For most, employee training is a headache. It costs too much and has little Return on Investment. It doesn’t have to be that way.
The three biggest problems that all employee training methods try to solve are 1) the employee’s inability to understand the training materials, 2) insufficient data retention and 3) inability to apply the materials on the job. Perfectly mapped procedures are useless if employees can’t understand, retain and apply them.
Truly fixing those problems seems like a pipe dream to most employee trainers.
Now, there are many tips and tricks out there addressing these problems–learning games, adult learning tools, memory tricks (mnemonics), diagramming and sketching and more.
The vast majority of these techniques are a waste of time and fail to address the fundamental reasons why the employee can’t understand, retain and apply the materials.
In our experience with training literally thousands of employees, we’ve found that there are five fundamental reasons why employee training is such a pain.
Reason #1:
When’s the last time you looked up a word’s meaning in a dictionary? Misunderstanding words leads to misunderstanding sentences, which leads to misunderstanding paragraphs, which leads to misunderstanding pages, and so goes chapters and even entire literature pieces.
If you can’t define a word as it’s used, you don’t understand it. If you don’t understand words, you won’t understand the material. Thus, your comprehension and retention will suffer.
Some employee training methods say that should you not understand a sentence, simply re-read it over and over and if you still don’t understand it, don’t worry about it. This is ridiculous, and let me show you why. Look at the following sentence.
As crepuscle approached, bands of orange and purple diffused the sunlight.
Chances are you didn’t understand the sentence. If not, try reading it five times. Did that help? Probably not. You may have tried to come to some logical conclusion as to what “crepuscle” might have to do with bands of orange and purple and sunlight, but your conclusion may be wrong.
Let’s use a simpler method and define the words “crepuscle” and “diffuse.”
“Crepuscle” is the time directly after sunset; the partial darkness between day and night. To “diffuse” means to spread or scatter widely or thinly.
Does the sentence now make sense? Yes, now you see that all it’s saying is when the sun sets, the sunlight is less intense and the sky turns orange and purple.
Now, imagine if you misunderstood 30% of the sentences on a page. Could you say you really understand the content on that page? What if 30% of the pages you read were like this? Have you really comprehended what you have read?
The other four reasons are just as simple and I want to share them with you. Enter your name and e-mail address below and we’ll e-mail you our free eBook on employee training. In it, you will learn…
- The five fundamental reasons why employee training fails and what you can do about it.
- The three most important tools you must use when building training programs.
- How to determine which area to build training for first and where to go from there.
- Third-party reviews of contemporary training methods.
- And more…
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