Important information about reinforcement, including how it’s different from reminders.

Training reinforcement is a new concept to many organizations and is often confused with training reminders. Training reinforcement goes beyond reminding participants and instead creates measurable behavior change using the most important content from your training session.

Here are 7 things you should know about training reinforcement:

1. Reinforcement is not reminders!
   

   Reinforcement is about changing your participants’ behaviors by helping them apply new knowledge and skills learned during training. Reminders don’t add value to your training, reinforcement does.

2. Reinforcement focuses on behavior outcomes and learning objectives.
   

   Training reinforcement takes into account your learning objectives, as well as your expected behavior outcomes. By taking both into consideration when making a reinforcement course, you’ll increase the overall value of your training.
   1. This also allows you to follow this simple guideline: Plan, Do, Check, Act.
      1. Plan around your expected outcomes
      2. Do reinforce your training content
      3. Check your results
      4. Act on your results

3. Create your reinforcement program before the training takes place.

   It’s important to create your reinforcement program before your training takes place. This will allow you to add value to the session by introducing the solution to your participants before training has ended.

4. Carefully consider the frequency of messages and the length of the reinforcement program.

   Training reinforcement takes into account both the frequency of messages and the length of time a program should last. If you don’t take into account frequency or timing (among other things), then you are simply reminding your participants.

5. Begin your reinforcement program immediately after training takes place.

   Training reinforcement should begin immediately after your training ends to allow the participant to continue learning. Its been proven that participants will begin to forget within days of your last training session, so starting your reinforcement immediately is important!

6. Maintain engagement throughout the reinforcement course.

   Once your reinforcement program has begun, it’s important to keep participant engagement as high as possible. Reinforcement program content should be quick, meaningful, and helpful. In addition, it’s important to continue communicating with your participants in person or through email.

7. Determine how you’ll measure reinforcement progress and success.

   You need to have a plan of action for measuring success. Do you have KPIs that you’d like to achieve at three, six, or nine weeks? Are you determining reinforcement success by each individual or overall progress?

Once reinforcement data begins to accumulate, you’ll be able to create actionable intelligence for your organization. Actionable intelligence is training reinforcement data that’s used to make decisions that bring organizational improvement to your participants and training programs.

Training reinforcement may be a relatively new concept for many organizations and it’s often confused with reminder services. Reinforcement goes beyond reminding by using quick, meaningful training content in a structured microlearning format to create behavior change in your participants.