The 3 Problems With Staff Training

There are a lot of staff training courses out there. Here are the 3 reasons they don’t work as well as they should

A lot of staff training courses commit the following 3 big sins:

1) People forget things

Certain staff training courses do all day training “blasts”. The person flies in, trains the staff for the day, and then leaves.  The problem is the human brain doesn’t learn like that.  It forgets new information fast (there is one exception though).

Memory expert Dr. Piotr Wozniak,  author of the Super Memo method, shows what happens in this chart:

The first time you learn something, your memory of it decays rapidly. Within 60 days, there is almost nothing left.

But look what happens when you have a reminder within a few days. Not only does it refresh your memory but you will remember it at least twice as long. A second reminder after 2 weeks makes it even longer and so on.

Proper staff training should be spaced out over a few weeks, not all at once in order for staff to remember and recall it when they need.

2) Habits! Integrated into their behaviour

Everyone comes with old habits.  Everyone has a certain behaviour. It takes 21 days to form a new habit.Staff training that doesn’t take this into account is fighting an uphill battle.

It’s much easier to adopt new ways of doing something if it is blended in with what they are already doing.  This is especially true of the new habit goes negates the old habit.

3) Accountability

If their new training isn’t monitored at least for a short while (and randomly), then it won’t be applied as much. That’s just human nature.