Training Reinforcement

CHAPTER 2What Is Reinforcement?

Companies often attempt to solve a business problem through classroom training or e-learning courses, but find it difficult to apply specific training goals and measure training results. I have these conversations every day.

New knowledge and skills start to fade as soon as your learners leave the training. In fact, 90 percent of learners quickly forget the new knowledge and skills learned in training and revert to old habits. It is as if the training never took place at all! This severely threatens the ultimate goal of increasing knowledge retention and driving lasting behavior change.

Can you imagine how that would work in an Olympic program?

While organizations invest a lot of time, money, and resources in their training programs, the training doesn’t stick and the impact is very low. So how do you move learners into actively applying their new skills and knowledge back on the job? In this chapter, you will learn how the brain works, why your learners forget, and what is needed for behavior change.

THE EFFECT OF MIND-SET ON LEARNING

Before we discuss why your learners forget what they’ve learned and how to create behavior change, it’s important to understand how the brain works. Our brains not only store all of the new information we learn, but they also retrieve information when we need it. How can you help your brain be more invested in learning and better trained in storage, stickiness, and retrieval?

If you understand why people attend ...