Why 70% of Your Training is Forgotten (And How to Fix It) | MaxLearn
Beating the Curve: Why 70% of Your Training is Forgotten and What to Do About It
You’ve just wrapped up a brilliant two-day training workshop. Your employees are engaged, they aced the final quiz, and the feedback forms are glowing. You pack up, satisfied with a job well done.
Fast forward one week. You ask a participant to apply a key concept from the session. You’re met with a blank stare. The manual is forgotten. The skills are rusty. It’s almost as if the training never happened.
This frustrating experience isn’t a failure of your training program or your employees. It’s a predictable function of the human brain, a phenomenon mapped out over a century ago: The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve.
For corporate trainers and L&D professionals, this curve isn’t just an academic theory; it’s your single greatest, and most expensive, undetected problem. The good news? It’s a problem you can solve.
What is the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve?
In the late 19th century, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus conducted a groundbreaking study on himself to understand how memory works. He memorized lists of nonsense syllables and then tracked how long he could retain them.
The results were, and still are, startling.
He plotted his findings on a graph that is now famously known as the “Forgetting Curve.” This curve illustrates the dramatic decay of memory over time.
The most critical feature of the curve is its steep initial drop. Ebbinghaus discovered that without any attempt to reinforce the new information, we forget the majority of it alarmingly fast.
- Within 20 minutes, retention can drop to just 58%.
- Within 1 hour, it can plummet to 44%.
- Within 2 days, as the MaxLearn article highlights, we can forget almost 75% of what we learned.
Think about that. If your training session ends at 5 PM on Friday, your employees may have forgotten three-quarters of it by Monday morning. This is the trainer’s nightmare, and it’s happening in organizations every single day. The hard-earned training budget, the meticulous planning, the valuable employee time — all dissolving into thin air.
Why We Forget: The Factors Working Against You
Ebbinghaus’s research also identified why this forgetting happens. For trainers, these factors are the root causes of our biggest challenges.
1. Information Complexity (Cognitive Overload)
Our brains have a “working memory,” a sort of mental sketchpad that can only hold a few pieces of new information at once. A typical all-day training session is a firehose of new data — new processes, complex software steps, nuanced compliance rules. This firehose quickly overloads the working memory. If the brain doesn’t have time or a reason to move that information into long-term storage, it simply discards it to make room for the next thing. This is why “information dumps” are so ineffective.
2. Lack of Relevance and Prior Knowledge
New information is “sticky” when it can attach itself to something we already know. Our brain organizes knowledge into frameworks (or “schemas”). If new learning connects to a learner’s existing knowledge and they find it meaningful, it gets integrated. If the content is presented in a vacuum, with no connection to the employee’s daily tasks, past experiences, or real-world problems, the brain flags it as “not important” and lets it go.
3. Poor Presentation and Encoding
How information is first presented — the “encoding” process — matters immensely. A monotonous, text-heavy presentation that doesn’t engage the learner on multiple sensory levels (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) leads to weak encoding. If the information isn’t “packaged” in an interesting, clear, or emotionally resonant way (like through a story), it fails to make an impression and is one of the first memories to be pruned.
How to Beat the Curve: A Trainer’s Toolkit
Understanding the curve is depressing. But acting on it is empowering. Ebbinghaus himself proposed the solutions, and modern learning science has refined them into practical strategies that every trainer can use.
Strategy 1: Spaced Repetition (The Heavy Hitter)
This is the most powerful weapon against the forgetting curve. The original article states, “Ebbinghaus laid emphasis on the effect of repeating and reviewing acquired knowledge.”
The Concept: Instead of “cramming” (reviewing information multiple times in one short period), Spaced Repetition (or Spaced Learning) involves reviewing the information at increasing intervals over time.
Why it Works: Each time you review the material just as you’re about to forget it, you force your brain to engage in “active retrieval.” This effort signals to the brain, “Hey, this information is important!” Each retrieval strengthens the neural pathway, making the memory more durable.
With each spaced review, the forgetting curve becomes flatter.
- Review 1 (e.g., 1 day later): Retention jumps back to 100% and the next drop is slower.
- Review 2 (e.g., 3 days later): Retention jumps back again, and the curve flattens even more.
- Review 3 (e.g., 1 week later): The information is now well on its way to being locked in long-term memory.
Practical Application for Trainers:
- Automated Follow-ups: Don’t let training end when the session does. Use a learning platform (like MaxLearn) to automatically send a quiz question, a short video refresher, or an interactive exercise 1 day, 3 days, and 1 week after the training.
- Microlearning: Break down your complex, 8-hour workshop into 10-minute microlearning modules that can be delivered over several weeks.
- Manager Huddles: Equip managers with a “one-minute refresher” topic to cover in their weekly team huddles, reinforcing the training on the job.
Strategy 2: Mnemonics and Mental Hooks
The MaxLearn article highlights mnemonics as a way to “repackage” information to be “easy to remember.” A mnemonic is simply a memory device that helps us recall larger pieces of information.
Why it Works: Mnemonics work by associating complex, abstract, or new information with something simple, familiar, or highly visual.
Practical Application for Trainers:
- Acronyms: These are the most common. Teaching a new leadership model? It’s easier to remember SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) than the five words separately.
- Stories & Analogies: When teaching a dry compliance policy, wrap it in a compelling, real-world story. The learner will remember the story, and the policy will be attached to it.
- Visuals: Use the “memory palace” technique or simply a strong, unexpected visual metaphor. To remember the planets, the article cites, “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Noodles.” This silly sentence is far easier to recall than the list “Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars…”
Strategy 3: Make Learning Active, Not Passive
Passive review (like re-reading a manual) is one of the least effective ways to learn. To beat the curve, you must force the brain to retrieve information.
Why it Works: As mentioned, retrieval practice strengthens memory. Forcing a learner to produce the answer from their own head is exponentially more powerful than simply recognizing the answer in their notes.
Practical Application for Trainers:
- Frequent, Low-Stakes Quizzing: Ditch the one-big-test-at-the-end. Instead, sprinkle short quizzes and knowledge checks throughout the training and in your spaced repetition follow-ups.
- Role-Playing & Case Studies: Don’t just tell them the new sales technique. Make them do it in a realistic role-play scenario.
- Teach-Backs: At the end of a module, break learners into pairs and have them “teach” the key concept to their partner. The act of articulating a concept is a powerful form of retrieval.
Your New Mission: From Training Event to Learning Journey
The Forgetting Curve proves that “one-and-done” training is a failed model. It’s a waste of time and money.
The solution is to shift your mindset: you are not hosting a training event; you are designing a learning journey. This journey must include breaking down complex information into “easy to grasp” parts, as the MaxLearn article suggests. It must use multiple formats (videos, exercises, text, games) to keep learners engaged.
And most importantly, it must have a plan for deliberate, spaced reinforcement.
As learning expert Will Thalheimer said, “Spaced Retrieval is like the aspirin of instructional design. It has multiple benefits and very few side effects.”
Don’t let your valuable training efforts dissolve. Acknowledge the curve, and start using these proven strategies to flatten it.
