Your brain is like a giant mansion with an uncountable number of rooms, each with space for an uncountable number of shelves. Rooms are created as you learn new subjects. They might have names such as “Things for Work,” Animals” or “Things Not-To-Do on a First Date.” The shelves are subcategories that help organize your knowledge of each subject and might have labels such as “Urgent Projects,” “Mammals” or “Bodily Functions to Inhibit.”

Your brain likes to keep a neat giant mansion. When you get a new bit of information, your brain puts it in the appropriate room and on the appropriate shelf, where you can easily find it when you need it. (Incidentally, catchy pop songs have no surface friction and leak off the shelves into your head randomly, in case you were wondering what that was all about.)

As you learn more about a subject, you begin to understand it in context and soon you become knowledgeable enough to quickly retrieve the information in just the right situation.  Amazing, right?

When you first learn about a subject, there is just a room with no shelves; any new information goes right onto a pile in the corner. And don’t get any ideas about finding a needle in a haystack, that’s amateur stuff compared to finding a specific needle in a needlestack. This slows down the process of information retrieval to a crawl.

Now, think about this: What happens when you train a new employee who has no experience in your industry (or perhaps no experience at all!)?  How often do you just sit them in a room, make them fill out paperwork, and then proceed to chuck large quantities of information at them without providing any context for that information? This type of training encourages employees to just throw all new information on the floor of their new room labeled, “Stuff To-Know-for-My New Job.”

Naturally, once that new employee starts working, they remember little of that training and they make mistakes that cost money, customer happiness, or both. Do you get annoyed and say things like, “I told you how to do that yesterday!,” or “Didn’t you learn this in training?” They were paying attention; but, you know what? Most of that information ended up in some room on the floor because, without the information being provided in a useful, interactive context, they aren’t able to organize the information on the right shelf in their mind’s new room.

“But informational context comes from experience!” you may exclaim. And you’re right!  Your new employees need some of that experience and they need it BEFORE they get to your customers.  This pre-job training is essential and TrainerTainment can help!  Experience tells us that there are two great methods to provide pre-job experience: role play exercises and online simulations. These methods are incredibly efficient because they provide necessary information, relative and immediate feedback and critical context at the same time. Bottom line, you allow your employees to build those extremely helpful shelves to stock AND organize your company’s information at the same time.  Plus, because it’s only a simulation, your employees are not costing you money because the mistakes they make are consequence free, unlike mistakes on the actual job.

If you don’t have time to set up onsite training with role play situations, try our E-Learning courses!  Our courses offer training those critical scenarios that answer those ever-daunting questions like, “what do I do if….”  They’re also great because 1) they can be done immediately as needs arise with no set up; 2) they can be repeated almost endlessly without costing you precious time; and 3) they allow the trainee to breeze past information they already know so they can concentrate on areas they need help with.

Give your employees shelves instead of expensive needlestacks! You’ll be impressed with how much they recall when starting in your business and how many fewer “new hire mistakes” they make.