Enhancing Training Knowledge Transfer is key to ensuring that learning sticks and delivers real-world impact. This blog explores three crucial factors for success: fostering accountability to encourage engagement, designing training with relevance to the learner’s role, and providing context that bridges the gap between theory and practice. Discover actionable insights to make your training more meaningful and effective.
Enhancing Training Knowledge Transfer Through Training Context
The transfer of knowledge in a training environment often focuses on the ‘push’ of that knowledge. For example, how can we design training in a way which is easy for participants to absorb, or is delivered in a method which they find suitable? As instructional designers, we can spend considerable time on training interactions, activities or content to hopefully boost participant engagement. Microlearning and mobile learning are just two of the latest examples in this push-based approach to training design.
There’s nothing wrong with this approach either! However, every force has an equal and opposite reaction. Indeed, when the transfer of knowledge is focused on behavioural change – apply new skills, stop old habits, implement different processes – the push of knowledge alone may not be enough.
This is particularly true for adult participants. Changing behaviours as an adult may be associated with uncomfortable feelings – admitting deficiencies with existing performance, acknowledging that someone else may have a better solution, or experiencing discomfort from initial failures with new skills. As a result, as we try to push learning and knowledge onto participants, they may well be pushing back against us!
So, in addition to considering how to push learning, we should give equal thought to helping the participant ‘pull’ the learning. We need participants working with, not against, the transfer of knowledge at a fundamental level. As we push, the participant pulls.
Training context gives you the ending
Many training courses provide participants with or ask participants to set, learning outcomes (‘In this module, you will learn…’). However, the goal of training involving behavioural change is not merely to learn. It is to change. The context of what you will learn is good – the context of how you are expected to change is better. Giving context to expected change helps learners self-direct their pathway to that change.
Yet many organisations do not clarify expected outcomes or behavioural change before a training event. For example, participants attending a sales training workshop are often given one expectation – attend the training. In a best-case scenario, they might be asked to do some pre-reading, prepare some items or think about some learning goals. As a result, when they attend the training, these participants are ‘responsive’. They respond to knowledge that is pushed towards them.
Training context makes learners active
Let’s say each participant instead had a meeting with their manager before the training to agree on two specific sales skills that the participant would need to demonstrate improvement in after the training. They also agree on how that change will be measured – improvement in a sales metric or an observable behaviour, for example.
Now those participants are ‘active’ in the training process. They actively drive training activities, discussions and choices towards their specific requirements. They pull the training in directions that matter to them because they have the context of the outcomes they are expected to obtain.
Training context case study
This fact was highlighted in a training exercise for 450 participants completed in March to August 2018 for a large Australian financial service company. The experience consisted of three participant modules and one matching Manager’s module. The Manager’s module educated managers on how to define desired outcomes, changes and behaviours with their staff. 65% of managers completed that module, with their staff training reporting an 89% success rate in on-the-job activities associated with the training. For the staff whose managers did not complete the Manager’s module, and therefore failed to receive information on the required context, the success rate for on-the-job activities was 48%.
When you have agreed on a destination to get to, you tend to map out a path to get there.
Enhancing Training Knowledge Transfer Through Training Relevance
Training relevance speaks your language
When visiting a foreign country, anything written in your own language stands out. From advertising billboards to restaurant signs, your language cuts through the noise. Our instincts are trained to lock on to anything that feels like us, sounds like us, looks like us. American psychologist and author Adam Grant states ‘The most promising ideas begin from novelty and then add familiarity’. From a learning point of view, this means relevance.
Participants are naturally attracted to learning they find inherently relevant. Relevancy trumps almost everything else in the mind of an adult. Yet the economics of many training solutions often do not allow for relevance because relevance requires customisation. Training developed externally from an organisation can suffer from assumptions, generic examples or ‘lowest common denominator’ construction. That’s a simple economic reality of training built for mass distribution.
Training relevance improves the incorporation of knowledge
Consider that relevance means the participant can easily incorporate new knowledge into their role.
- Knowledge is presented in the context of specific, not abstract, roles and scenarios.
- Examples of application are realistic and relatable.
- Solutions have an awareness and use of internal acronyms, tools and limitations.
Training relevance case study
We recently reviewed over 1,950 online training modules, from across multiple organisations, completed in 2018. These modules were created by either (a) internal subject matter experts or (b) external instructional designers. All modules contained the same standardised polling, including two key questions.
- ‘Did you discover what you expected in this module?’. For modules created by internal subject matter experts (unique content, high relevance), 86% of participants discovered the knowledge they were seeking as opposed to 67% for modules created externally to the participant’s organisation (generic content, low relevance). This was even though the externally created modules often looked more impressive with animations, custom videos and fancy
- ‘Were you successful in implementing on-the-job?’. For modules created by internal subject matter experts, 94% of participants reported total or partial success with targeted on-the-job skills, attitudes or behaviours. For externally generated modules, 56% of participants met with success.
When someone is speaking your language, you tend to turn up the volume.
Enhancing Training Knowledge Transfer Through Training Accountability
Training accountability keeps you on the course
Now, despite all of the issues of training relevance and training context, most participants are typically well-intentioned when it comes to training! While there will always be those participants who, for whatever reason, are unable to approach learning with the best of intentions, they are in the minority. Most learners are keen to improve themselves and make a change.
But learners are also busy. They can be easily distracted. Plus, the process of learning isn’t always easy – particularly when it involves behavioural change. So we can hit a problem of ‘intention versus action’. Participants may want to change, but they push the learning away if other things distract them or the learning becomes a little hard.
Training accountability balances the push and pull of learning
That’s where accountability comes in. Accountability creates a ‘pull’ on the learner from their manager (or another stakeholder) who can hold them accountable. This, in turn, generates a ‘pull’ from the learner for training. Accountability provides a counter-balance to the often instinctive push from participants who get distracted or encounter difficulties. It keeps the participant on the path.
Training accountability case study
Accountability is also the book-end to context. While context assists participants before training begins, accountability assists through to the end of the training process. Statistics on accountability are overwhelming too. In over 2,500 training modules we reviewed from 2018, we found that when a participant’s manager was automatically notified of the participant’s training progress, reflections, plans, hurdles and outcomes, then every training success metric jumped.
- Completion rates were 95%, compared to 68% for participants without stakeholder accountability.
- Completion within specified due dates was 92%, compared to 45%.
- Success at on-the-job implementation was 85%, compared to 53%.
Critically, these results came from merely copying the managers on all participant notifications and outcomes (including participant answers, choices, and reflections). This wasn’t about managers providing 1:1 coaching (which would improve results even further). This was purely from the participants knowing that their manager was updated. Knowing that they would be accountable for their actions and choices.
When you know others are watching your performance, you tend to work a little bit harder.
Further Reading
- Training Accountability: The Real Driver of Knowledge Transfer
- Improving Knowledge Transfer Through Training Relevance
- Improving Knowledge Transfer Through Training Context
- What LMS Reporting Should Actually Look Like
- Fuel Your Success: 10 Reasons Why an LMS Empowers Your Organisation
- Static PDFs Don’t Cut It Anymore | What Modern Learners Want
- Best LMS for a 50 to 1000 Person Business in Australia
