Hold on to what you've Learned

HR Magazine, May, 2000 by Kathryn Tyler

Almost everyone who has been in a training class has experienced it. You attend a course--on a new software program, perhaps--pay attention and learn the material. As the course wraps up, you feel confident.

Then several days go by before the new software is installed on your computer. You try to make sense of your class notes and realize you can't remember a fraction of what you learned just a few days ago.

It is an issue that confronts every trainer: how can you help trainees remember what they've learned in the classroom? Beyond that, how can you ensure that the skills they learned are applied on the job? What the late educational psychologist Edward Thorndike called the "transfer of training" is probably one of the most critical problems trainers face.

According to "Making the Transfer Process Work," an American Society for Training and Development award-winning job aid from the ADDIE Group Inc., organizations with 100 or more employees collectively spend about $60 billion on training annually. Of that $60 billion, only $6 billion--10 percent--result in transfer. It is no surprise, then, that employers are eager to increase their return on investment.

scheduling the Training

Steps to ensure training transfer should begin long before participants enter the classroom. One of the most crucial steps is good scheduling. Late in the day, "the learning curve goes down," says Elliott Masie, president of the Masie Center, an international think-tank focused on learning, technology and training in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "Full-day training is not as effective as half a day or three-fourths of a day."

According to Masie, our attention span in the classroom is limited to about three to four hours, and online it decreases even more.

Barbara Games, co-author of Making Training Stick (Creative Training Techniques, 1992) and president of Carnes & Associates, a training consulting firm in St. Louis, agrees: "The best scheduling is one or two times a week for two or three hours at a time."

However, Masie cautions, "Once you break the training into multiple events, the dropout rate can be larger than what you saved in retention.

And it can become an administrative nightmare," particularly if participants need to travel. Thus, trainers must strike a balance between courses that drag on for months and 40-hours-perweek cram sessions.

Beth Thomas, director of learning for The Limited Inc./Limited Technology Services in Columbus, Ohio, adds, "We also take into consideration the business calendar. We do not schedule training during important monthly meetings where preparation time is heavy. We never schedule training on Mondays, and we never train full days."

In addition, trainers need to determine when employees should attend the training. A common mistake is to provide employees with training far in advance of their need for it. Employees do not yet have a grasp of what they need and, by the time they do, they have forgotten a large portion of what they learned. The goal, then, is to schedule training as close to the time they need it as possible.

"Technology is enormously powerful in this sense as it allows us to shift the time of training to the moment of need," says Masie. "If I can move the information online, theoretically, employees can take it the moment they need it."

John Cone, vice-president of Dell Learning at Dell Computer Corp. in Round Rock, Texas, agrees. At Dell, over 50 percent of the training courses are technology-based. "Technology allows us to have the information available the minute the learner wants to know it and immediately use what they learn."

For instance, Dell has a telephone-based learning tool for customer service employees. "They can dial up and hear tape-recorded examples of customer calls to see how an expert would have handled a particular problem. They can respond to a simulated customer and get an evaluation of how they handled it."

Explains Cone, "One of the reasons we use technology is we don't expect retention. There's way too much stuff to know. We introduce 80 new products in a year. Do you think it's reasonable to expect a technical support person to know" everything about every product and every combination of products? Instead, "we divide what people need to know into two bunches. Here is what you need to know all the time, every day: the rules of doing business, our culture and values, systems and work processes, etc. The rest of it--80 percent of it--is what you need to know right now. You didn't need to know it 20 minutes ago and you won't need to know it 20 minutes from now. So, instead of teaching you what you need to know, we teach you where to find it."

Cone gives an example of new manager orientation. A traditional course would teach new managers how to do performance reviews, even though they may not be doing reviews for six months. At Dell, managers learn how to navigate intranet sites to find management tools when they need them. When new managers need to do performance reviews, they can learn online.