Have you ever left a class or training program excited about what you learned, only to realize a month later that you have applied little of it back on the job? As a training manager have you ever invested significant dollars and resources to carefully design and deploy a training program only to see little or no shift in individual behavior or culture afterwards? Even when your students passed the knowledge tests and you are certain learning occurred?
As learning professionals, we often focus on the easy goal--imparting knowledge--and ignoring what it really takes to create lasting change. Creating a lasting impact on people and organizations requires much more than knowledge transfer. Lasting change occurs when learners practice and perfect what they have learned back on the job, building real skills instead of acquiring factual information, and, most difficult of all, changing habits so those new skills are applied consistently for real business results and bad habits are killed off.
Today there is little time in class to practice skills to a minimal level of proficiency, let alone achieve outstanding performance. Learners focus their attention back to their job and forget what they learned, despite all good intentions. Post-training reinforcement has been difficult and labor intensive. Traditional action learning can be effective but the resources needed to do it properly are not always available for every training effort. In today's world, instructors and managers don't have the time to monitor key objectives once students leave the classroom (or the learning management system). The follow-up to monitor cohort teams and schedule discussions can overwhelm instructors or training organizations. Sound familiar?
The good news is that #SUCCESSFUL CORPORATE LEARNING tweet Book10: Making Learning Stick: Transforming Knowledge into Performance is full of simple research-based techniques you can use to make training stick. Ways to activate knowledge, improve retention, and extend skill practice. Techniques to shape behavior change when students leave the classroom and go back to work. And the most exciting part is that emerging web and mobile technologies can be used today to extend your reach, and help you to reinforce learning, promote retention, build better habits, and create lasting success.
#SUCCESSFUL CORPORATE LEARNING tweet Book10 is part of the THiNKaha series whose slim and handy books contain 140 well-thought-out quotes (tweets/ahas).