Think back to the last training course you attended. A day or two of workshops, a folder of notes, a sense of energy at the end. Now try to list the main ideas. For most people, the honest answer is a handful of fragments.
That experience is so common that the Managing Your Opportunities sales workbook devotes an early page to it, under the heading “Remembering… or not”. The page is a prompt for participants to reflect on how quickly we forget. This article explains why it happens, what the research says, and how individuals and businesses can make learning last.
The forgetting curve
In the 1880s, the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus ran a famous series of experiments on himself. He memorised lists of meaningless syllables, then tested how much he could recall after different intervals. Plotting the results produced what became known as the forgetting curve.
The shape of the curve is the important part:
- Forgetting is fastest at the beginning. A large share of newly learned material is lost within the first day or two.
- The rate of forgetting then slows. What survives the first few days is lost more gradually.
- Reviewing the material resets the curve, and each well-timed review makes the next decline slower.
Ebbinghaus’s experiments used deliberately meaningless material, so the exact percentages do not transfer neatly to real-world learning. Meaningful, well-understood material is retained better than nonsense syllables. But the general pattern of rapid early loss followed by slower decline, and the power of review to slow it, has been confirmed many times since and underpins modern techniques such as spaced repetition.
Why workshops are especially vulnerable
A typical training day is close to a worst case for memory:
- A lot of new material arrives at once. There is little time to absorb one idea before the next arrives.
- There is no review. Once the day ends, most people never look at the material again.
- There is no immediate use. People return to busy jobs, and new skills compete with old habits under pressure.
- The context changes. Ideas learned in a training room are recalled less easily at a customer’s premises or on a sales call.
The result is a familiar disappointment. Organisations invest in training, participants enjoy it, and a few months later little has changed.
Remembering is not the same as doing
There is a second gap beyond memory. Even when we remember an idea, we may not act on it. Knowing that open questions help a conversation is different from asking them naturally under pressure, with a customer who is short of time.
Skills such as questioning, listening and planning are built through practice, not recall. Training can introduce them, but only repetition in real situations makes them reliable. That is why the most effective training programmes treat the workshop as the beginning of learning rather than the whole of it.
What makes learning stick
Research on learning and memory points to a small number of practical principles.
Space it out
Reviewing material several times over days and weeks is far more effective than a single long session. This is the spacing effect. A short review the day after training, another a week later and another a month later will preserve far more than the same total time spent all at once.
Test yourself, do not just reread
Trying to recall information without looking (retrieval practice) strengthens memory more than rereading notes. Writing down the three main ideas from a session from memory, then checking what you missed, is more effective than skimming the handout.
Use it quickly
Applying a new skill soon after learning it, ideally within days, connects it to real experience. A new questioning technique tried on a real call is far more memorable than one practised only in a role play.
Make it meaningful
We remember things that connect to what we already know and care about. Relating each idea to a specific customer, situation or problem makes it easier to recall when it matters.
Teach it
Explaining an idea to someone else forces you to organise it, and exposes gaps in your understanding. Short team sessions where participants teach back what they learned are a simple, effective review.
Reduce the load
Trying to change ten habits at once usually changes none. Choosing two or three priorities and focusing on them until they become natural is more effective than trying to apply everything.
Turning a training day into lasting change
Here is a simple structure any individual or small team can use after a course. It is an illustration, not a prescription.
Day 1 (the evening of the training): write down, from memory, the five most useful ideas. Then check your notes and correct the list. Choose two or three to act on first.
Day 2: a ten-minute review of your list. Plan where you will use each idea this week: which call, which meeting, which customer.
Week 1: use the chosen ideas in real work. After each use, jot down what happened.
Week 2: a short team conversation. Each person shares one idea they tried and what they learned.
Week 4: review the full notes again. Decide whether the first ideas have become habits, and choose the next one or two.
Month 3: a final review. What has changed? What has slipped? What still needs practice?
The total time is small, perhaps two or three hours spread across three months. The difference in what is retained and applied is large.
What managers and businesses can do
Individuals can do a lot on their own, but organisations shape the conditions that make learning stick.
Plan the follow-up before the training. Decide in advance how the material will be reviewed, practised and reinforced. Training without a follow-up plan is mostly entertainment.
Coach in the field. A manager who joins a sales call and then discusses how a new technique was used does more for retention than any refresher course.
Build ideas into tools. Checklists, call-planning templates and meeting agendas carry ideas into everyday work. If the training introduced a set of qualifying questions, put those questions in the template people already use.
Make time for practice. Short, regular practice sessions (a fifteen-minute role play in a weekly meeting, for example) keep skills fresh.
Measure behaviour, not attendance. The question is not whether people attended the course but whether they are doing anything differently. Observation and conversation reveal this better than course completion records.
Reinforce selectively. Pick the few behaviours that matter most and reinforce them consistently, rather than trying to sustain everything.
A closer look at spacing
The spacing effect is one of the most reliable findings in the psychology of learning. The basic idea is that the same amount of study is far more effective when it is spread out over time than when it is crammed into one session. Several practical points follow from it.
Expanding intervals work well. A common pattern is to review soon after learning, then at gradually longer intervals: the next day, a few days later, a week or two later, a month later. Each review catches the memory before it has faded too far, and each successful recall makes the next decline slower.
Short reviews are enough. A review does not need to be a full re-study. Five or ten minutes of active recall (writing down what you remember, then checking) is often sufficient.
A little forgetting helps. Reviews are most effective when recall takes some effort. If the material is still completely fresh, the review adds little. If it is completely gone, you are starting again. The best moment is somewhere in between, when you have to work to remember.
Mixing topics helps too. Alternating between related skills in practice (for example, practising questioning, then listening, then questioning again) can produce more durable learning than practising one skill in a long block. This is known as interleaving. It feels harder at the time but tends to transfer better to real situations.
Digital tools based on spaced repetition can automate review scheduling for factual knowledge. For practical skills such as sales conversations, the equivalent is regular, spaced practice in real or realistic situations.
Designing training that sticks
For people who run training, rather than attend it, the forgetting curve suggests a different design.
- Teach less, practise more. A session that covers five ideas well, with practice, is more valuable than one that covers twenty superficially.
- Build in recall during the session. Pausing to ask participants to recall earlier material, rather than simply moving on, strengthens memory.
- Plan the follow-up as part of the course. Short follow-up sessions, practice assignments and check-ins over the following weeks should be part of the design, not an optional extra.
- Connect to real work. Use participants’ own customers, situations and problems in exercises wherever possible.
- Give people tools, not just notes. Templates and checklists that people will use at work carry ideas forward far better than a slide deck.
Fill-in workbooks, like the one this series draws on, are a step in this direction: participants write key ideas in their own words. The step that is easiest to forget is the one after the session.
A worked example: one team, two approaches
Consider two small sales teams that attend the same one-day course on questioning and listening. This is an illustration, not a study.
The first team returns to work and carries on as usual. A few people mention the course in conversation. Within a month, behaviour is largely unchanged.
The second team agrees in advance on three behaviours to adopt. The day after the course, each person writes down what they remember and compares notes with a colleague. For the next four weeks, the weekly team meeting starts with a ten-minute practice round, and the manager joins two calls per person and gives brief feedback on the chosen behaviours. Their call-planning template is updated to include space for open questions.
The second team has invested perhaps four extra hours each over the month. Three months later, they still use the techniques, and new team members learn them from the template and from watching colleagues. The course has become part of how they work.
The role of notes and workbooks
Workbooks like Managing Your Opportunities are designed to be filled in during a session, with blanks for participants to complete. That design has a sound basis. Writing something down in your own words involves more active processing than simply receiving a printed summary, which helps memory.
But a completed workbook only helps if it is used afterwards. A useful habit is to turn the workbook into a working document: a short summary at the front of the ideas you are currently practising, and notes added as you try them. The workbook becomes a record of progress rather than a souvenir of a training day.
Applying this beyond sales training
The forgetting curve applies to any learning: technical training, safety procedures, new software, customer feedback, even lessons from a project post-mortem. Many organisations repeat the same mistakes not because nobody learned from them, but because the lessons were recorded once and never revisited.
A few general habits help:
- Summarise lessons in a small number of points, not a long report.
- Schedule reviews of important lessons, especially before similar work begins.
- Build lessons into the process, so that remembering is not required. A checklist item is more reliable than a memory.
- Revisit after real use, asking whether the lesson held up in practice.
Common mistakes
Relying on enthusiasm. The energy at the end of a good training day is real but short-lived. Without structure, it fades along with the content.
Trying to apply everything at once. Overload leads to applying nothing.
Rereading instead of recalling. Rereading feels productive but builds less durable memory than testing yourself.
Leaving practice to chance. Skills that are not deliberately practised revert to old habits, especially under pressure.
Treating training as an event rather than a process. The workshop is the start of learning, not the end.
Bringing it together
The forgetting curve is a reminder that memory is not a filing cabinet. Information that is not reviewed and used fades quickly. That is not a personal failing; it is how human memory works.
The good news is that the remedy is simple and inexpensive: space out reviews, test yourself, use new skills quickly, focus on a few changes at a time and build ideas into everyday tools. A training course is only as valuable as what happens in the weeks after it. Planning those weeks is where the real return on learning comes from.
The next article in this series looks at a related tool: the personal action plan, and how habits form.
Topics and structure drawn from the Managing Your Opportunities sales workshop workbook (Charlie Pidcock); the explanations and examples are GoCore’s own. The forgetting curve is based on the work of Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885); exact rates of forgetting vary with the material and the learner. This article is general information, not professional advice.
