Why should you be concerned about learner retention? Employees know safety is important. So why do you have to constantly remind them of safety procedures? It can’t always be chalked up to poor attention during safety training.

In fact, most of the time what’s happening is the employee’s memory is being so overwhelmed that their brains aren’t holding on to the information you’re giving or have given. In the simplest of terms, employees are forgetting to be safe.

The forgetting curve describes how the brain’s ability to retain information decreases over time. Hermann Ebbinghaus and his research in memory and forgetting, is credited with the creation of the curve in 1885. He discovered that from the point when you learn a piece of information (100% retention), retention begins to drop exponentially. What that means is, without follow-up, about 70% of learning is lost and forgotten within 24 hours of learning it, after which the loss rate slows down some, but studies show that total retention a month later is only around 10-20%.

That’s assuming of course, the learner is starting with 100% retention, which is likely not the case. On a good day, we are lucky if a learner starts at 80% retention.

Download our report to find out about strategies and solutions that can easily improve the retention rate of your safety training and help to reduce accidents & incidents by an average of 47%.