Attention span: Technology is your friend
Research shows that people have a hard time doing one activity for more than 3-5 minutes at a time during online training
Staying engaged is hard, whether you are in a classroom, a conference room, or a living room. So how do you keep people engaged and paying attention in an online training environment, where they have an endless number of distractions?
Research shows that people have a hard time doing one activity for more than 3-5 minutes at a time during online training. While that seems like a depressing finding, the good news is that technology allows us to provide all sorts of different experiences online. Training providers should make sure to cycle through videos, text, images, interactive facilities, and simulations to deliver training that employees actually enjoy using.
Content overload: Too much content is a bad thing
Sometimes it’s hard to fight the urge to throw the kitchen sink at employees. We have all this great material, so why not share everything – right? Not quite.
If there are too many modules in a course, they’ll be too overwhelmed to start. If too much of the content seems irrelevant, they’ll disengage from the training completely. We’ve all tried to read engineering standards online – it’s really not fun.
The forgetting curve: Training is a journey, not a destination
Remember, people forget. What percentage of info do you remember from your last training session? How many times do you get out to the field and forget how something works? It’s important to give employees of all levels resources to constantly refresh their memories.
A weekly training newsletter is a great way to keep people in a state of continuous learning.
