How to make memorable corporate learning

‘Corporate learning’. Two words that strike fear into the hearts of employees the world over. However long learners seem to spend doing it – and however diligently I might add – the knowledge never seems to be there when you need it: that prospecting call, that goal setting conversation, or that ‘where on earth is the Floor 3 fire extinguisher!?’ moment. The problem is the learning you did wasn’t made to stick around. It hangs out in your short-term memory for a little while, but fades into mist with the passage of time. Even if you think you may have learned something really well, learners aren’t always the best judge of what effective learning really looks like.

We’ve been reading Make it Stick, a book on the science of successful learning by Peter Brown, Henry (Roddy) Roediger III, and Mark McDaniel, and we had the great pleasure of welcoming the authors on a live Q&A where we spoke about how you can apply the principles of sticky learning to the corporate world.

Grab your favourite hot beverage and settle down with the recording here.

…And dig into key insights from the book and the session below.

Contents

• What makes learning sticky?
• Learner attitudes in corporate learning
• How to optimise your corporate learning strategy
• How to make corporate learning content sticky
• Three things to try today

What makes learning sticky?

In order to understand how to make content sticky, you need to understand how the brain takes in new information. Take a look at the video below.

The problem is a lot of corporate learning just sits around in our short-term memory, pushed further and further back until it gets replaced by something else. In the moment learners feel like they’ve had a successful learning experience, but when they come to use the knowledge they find it’s not particularly accessible – it might be buried under a bunch of new information, or has degraded over time.

For learning to be sticky, it needs to move from your short-term memory to your long-term memory through a process called consolidation. And in order to do that effectively, Brown, Roediger and McDaniel have four principles you can fold into your learning:

Retrieval: When we want to learn something, for many of us our first instinct is to gain familiarity by reading and rereading, but that doesn’t actually work. The curious thing is that we feel like this is a really effective way to learn, but it’s an illusion – it’s just keeping it at the front of our short-term memory, and giving us a sense of familiarity, but as soon as you stop reading and rereading, the information slides to the back of your mental garage to be usurped by something else.

Retrieval practice – which includes things like quizzes, flip cards, fill-in-the-blanks – requires more cognitive effort, but in doing so makes that information easier to access – or retrieve – in the future. This is the process of consolidation – you practice recalling it and so move it into your long-term memory ready to be called up again in the real world.

• Example: so instead of reading the sales pamphlet a few times, you might do a task that matches features with benefits, or you try to fill in the blanks on key specification.

Spacing: Cramming study in a short space, or even doing a course in a single sitting may give learners the illusion of proficiency, but it’s actually when you give the brain time to forget a little that you can produce longer-lasting learning. That extra effort to remember or to correct any gaps allows for greater retention overall.

• Example: instead of a longer piece of eLearning, or a one-day workshop, learning could be split over a short story-based introduction, a module on key features with some follow-up quizzes, and finally an interactive customer-scenario.

Interleaving: This is the idea of looking at two (or more) topics at the same time. Even though mastery of each topic may take longer, the knowledge acquired is more holistic – learners have a much better grasp of how topics relate to others and can discriminate on similarities and differences much more accurately.

• Example: instead of just learning about and testing one product at a time, you might look at two new products, or an old versus a new version. Getting to know both at the same time will take longer, but will give the learner better skills when it comes to discerning things like key differentiators.

Variation: Drilling a single idea may give an illusion of fluency, but that’s rarely how we use knowledge in the real world. Varying practice may take longer, but sets the learner up better for how they’ll need to retrieve the information on a daily basis, and even allows for greater connections to be made with existing knowledge.

• Example: your product training practice might consist of quizzes, scenarios, and live presentations rather than just lots of one kind of those.

Now it’s worth saying that this kind of learning will feel harder – which makes sense because it is harder – you’re asking the brain to do more, but in doing so you’re making the content stick around because you’re pushing it into your long-term memory. Setting learner expectations up front will be really important to getting them on-side, and giving them safe spaces to practice (without a fear of failure) will be critical.

Which leads us nicely to our next section…

Learner attitudes in corporate learning

Let me introduce you to Max. He’s a marketing manager for a large construction company, he’s newly-promoted, and – bonus fact – he’s also learning guitar in his free time. He’s just been assigned a piece of eLearning to teach him how to set goals for his new team. Even though he loves to learn and will even pick up a new skill outside of work, he has a very different attitude when it comes to learning at work.

• Too busy: His new role has a steep learning curve and this course feels like he’s adding more to his plate.
• Lack of buy-in for compulsory training: He doesn’t know why he needs to do the training so far out from annual reviews, so isn’t really bought into the compulsory training he’s been assigned.
• Fear of failure: He also wants to succeed in his new role, and the fear that he might set the wrong goals for his team increases his overall anxiety about taking the course in the first place.

Feel familiar? According to our panellists, learner apathy is one of the biggest challenges in all of learning. Roediger has a couple of key ways to overcome this in your learners:

• Start off by asking difficult questions or give a difficult scenario about things your learners already think they know. Often learners come to a piece of content and think ‘I already know this stuff, why do I have to do this again?’ But creating some immediate challenges and exposing potential knowledge gaps piques their interest and is a great way to blow the cobwebs of apathy away.
• Make good use of interaction and gamification. You need to make sure your learners aren’t passively watching your content. Keeping a consistent stream of questions and answers, awarding points, and creating some low-level competition helps to sharpen learners’ focus, and engage them where they may be inclined to switch off.

For McDaniel, roleplay scenarios are key to addressing this issue of apathy:

• Use roleplaying to provide an immediate test of a learner’s knowledge and their ability to apply it. If a learner can accurately understand how they’ll need to use their new knowledge in the real world, it becomes more meaningful to them, and in doing so, more memorable. Scenario-based learning gives learners a safe space in which to practice their new skills and gives them feedback about where they are falling short, and what gaps they need to fill.

How to optimise your corporate learning strategy

I imagine many of you reading this have ideas on how learning could be better in your organisation. Some of you may have the power to do that, others not. But even with no internal blockers to your perfect strategy, time gets in the way. And budgets, and KPIs, and the prospect of change management. And so it pushes many of us down another route – that of reactive course creation. Gaps are identified and then learning is created as a band aid to patch a gap.

But real effective learning doesn’t start by fixing the symptoms we see, an effective approach to corporate learning starts by identifying root causes, and then works to build the skills to allow learners to course correct and avoid the symptoms completely.

For organisations that adopt this approach, learning goes beyond something that fixes the problems people have noticed, to a deep cultural value – where employees are invested in their own (and others’) skill-building. This is also incredibly powerful for helping employees move away from associating learning with a fear of failure. If learning becomes about curiosity and expanding skillsets, then discovery, exploration, reflection and evaluation become tools for the journey.

If you’re responsible for learning strategy in your organisation, we’d love to talk to you about how you can apply some of these principles to your learning. If that isn’t you, here are a couple of things the Make it Stick authors suggested that any course creator can do to start embodying these ideas in individual pieces of learning.

According to McDaniel you don’t need an overhaul to get started on making your instruction more effective. Instead, try one single change: a change that fits your course, and a change that fits your time and your budget. Just one or two changes that fit the challenges of your learners will have a significant impact.

Here are two things you can try:

• Adopt retrieval practice: Adding some sort of quizzing element to your learning where you ask learners to generate the answer, rather than just increase their familiarity by reading and rereading can have big results. Roddy cites numerous instances where something as simple as a series of multiple choice tests can positively affect long-term retention of information – just make sure you provide feedback on all incorrect responses. But as Brown says “Mixed practice? Well, that’s life; retrieval practice is life.” Being able to teach the brain to retrieve the information it will need to access sets every learner up for success in the real world.

• Optimise your on-screen content: McDaniel says that the design of your on-screen content – specifically slide-based material – is fundamentally important for learning. Don’t put information on the screen that’s distracting, that’s not relevant to the main point you’re making. When you distract learners’ attention, you reduce learning. If you need help streamlining and focusing your content, check out this article.

How to make corporate learning content sticky

We’ve thought about the learners themselves, and about the overall corporate approach to learning, so now let’s turn our attention to the course content itself.

We have a peculiar phenomenon to unpack. We begrudge sitting and flicking through a manual for 20 minutes, but we’ll gladly spend an entire evening reading a novel. We’ll roll our eyes at the thought of a 20-minute eLearning module, but we can hardly hit play sooner on the 5^th episode of the latest show on Netflix. We’re mostly asleep at the start of the 38^th minute of a day’s training workshop, but we’re captivated at the theatre at 9’o’clock at night.

What’s going on?

We’d argue that the main differentiator in these content formats is story. Presenting compelling stories to learners is a huge part of making content engaging and sticky.

Humans are story-driven creatures. Roediger pointed out that we’re the only storytelling species on the planet. He says it’s as though the human brain has an actual affinity for understanding and creating stories, and so it stands to reason that if you can take an abstract concept and tell a great story about it, it will be well remembered.

Brown expands on this point. He says, “Stories are everywhere. They help us have a context and a visual image for recalling knowledge and using it in other ways in our lives.” Stories and learning therefore cannot be separated. Anywhere you can put knowledge within the context of something happens to somebody, it helps to reinforce how these things work and helps deep learning take place.

If you want to learn more about how to approach learning content with a story-first perspective, read this article.

Three things to try today

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding how to optimise learning content for the way we learn best, but thankfully it doesn’t require mastery to give a few things a go. We’ve got three things you can try today:

Make retrieval practice a non-negotiable: Build in some sort of retrieval activity into every piece of learning you do. Even better, make this spaced, regular practice that allows users a little time to forget and then expend some cognitive energy to retrieve.

Take stock and evaluate your current courses: Measuring the stickiness of my child’s car seat may seem, on the face of it, much easier than measuring the stickiness of your learning content, but we’ve developed a tool that enables you to do just that. Our free learning evaluator lets you score impact (based on principles found within neuroscience that lead to efficacy and engagement) against the effort it took to make. This gives you a benchmark that you can compare other courses to, and helps you identify strengths and weaknesses within your learning output.

Build stickiness in from the outset: Making courses sticky isn’t just a case of adding in some fun interactions at the end. A sticky approach to learning has to be foundational. If you don’t know where to start, you can download your free copy of the blueprint our course creators use to create learning material for some of the biggest organisations in the world.