Learning on the Job: Myth vs. Science

Harvard Business Review:

if a training session has ever felt to you like a skull-numbing high-school class, new research has confirmed your suspicions. The most depressing part? Over the past thirty years the science of training has improved, but many employers haven’t incorporated the findings into their training programs; instead they’ve continued to rely too much on their intuition. So bad practices continue to spread — lectures, workbooks, tests, videos — even though research has shown that the best training is less a cram session than a hands-on-experience. The biggest problem is that the new skills we’ve been taught usually decay by 90 percent over the course of a year. But there’s an easy fix for that: refresher sessions. Whether that’s good news or not is anyone’s guess.

Read the whole story: Harvard Business Review