As we do a lot of training delivery here at Lightbulb, we thought we would carry out a piece of long overdue research around how people best learn, take in and ultimately use what they have been taught.
We all know that one training intervention is never enough for things to 'stick' but all too often a workshop is delivered traditional 'classroom style' and that's it - box ticked! Organisations often part-combat this by deploying a series of workshops but then there is the problem of consistent attendance.
We asked a number of questions of clients, previous clients and other organisations and three interesting insights presented themselves:
- Only a third of people attend every scheduled workshop/class in an internal or external training programme because of holidays and other commitments.
- However, people still prefer to experience live 'traditional classroom' workshops because of the interaction, opportunity for Q and A, sharing etc – but if workshops are the only delivery method, then learning can be soon forgotten in many cases.
- But 81% of people do not want to learn solely from an alternative ‘microlearning’ approach (regular bite-sized minutes of content across various formats).
Interestingly, the trend towards microlearning isn't necessarily as popular or effective as we may have thought although there could be a place for it as part of a wider offering. A variety of different learning formats are clearly required so that everyone gets everything they need and has the opportunity to remember and use it.
For example, in the new 'flexible' version of our popular Painless People Management Programme we now use six different learning formats from reading material and quizzes to short videos and online live masterclasses.
So, if you haven't done it for a while, it may be time to evaluate how your learning formats are working for your people?
Do also check out our 'no-fluff', flexible Painless People Management Programme
