Hermann Ebbinghaus, credited as the first person to systematically study memory, is best known for his discovery of the forgetting curve and the spacing effect back in 1885.
The trainees on your programme will steadily forget most of the information they were exposed to on the training course unless you add components into your programme designed to counter the effects of the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve.
And by programme, I don’t just mean the training event, I mean what is designed to happen after the training event.
Given our propensity to forget things that we don’t review and recall soon, and regularly, after we first learn them, it can be hard to retain the learning long enough to transfer it to the point of work.
No matter what you do, a lot of what is learnt in your classroom won’t survive the journey.
This means you need to get clear on what learning MUST survive the journey to the point of work.
Other than the MUST survive content, what else is in your training course? Do you really need it?
You may decide to reduce the amount of training and instead introduce the content directly into the workflow on an ‘as needed’ basis, aka performance support, thus avoiding the perils of the forgetting curve.
The only way to ‘beat’ Ebbinghaus is to extend your thinking beyond the classroom.
