Bigger isn’t always better—and as it turns out, the same can be said of training.
When you look at how most organizations are training their employees, you see great big formal initiatives complete with instructors, manuals, presentations, and hours-long sessions.
Part of the attraction of large formal training programs is that they’ve got a certain “thud” factor. They feel tangible and impressive. Organizations can point to their big stacks of resources and long schedules of upcoming sessions and say, “Here is our training program. Look how extensive it is! See how much we’re doing?”
And they’re not wrong—they’re doing a lot of things. It’s just that those things are outdated, cumbersome, and inefficient—and research is proving it.
As far back as the 1970’s, Johnstone and Percival reported that the average student had only 10 to 18 minutes of optimal focus before their ability to learn started ebbing—in other words, learners were tuning out early. (See References at the end of this article.)
That idea was confirmed again in 1985 by Burns, when researchers found (much to their surprise) that students had much better recall of what they learned before the 15-minute mark of a class, after which point most had already zoned out. (See References.)
But here’s the kicker: All that time and energy building lengthy sessions is having far less of an impact than most think. Digenti and Cross both concluded that workshop and classroom-based learning is failing businesses because it covers only about 10 to 20 percent of what someone actually needs to know to do their job. (See References.)
Those hours-long training sessions aren’t adding more actionable information—they’re just eating up time and budget while giving learners more than they can actually digest.
It’s a clunky process:… Subscribe or log in to read the full article.
You can log in using your eLearning Guild username and password.
No comments:
Post a Comment