Purposeful Talent Development: Retaining what you’ve learned

The start of a year is a time we begin to set goals and also identify development areas to help meet these goals. We look at knowledge we want to gain, skills we want to develop and training we’d like to take.

Once we’ve identified and participated in opportunities to build our skills, we can’t just sit back. Retaining all this new knowledge requires work. As much as we’d like, new knowledge is not absorbed by osmosis and carried forever in our brains, we have to work to retain it.

For those of you familiar with the forgetting curve, you understand how much work it takes to retain information. For those that may not be familiar, the Ebbinghaus curve of forgettinghypothesizes the decline of memory retention over time. It shows how information is lost when there is no attempt to retain it. Anyone who has parked in a ramp and couldn’t find the car when you returned is a victim of the forgetting curve. (I’d recommend taking a picture of any signs near your car in the future.)

Now, as annoying as it is to forget where you parked, forgetting something you learned at a conference or training or from a colleague is far more frustrating. At these events, you spent your time, energy and budget to participate and you want to walk away with something new or even enlightening.

 

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