Ensuring durable knowledge transfer during training sessions is always a bit of a challenge. Because people have different ways of perceiving and understanding their environment, they have developed different learning methods and approaches that work best for them. Some people prefer listening as it stimulates their auditory memory; some prefer taking notes, writing in their own words or transcribing exactly what the presenter said or wrote.

When organising workshops and training sessions, teaching new concepts to a new group comes down to the challenging task of finding an approach that ensures the understanding and assimilation of knowledge for every participant, no matter the preferred learning style.

Among the different ways of assimilating content, a popular, helpful method is to use “mnemonics,” making new concepts easier to remember as common-sense associations are used; i.e. easily-constructed sentences or terms based on common, spoken vocabulary. An example for easily remembering the colours of the rainbow is using the phrase: “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain” (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet).

Another useful method that builds on the idea of associative learning is to employ metaphors and images to help participants remember relationships between originally unrelated items.

To illustrate the possible optimization tracks of a contact centre’s resources, we can imagine walking up a mountain trail. There are many ways and paths to the top. On your way, you’ll stop at different base camps that correspond to the different iterations and choices to be made for optimising schedules: for example, first, start optimising “Days Off.” From there, balance fairness among distributed shifts and analyse the result. Then, optimise activities within shifts, and so on.

In conclusion, many methods exist to help transfer knowledge gained from workshops. To help participants assimilate and make good use of the knowledge in the long term, no matter their learning style or preferences, starting with a simple approach is a good way to go!