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. You need more than just good intentions—you need a structured approach to help learning stick and a learning transfer system to apply this at scale. Because it must do more than just ‘stick’. It also needs to be operationalised so it has an impact on workplace results.
The People Alchemy Learning Workflow Platform was designed to do this. It enables consistent learning transfer and on the job performance improvement by embedding learning and skills improvement into daily work. Rather than relying on memorised knowledge from one-off training sessions, it reinforces knowledge and application over time with prompts, tasks, and opportunities to apply new skills in real situations.
By guiding learners through activities that encourage reflection and action, the platform ensures knowledge isn’t just acquired but actually used.
If you want to move beyond training events and create real behaviour change, let me take you on a walkthrough of our Learning Workflow Platform and discover how it can do that for the learning programmes you provide in your organisation.
