The main focus of any training and development department is to create the most effective training program possible. Training programs should actively engage your participants and should leave a lasting impression, but do they really?
What Happens After Training Ends?
Once the participant has finished their training program, what's next? Usually there is no active reinforcement taking place. The result? Most of the knowledge and skills taught during training are forgotten within the first two weeks after the training event.
So how do you prevent forgetting? A structured reinforcement program is needed to continue education and skills transfer after the eLearning course or live classroom training has ended.
An effective reinforcement program should take your learning goals into consideration. What do you want your learners to start doing (or do more of) after training is finished? Increase sales volume? Become a confident leader? After your training has ended, you’ll need to continue educating and reinforcing knowledge and skills to help increase the effectiveness of your training.
Define Your Objectives
When crafting a reinforcement program for your organization, it’s important that you understand the desired behavior changes and define your reinforcement objectives accordingly.
Define your learning goals and reinforcement objectives before you begin creating your reinforcement program. Once measurable reinforcement objectives have been determined, your organization can begin designing a reinforcement program.
Now that you have an end goal in mind, how do you create behavior change? A well-crafted reinforcement program can begin to help you change behaviors, but it’s up to you to take the data gathered and turn it into Actionable Intelligence.
Actionable Intelligence gives you the ability to understand what happened during training and why it happened. No matter your end goal, Actionable Intelligence allows you to better understand if your training is effective, and if it’s not, where it can be improved.
Design a Powerful Reinforcement Program
If you want to craft the most effective training program, it is important that your program includes both the training course, as well as a follow-up reinforcement solution.
When both your training course and your post-training reinforcement programs are aligned, you’ll see an improvement in knowledge retention and behavior.
Interested in learning more about the key principles behind training reinforcement? Download Part 1 of the Mindmarker Total Concept: From the Olympics to the 7 Principles of Reinforcement.
