73% of adults consider themselves lifelong learners. This means your employees are generally hungry to learn if given the opportunity.
"Invest in your people" should be the HR mantra. The longer an employee works for a company the more valuable they are. That is if the company puts in the effort, time, and money required to develop the employee's knowledge and skills.
Mainstream science admittedly still has a long way to go in understanding the human brain. Yet, many of the techniques that are tried and true are often not used in the workplace to improve employee learning. Take a moment to familiarize yourself with a couple of these techniques and get more out of your employee development initiatives.
Gamification
Whoever said, "learning is its own reward" probably doesn't get invited to many parties. We learn because that knowledge leads us to an outcome. The outcome may be as simple as understanding another perspective or it might be applying newfound skills to advance your career. Gamification is the process of adding game-like elements to a task – to make it like a game. Learning becomes fun and engaging within the framework of a game.
Teachers have been creating games for their classrooms to increase student participation and focus for years. Why? Because it works! There are several reasons why gamification works so well including:
- Creating a challenge to overcome
- Setting up a competition with peers
- Encouraging active participation in the learning process
- A fun way to track progress (level up)
- A clear goal in mind (win the game)
- It's actually rooted in the science of Retrieval Practice
Boredom is the enemy of learning. It has nothing to do with self-discipline or professional ambition. The mind loses interest if learning seems to have no immediate value.
In order to improve memory, we need to associate those memories with our life in a meaningful way. Games effectively and immediately give learning purpose and associated structure.
Nobody is immune to mind-numbing boring lectures. Our brains are simply wired and trained by life to retain knowledge that is useful and forget the rest. Knowledge retrieval, in practice, is all about using what we know to accomplish a goal.
Spaced Repetition
Spaced repetition directly hacks the brain to learn and remember large amounts of information. Remembering facts is often difficult because they tend to slip our minds through the short-term memory, never making it to the long-term memory.
In order to solidify the memory, items that are being taught need to be repeated over time. Language acquisition is a great example of this principle. We have no trouble remembering words that we use all the time, but vocabulary that we don't often use or hear usually gets stuck on the tip of our tongue.
Testing the recall of items of information and repeating those items forgotten over time is called "evidence-based learning". By increasing the duration of time between prompting the learner to recall an item taught helps put the information in the permanent memory.
Applying these knowledge retrieval systems in your employee training will most certainly improve its effectiveness.
Improve Employee Learning With These Techniques
The brain is an incredibly complex and amazing tool, one that is uniquely designed for acquiring, storing, and retrieving knowledge. Yet, how we present the information to be learned is extremely important to how successfully and quickly employees are able to remember what they are taught.
Using brain science to improve employee learning has the power to transform ineffective training sessions into effective people-building exercises. Get started with Trivie today to automate and personalize employee development and make learning better.
