Let’s say your team has just completed a course on building customer relationships. We hope to increase customer satisfaction scores and drive repeat sales.
But back at work, the fast pace of work and management priorities elsewhere leave little time or support for experimenting with new skills. Recent course graduates quickly revert to the old way of doing things. Training is never mentioned again, and your numbers stay exactly the same.
The discouraging story after training is all too common in many companies, but it doesn’t have to be. If you want your training strategy to serve your company’s goals, you need to support learning transfer.
Let’s take a look at what learning transfer is, why it’s important, and how you can ensure that training translates into action and results in your company.
What is learning transfer?
Transfer of learning is when people apply newly learned skills, processes or knowledge in a new situation.
At work, this means that employees know how to use what they learn in corporate training—i use to achieve the company’s goals.
Why transfer of learning is important
You need people to turn learning into action because you want your company’s investment in training to pay off.
Every good training strategy has clear goals. For example, as in the introduction, you want to improve customer retention and increase repeat purchases. This means an increase in customer satisfaction. So you send your customer service team and sales reps through relationship building and stuff soft skills training.
However, choosing the right training is only the first step on the way to success. Even the best content is a bad investment if employees don’t make changes in the way they treat customers.
If you want training to have an impact, you need to make learning transfer part of your strategy. You need to support employees not only in their learning, but also in their ability and motivation to use what they learned.
How to encourage transfer of learning
Make transfer a part of your employees’ development from the start. Use best training practices for make content memorable and build real skills. Next, think about the potential problems employees will face in returning them to work and establish plans to overcome them.
Here are some helpful tips for turning learning into practice before, during and after training.
Before training
Start by making sure the content is relevant and memorable, and remove any obstacles employees will face on the job.
- Align your training with company goals: Courses should be planned in accordance with yours business goals. If you want to drive sales, your training should include sales techniques and best practices. If you want to improve your work environment, include diversity, equality and inclusion training. This will help you achieve your goals. And showing that alignment will also help you build the case for your training budget.
- Align management priorities with new training: If you want employees to use new skills, those higher up the chain must support their efforts. Even the best-intentioned employee will struggle to try new skills if their boss demands they maintain the status quo. Articulate how training will help managers achieve their goals to support them.
- Help employees see how the changes will improve their lives: Motivate people to apply what they learn by showing them upfront how it will benefit them as well as the company. Include points about how the skills will streamline their work, prepare them for promotions, or improve their work environment in your course descriptions.
During training
Quality learning design is critical to helping students remember skills and put them into practice. Use these tactics to make learning stickier:
- Make training interesting: If people are not interested in the content, they will hardly read it, let alone remember and apply it. Use best practices for designing interesting training to help content enter. For example, grab their attention with different media and make them accessible using microlearning. Encourage them to interact with the content through things like tests and quizzes and gamification.
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- Test often: Improve the transfer of learning in eLearning by building frequent opportunities for learners to test their knowledge. These could be multiple choice quizzes at the end of each module or quick question and answer forms after each new concept. Frequent testing forces people to remember and apply what they learn.
- Enable simulations: Give students hands-on experience with skills instead of just theoretical knowledge. When they get actual practice in a safe environment, it builds “muscle memory” that makes it easier to remember to do them in the moment.
- Consider on-the-job training: Take the hands-on experience a step further by incorporating learning into the employee’s workday. On-the-job training it uses traditional training methods like mentoring and workshops to guide the learning that happens as people do their jobs. This is a good option for onboarding and familiarizing new employees, as well as training existing employees on new tools or processes.
After training
Redouble your efforts by providing a work environment that supports training. Here are some ways you can make learning application part of the employee experience after training.
- Offer ongoing manager support: Employees should not learn in a vacuum. Make sure their managers know the content they’re learning so they can answer questions and provide support and feedback for employees’ efforts. Train leaders for good talent management techniques to understand how to encourage new employee skills.
- Incorporate new behaviors into employee reviews: Motivate employees to keep working on their new skills by adding feedback on their progress to their regular performance reviews.
- Set goals after training and provide support: At the end of the training, have the participants create specific goals around the application of skills or knowledge. Specific goals make it easier to remember how and when to use skills.
- Provide post-training support: Offer resources that employees can use to review concepts or ask questions. This may include follow-up sessions to review content, a library or database for quick access, or ongoing access to the actual course via your LMS.
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Can you measure learning transfer?
How do you know that learning transfer is happening at work? You know you need to set and measure training goals every time you implement new courses, but typical training KPIs don’t always tell the whole story. For example, a course completion rate does not measure whether someone has learned the content, let alone whether they are using that knowledge.
You will not be able to measure the transfer of learning immediately after training. If you want useful data, you’ll need to track it over time. You can use your LMS reports and other training evaluation tools, but you’ll need to dig deeper than just quiz scores and completion rates.
Start by looking at test and quiz results to make sure people understand the content. Then continue with post-evaluation surveys which ask employees about their experience of using skills at work. You can use 360 surveys to get feedback from managers and colleagues about how well skills are being used.
And finally, if your training is linked to desired business results, track those metrics over time to see if they improve.
Learning support shows support for your employees
Back to our newly trained customer service team. Say that when they return to work, instead of being bombarded with demands to keep up with quotas, they are supported with the following:
- Skills review sessions at weekly team meetings
- An opportunity to share their experiences using the acquired skills
- Company celebrations when customer satisfaction scores are reviewed quarterly
With these clear links between training and work, employees will feel motivated to use their skills to keep customers happy. They will also be inspired to continue developing their careers within your company.
This is because providing support after training not only helps employees remember and apply the skills, but also shows employees that you support them. And employees who feel valued have more reason to stay committed to their company and excel at work.