-learning, all swirling around in a great pool of blogs and online articles, but no one seems to care. We’ll still do it the boring old way that we aren’t even sure works most effectively. Surely you must see something wrong with this picture. Once someone throws a percentage into the picture, the immediate follow up question is where did that metric come from? How does e-learning improve retention in employees?

It is first important to note that not all observed information or behaviours are effectively learned. After hearing something once, you may be able to recall it almost perfectly after 1 minute and just after 20 minutes with only 58% retention ability. With e-learning, material can be reviewed at any time and information can be digested at a rate appropriate for each trainee. The ability to store information is also an important part of the learning process. “Retention can be affected by a number of factors, but the ability to pull up information later and act on it is vital to observational learning” says Kendra Cherry, author of Everything Psychology Book. In the end, in order for any type of training to work, the trainee needs to be motivated to implement was has just been learned. The means used to accomplish this should be highly engaging, motivating and interactive. This is gold standard for training.

Genele Rose