Top 10 Guaranteed Strategies To Improve Learning Retention For Employees

In a fast-paced corporate training and development world where rapid technological advancements constantly reshape organizational performance, promoting learning retention is more important than ever. When preparing an effective corporate training program for your employees, it is crucial to ensure that they not only learn but also retain the information they acquire. 

Boosting learner retention is a reliable way to cut training expenses and increase the return on investment from training. Only when your employees remember what they learn, you save on repeated training and ensure they can consistently apply their knowledge.

Importance Of Learning Retention?

Hermann Ebbinghaus's research on the Learning Curve and the Forgetting Curve reveals that 70% of gained information can fade away within 24 hours if not retained. I mean, it is pretty natural for any human being to forget, but it can be pretty infuriating in the workplace, especially when your employees are trying to retain the skills but find it challenging to recall what was taught. This can build up stress for your employees and undermine their confidence, potentially resulting in lost time, productivity, and overlooked opportunities. 

So, learning retention is crucial here because it's like building a sturdy foundation. When we remember what we've learned, it sticks with us, allowing us to use that knowledge effectively over time. It saves us from having to relearn things, which can be frustrating and time-consuming. Plus, when we retain what we've learned, we can apply it confidently in our work and everyday life, making us more skilled and efficient. It's like having a reliable toolkit that's always there when you need it!

Well, then how do you promote employee retention and ensure that your employees learn and apply something meaningful from the corporate training session? 

Let’s figure out the top 10 guaranteed strategies to improve learning retention for employees.

Top 10 Effective Ways To Improve Learning Retention For Your Employees

1. Make It Relatable

To get your employees onboard, it is important to show them how training directly impacts their lives. So make the training materials relevant to their needs. Use stories or case studies to illustrate real-life examples, like how mastering a new product rollout process helps them envision using the product effectively in their job. 

This approach helps your employees see the practical value of what they're learning and encourages active engagement in the training process.

2. Promote Peer-To-Peer Learning

Whether it is a traditional conference hall or an online training setup, employees are highly likely to feel a little distant from the trainers and hesitant to ask questions or doubts. Here is where peer learning works like a charm! A coworker explaining the subject to another employee helps them understand more easily, from their perspective. 

When your employees teach each other, they get the opportunity to recall and explain what they have learned. This not only helps you determine the learning outcome but also reinforces their own understanding and increases learning retention.

3. Break It Into Chunks

In today’s busy work schedule, nobody wants to go through hours of training modules. In fact, 58% of employees claim that they would spend more time honing their skills at the workplace if they were given bite-sized chunks of content. 

Even the most patient employees could lose interest, get distracted, and zone out during your training session. So the best way to improve learning retention of your employees is through microlearning. Breaking down a 20-minute training session into 5–10 minutes of short modules would help you deliver the information in a precise manner, thus keeping your employees engaged.

4. Gamify The Learning

Create your content with a relatable narrative and characters that help your employees relate. Make the training content fun and engaging, thus allowing your employees to see workplace training not just as a formality but as a life jacket.

You need not reinvent the content and start from scratch. Just find fun elements to include in your content wherever possible, thus enhancing the content. Gamifying your training can significantly boost employee engagement, thus making the training experience more valuable and productive.

5. Use A Mix Of Learning Formats

A workplace is a combination of different personalities with different learning styles. So focus on a variety of learning strategies to engage your learners as much as possible. Use videos, and animations to deliver the content, as visual representations aid retention on a great level. 

While one of your employees would prefer job shadowing, the other would prefer video or audio modules. So make your training content personal, relatable, and interactive. 

6. Built-In Assessments

Incorporate built-in assessments, surveys, and quizzes in your content to ensure that your learners retain the information. This would help you keep track of your learners’ progress and further enhance your training modules according to their pace and learning needs.

These short quizzes and survey questions act as a little recap for your employees, allowing them to recall what they just learned. This approach helps you receive real-time feedback and make the necessary tweaks in your training modules to further improve the content.

7. Utilize the Blended Learning Method

While some topics might be best explained in person, the rest could be taught remotely. So the trick here is to utilize the blended learning approach to create a balance between virtual and in-person learning. 

Utilizing both these methods in your corporate training would enable you to break up the way your employees learn and retain information. You could even cross-train your employees on the same subject, both online and offline.

8. Integrate Learning

Learning in the flow of work is a robust approach toward employee training and development introduced by Josh Berin in 2018. It focuses on providing employees with the necessary tools, materials, and information in the moment of need. 

Integrating learning in their daily workflow and providing your employees with the right resources on time gives your employees quick access to the answers and bridges the gap between learning and practicing.

9. Encourage Social Learning

To make training more relevant to everyday life, including social learning aspects. Just as employees use Facebook groups for questions or LinkedIn for industry trends, incorporating social media into training can boost how well employees remember and apply new skills.

For example, you could add course templates, social networks, and microblogs on the topic, thus encouraging your employees to engage with the training materials online and gain better clarity of the subject matter. This approach enhances learning retention, allows them to learn different perspectives, and continuously collaborates with each other.

Calibr Craft offers several courses in various categories, such as Compliance Training, Workplace Ethics and Safety, Code of Conduct, and so on. You can now access Calibr.ai to provide comprehensive training to your employees from anywhere, at any time.

10. Learn From Mistakes

As an L&D expert, it is crucial to emphasize the value of making mistakes. Emphasizing the value of making mistakes allows your learners to make mistakes without fear of repercussion, identify them, and avoid them in the future.

Mistakes capture the attention of your learners, allowing them to reflect on them and identify ways to rectify and improvise themselves.

In Conclusion

By implementing these guaranteed L&D strategies, you can create an effective eLearning experience for your employees that not only impacts their knowledge but also ensures they retain the acquired knowledge and skills.

Creating a well-thought-out learning and development plan for your employees is crucial. However, without integrating effective learner retention strategies, the impact of your training efforts may diminish over time.

Since human memory naturally fades over time, it is important to structure your training content in ways that maximize retention. By incorporating these strategies from the outset, you can ensure that employees not only grasp new information but also retain and apply it effectively in the long term, thus optimizing the return on your training investment.

Calibr Craft is an effective AI-powered course authoring tool that lets you prepare bite-sized training modules within a few minutes. It provides you access to the best corporate training courses in areas like behavioral skills, personality development, compliance training, soft skills, IT, data science, and so much more.

Calibr LXP is the best LMS tool to get started with your effective corporate training today! This platform helps you foster a continuous learning culture in your workplace and keep track of the learning progress and outcomes efficiently. So stop waiting and collaborate with your team with Calibr.ai today!! Schedule a demo to learn more about this LMS tool now!

FAQs

1. How can organizations improve learning retention among employees? 

Implement strategies like making training relatable, promoting peer-to-peer learning, and using microlearning to deliver content in digestible chunks.

2. Why is learning retention important in corporate training? 

Learning retention ensures that employees retain and apply knowledge effectively, reducing the need for repeated training and enhancing productivity.

3. What are the best ways to make training content engaging? 

Use gamification, incorporate a mix of learning formats (videos, animations), and include built-in assessments to keep employees interested and actively learning.

4. Why should my company invest in a Learning Management System (LMS) like Calibr LXP? 

Calibr LXP fosters a continuous learning culture by providing access to diverse corporate training courses, enabling easy tracking of employee learning journeys and enhancing overall training effectiveness.

5. How does Calibr.ai help in corporate training? 

Calibr.ai offers AI-powered course authoring tools for creating bite-sized training modules quickly, and Calibr LXP serves as an effective LMS to track learning progress and outcomes efficiently.