Fixing the “Forgetting Curve” in Multifamily Learning

RealPage Vice President of Learning Solutions Katie McCaslin recently has been circulating a shocking factoid: 70% of what employees learn in training is forgotten within just 24 hours. That’s like throwing away $42 billion of the $60 billion spent on employee training in the U.S. each year. And it gets worse: after only a week, the amount of material remembered has diminished even further. In fact, there’s very little long-term retention of anything learned through traditional training. McCaslin says it’s not that something’s wrong with the employees: it’s what she calls the “forgetting curve” at work. She explains that the human brain absorbs and retains what it considers to be the most important information while ignoring information it doesn’t see as critical. Those glazed eyes you see in training sessions indicate the level of motivation and interest most folks bring to training. And over the next few days, after the “completed” box has been checked, the brain simply lets the information go. Retained learning goes up as the training is happening, then immediately begins its descent back to nearly where it began. The forgetting curve The forgetting curve is just one of the problems that have plagued corporate training. Another is the lack of a centralized, organized and monitored solution, resulting in an overly complex and haphazard approach that often includes training information stored in random places online and a lack of oversight as to who’s learning what. Often industry knowledge is addressed separately from software knowledge, though both are critical to growing employee value and should be treated as equally important and incorporated in a single multifamily learning system. Then there’s the motivation factor. Training is often at the bottom of employees’ lists of to-do’s—somewhere around cleaning out the garage at home. So many things seem more urgent that i...