retention

Retention of training material remains one of the biggest challenges for L&D professionals working in the corporate landscape.

From designing more engaging training material to providing employees with blended training the employee training process can be optimised for better retention using a number of techniques.

While employing all these techniques at once may not be feasible, your employee training initiatives must constantly evolve to aid better retention and comprehension.

After all, what is the point of training your employees when they cannot remember anything they were taught?

One of the easiest and most overlooked ways to improve retention in learners is with quizzes. 

You can hire the best trainers and use the best web conferencing software to deliver the best training material to your employees. However, no training experience will be complete without testing whether the employee has retained enough knowledge to be able to apply it.

Testing has gained a bad rep in learning circles lately. However, there is plenty of scientific proof to show that consistent testing improves retention.

With that said, in order to enjoy the benefits of quizzing your employees, you must perfect the art of making and delivering quizzes in the right manner.

Here are a few tips to get you started:

Ensure You Stay Relevant

Designing quizzes is not an easy task. Finding unique questions can be tricky, especially for beginners. However, it is important for training administrators to make sure they don’t wander away from the core subject while deciding the questions.

A good way to do this is by defining the learning objectives you want to address with the quiz. By doing so, coming up with questions that are challenging and relevant to key concepts will become much easier.

Pair Quizzes With Incentives

Pairing quizzes with incentives is an easy way to motivate your learners to be better prepared to take them. If you cannot or don’t want to provide them with material benefits, you can use gamification.

Gamification is a proven concept when it comes to motivating learners to strive for better performance. By associating your quizzes with a leaderboard and a point system, you can easily create healthy competition among your learners.

The best part is, a leaderboard will also enable you to identify star performers early in the professional development process.

Use Automation To Improve Learner Performance

Modern elearning tools come loaded with a variety of automation features. These automation features can be put to use to assist learners with better performance during quizzes.

One great way to do this is to send low scoring learners additional study material that will help them understand the key concepts better and hopefully, will improve their chances of acing the next assessment.

Use A Diverse Variety Of Questions

Many corporate trainers limit their tests and quizzes to multiple choice questions. While there is nothing wrong with them, there are a variety of different question types that you can use to make your quizzes more challenging and interesting.

Even if you don’t want to overcomplicate things, you have options like ‘fill in the blanks’, ‘hotspot’ questions, and ‘match the items’.

For those that don’t mind creating a complex assessment, sequence questions are a great way to help your employees understand various company processes.

Conclusion

Quizzes are a great way to make your employee training experience more engaging. More engagement, combined with better retention can drastically improve the results of your training efforts.

Have you used quizzes in an employee training scenario before? How was your experience? Share with us in the comment section below.

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