India’s Business Standard has a great article on why experiential learning and follow-up are so important:
A Xerox Inc. study showed trainees retained a paltry 13 per cent of skills six months after training if managers failed to coach and support them when the skills were actually being applied.
Suhayl Abidi promotes Xerox’s seven learning principles as a way to use training to achieve true behavioral change:
1. Learning is a social activity, not an individual activity.
2. Knowledge, activity, and social relations are closely intertwined.
3. Learning is an act of membership.
4. Knowing is engagement in practice.
5. Engagement is inseparable from empowerment. Engagement is inseparable from empowerment.
6. Failure to learn is the normal result of exclusion from participation.
7. We already have a society of lifelong learners, but what is learnt is not necessarily what organisations want.