Education often isn’t so much about learning useful job skills, but about people showing off, or “signaling.”Employees often signal through continuous professional education (CPE) credits so that they can make a case for a promotion.

Learning for the Wrong Reasons

Want to see eyes glaze over quicker than you can finish this sentence? Mandate that busy employees attend a training session on “business writing skills”, or “conflict resolution”, or some other such course with little alignment to their needs.

Learning the wrong things

People learn best when they have to learn. Applying what’s learned to real-world situations strengthens one’s focus and determination to learn.Today’s employees often learn uniform topics, on schedule, and at a time when it bears little immediate relevance to their role — thus learning suffers as a result.

Learning at the wrong time

Like first year college students who forget 60% of what they learn in high school, studying merely to get the CPE credit suggests that employees, too, will quickly forget what they learn.German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus pioneered experimental studies of memory in the late 19th Century, culminating with his discovery of "The Forgetting Curve."He found that if new information isn’t applied, we’ll forget about 75% of it after just six days.

We quickly forget what we’ve learned

Our brains quickly forget what we don’t use. Incorporating new learning into your work is one way to retain knowledge.Another is spaced repetition. It refers to spreading learning out over time - material should be reviewed in gradually increasing intervals of roughly one day, two days, four days, eight days, and so on.Studies show that by using spaced repetition, we can remember about 80%of what we learn after 60 days — a significant improvement.

Learning the wrong things

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