The Traditional Training Workshop Doesn’t Work — So We Reinvented it

When L&D professionals like you identify a need to train your staff on a specific set of skills, you can usually find plenty of organizations offering training workshops covering that skillset. And you can narrow your list to companies with lots of experience in the subject matter, geographic proximity to your offices, etc. That’ll get you closer to a productive training experience for your staff.

But no matter which consultants you select, you’ll still face a significant challenge — several challenges, actually — with this approach. That’s because the traditional training workshop isn’t nearly as effective at creating the deep and lasting learning that your organization is looking for.

Traditional training workshops fall short for a number of practical and educational reasons. In this post, we’ll review those shortcomings. Then we’ll describe how you can overcome them all — and give your employees a powerful, lasting learning experience — with the modern training workshop developed by Oji Life Lab.

3 Huge Drawbacks of the Conventional Training Workshops

1. They’re a drain on company productivity.

Most training workshops work the same way: You book a significant block of your employees’ time — say, one or two full business days — and either send them to a hotel or business center for the live training, or have the training consultants come to your offices.

This rigid, all-at-once approach to training makes these workshops difficult to schedule, because at least some of your employees will likely be working on important projects and won’t want to be pulled away from their work.

2. They make many employees feel frustrated and anxious.

The all-day (or even multi-day) format of live training workshops can create high levels of disruption and anxiety among your staff. That can lead to a terrible unintended consequence: Some of the employees scheduled for this training go into the workshop feeling negatively about it.

And that’s a significant, quantifiable problem: According to a meta study published by the National Institutes of Health, 90% of the studies reviewed found that when learners feel positively about their experience, they have better learning outcomes. But this effect works in reverse as well: If they feel negatively about your training workshop, your employees are less likely to gain as much benefit from the learning.

3. They use a teaching method scientifically proven to be ineffective.

Here’s the fundamental shortcoming of traditional training workshops: They use a format for teaching that, according to credible research, doesn’t stick.

When your employees learn material in a live training, they are exposed to this new knowledge only once. And according to the scientifically proven Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, learners begin to forget this new information almost immediately. The rate goes something like this:

• We forget 50% in the first day.
• We forget 80% by the third or fourth day.
• And we’ll forget 90% of what we’ve learned after one week.
  

So how do you help ensure your employees truly learn and retain their new knowledge and skills? With regular reinforcement and opportunities to revisit the learning, which traditional training workshops — with their one-and-done model — don’t offer.

And that’s why Oji Life Lab — with help from world-renowned researchers and scientists from Yale University and other leading institutions — has developed the reinvented training workshop.

Why the Reinvented Training Workshop Leads to True Learning — and Business Success

Oji Life Labs designed a learning model both to overcome the shortcomings of the traditional training workshop and to give organizations a non-disruptive, cost-effective way of empowering their employees with invaluable new skills.

Here’s why this modern, mobile training model works.

Oji has built our training courses into mobile, digital, self-paced learning modules accessible anytime via apps on your employees’ smartphones or tablets.

We’ve created our courses as Life Labs — each covering a specific business skill set, such as emotional intelligence and decision making — which offer training to help your employees in all areas of their lives, from improving their productivity and business relationships to becoming better listeners, friends, and parents.

And whereas the traditional workshop simply ends and the consultants leave, Oji Life Labs also include live coaching at regular intervals, available through the mobile app — so your employees have ongoing access to experts to help them hone and practice their new skills.

Here’s a brief comparison of the old and new approaches to employee training. Learn what Oji’s reinvented training workshop can do for your team.

Co-Founder and Chief Learning Officer, Oji Life Lab

Andrea Hoban

Andrea Hoban is Co-Founder and Chief Learning Officer of Oji Life Lab. As Oji’s head of learning and program design, Andrea is reimagining the way we learn skills, such as emotional intelligence.

FOLLOW Andrea Hoban @andrea_hoban