How-To: Help Them Retain What You Train

By Mike Hawkins

You attend a seminar, read a book, talk to an expert, participate in a training session, or conduct some research to expand your knowledge. You learn something new about a topic you wanted to know more about. Yet after a week or two, what often happens? You forget much of what you learned.

The good news is that knowledge retention rates can be significantly improved with just a little extra effort. If people apply their new knowledge, especially within the first few hours of acquisition, their retention dramatically increases. They move their newly formed knowledge from short-term memory to their long-term memory, resulting in retention levels as high as 90 percent of what they initially learned.

Here are eight principles to help people increase their memory retention and the return on their learning investment:

1. Invest: The more you invest in something, or the more you sacrifice for something, the more you value it. Free advice usually seems to be worth about what you paid for it. Paying for advice, on the other hand, makes it seem more valuable. Start out with a retention mind-set by making the appropriate level of investment of your time, money, and effort into your knowledge acquisition.
2. Take notes: The process of writing or typing what you hear, see, or read reinforces it in your mind. It helps make an imprint in your memory. I keep a notepad with me at all times and make notes while reading, listening to books on CD, in meetings, and when attending seminars. I then transfer my notes to my computer for quick future reference.
3. Synthesize your notes into a framework: Consolidating your learning into some type of structure helps take the load off your short-term memory. It creates order and association that facilitates memorization and recall. Distil your learning into a model, diagram, flowchart, cluster, picture, rhyme, acrostic, acronym, analogy, or metaphor. Display your frameworks where you will see them frequently.
4. Reflect: Contemplate what you have learned. Ask why it’s important. Ask what it really means. Seek to interpret and understand. Grasp a deeper meaning and its unique implications. Reflect on your reactions and feelings to your newfound knowledge. It’s not the information or the experience that matters most, but how you interpret it.
5. Discuss with others: Discussion and debate reinforces learning. It creates clarity and understanding. Talk with others who listen well, who will probe into your points, and who will challenge you when they don’t understand or when they disagree.
6. Apply your learning: This moves it from the conceptual to the practical. It creates experience and provides context. Be application ready and plan post-learning activities that enable you to immediately put your learning into application.
7. Practice: Expand your application beyond just those situations where you are putting your knowledge into productive use. Find ways to refine your skills in environments that are safe to make mistakes. Make repeated practice part of your routine until your new skill is part of your unconscious competence.
8. Teach: Teaching and training involve investment, writing (or typing), organizing, discussing, reflecting, sharing, applying, and practicing. They utilize all the elements of improving retention. It is impossible to teach something well without deepening your own learning and retention. Teaching is the best solution to building and retaining knowledge. If you really want to enhance your learning, you should teach, coach, or train others.

Mike Hawkins is the author of “Activating Your Ambition: A Guide to Coaching the Best Out of Yourself and Others” (www.activatingyouram...) and president of Alpine Link Corporation (www.alpinelink.com), a consulting firm specializing in leadership development and sales performance improvement.