20 March 2020 The hope at the end of a presentation is that the participants not only understood you, but can take the information you provided and apply it for years to come. The question is: how can you efficiently and effectively transfer your knowledge to the trainees so that it’s implemented in their workplace? Try and use these three tips to help you improve learning retention. 1. Use the new font: “Sans Forgetica” – RMIT’s School of Design and Behavioural Business Lab and strategy and creative agency Naked designed a new font called “Sans Forgetica” to help learners remember their typed notes. The font was created by a multidisciplinary team of designers and behavioural scientists using a learning principle called “desirable difficulty.” This means an obstruction is added to the learning process to promote cognitive processing which results in better memory retention. Image and font from RMIT University 2. Create an effective presentation – With any presentation, know your purpose. Whether that is to inform, persuade, instruct or inspire, it’s important to leave a lasting impression. When you improve the impact of your message, your presentation will be effective. 3. Make your training participant-centred – Use the 90/20/10 rule for “chunking” content to increase retention. This training technique identifies how often people need to be involved with content, participation and revisiting the information during a workshop; the use of closers, openers, energizers and revisiters (CORE) for having people interact to improve retention. Lecture-based teaching is wasteful…and it’s everywhere. Usually, the lecture is only as good as the person who’s talking, and even if the speaker is amazing, 80% of what’s taught is forgotten a day later. Surprisingly, most training sessions still rely on lectures and death by PowerPoint. By Becky Pike Pluth