It took your team countless hours to create the perfect training course and implement the new content with hundreds of employees.
You followed all the rules of creating a learning and development (L&D) program, but a few months after your first session, you're not seeing an increase in knowledge retention or behavior change. Where did you go wrong?
Included below are three common mistakes that many training and L&D professionals make after a training course ends.
The typical training department doesn't have a clearly defined system for analyzing and tracking training results.
All training departments should have a clearly defined system of how to track the impact the training has and how to improve those results.
Many training departments assume there's an issue with the training course, program, or instructor when they're not getting the results they expect. However, unless your learners are actively trying to change their behavior, your training won't have a lasting impact.
Continuously reinforcing your content after training ends can help increase knowledge retention, but you still need to change your participants’ behaviors for your training to have a lasting impact.
Actionable intelligence is the data gathered from a reinforcement program that's used to identify and fix any problems areas within an organization. It's important that all training departments have a method to gather and transform training data into actionable intelligence. Traditional sources, such as surveys and one-on-one coaching, are burdensome and don't provide valuable insight into training effectiveness.
Continuously reinforcing your content over a period of time is a much more practical approach. During this time, you can track the knowledge retention and behavior change of all participants in your course, allowing you to make educated changes to your training content.
Learn more about defining your training goals, determining reinforcement objectives, closing the 5 reinforcement gaps, and achieving the 3 phases of behavior change in our step-by-step guide. Download the 10-Step Guide to Determine Your Reinforcement Objectives.
This post was originally published on March 4, 2015.