You just ran a brilliant workshop, your participants are buzzing with new ideas… and then, a week later, most of it has already faded.

Don’t worry – this is normal. Welcome to the Forgetting Curve, the brain’s delightful way of letting freshly learned information slip away if it isn’t reinforced. The good news? With smart post-learning strategies, you can make sure your workshop knowledge sticks. Let’s explore why forgetting happens and exactly how to reinforce learning so it stays top of mind.

Hermann Ebbinghaus’s Forgetting Curve illustrates that managers forget up to 90% of something they’ve learned within a week of a workshop if it’s not reviewed.

Without any post-workshop reinforcement:

  • We forget fastest in the first 24 hours after a workshop
  • We continue to forget – but at a slower rate
  • By day 6,we have forgotten most of what we learned

The more the learning is reinforced, the slower and shallower the curve.

Ebbinghaus’s original experiments used “nonsense syllables” (meaningless three‑letter combinations) to control for bias. He found that if you don’t review new information, the memory trace simply weakens over time. Even today, research shows that forgetting isn’t a memory failure – it’s an efficient filtering mechanism. The brain prioritises what it thinks is important and discards information that isn’t reinforced.

Based on Ebbinghaus’s research, reinforcement is most effective at 2, 7 and 30 days after a workshop. It reinforces the learning at points where it is likely to fade. Reinforcement also tells our long-term memory that ‘this is worth remembering’.

Here are some tactics and tools you can use that feel ‘do-able’ in the context of workplace learning, and how 10to3 can help.

Reinforce at the end of your workshop

  • Give your managers a physical takeaway. Ideally something they have written on, or practised with, during the workshop.
  • Signpost them to a bank of resources that are available for them to use that are relevant to the topic.
  • Set them a task for Day 2 to review the physical takeaway with a particular purpose. For example, ask them to evaluate a plan for a meeting they prepared during the workshop.

We can provide visually engaging documents (we call them ‘blueprints’) for the techniques – perfect for workbooks and practice tools. They are interactive, so managers can use them to prepare for real conversations in-workshop and post-workshop.

Day 2

  • Remind them about the task and the resources.
  • Ask them to reflect on what they learned — go beyond ‘happy sheet’-style reaction here. Aim for levels 2 and 3 of the Kirkpatrick Model.
  • Ask their manager to ask them what they learned.

Day 7

  • Send them something that appeared in the workshop.
  • Ask them to plan to apply it. For example, ask them to give feedback using the technique learned in the workshop.

Day 30 and beyond

  • Provide further resources in a variety of formats periodically — about once a month.
  • Ask them to apply it day to day and record when they’re doing it using a learning log.
  • Receive coaching from HR using the same techniques if they need support.
  • Ask them to share what they learned with a colleague or peer.

Ebbinghaus undertook his research in the 1880’s, but a more recent study in 2015 found similar results see here. There are, of course, other factors that will also influence managers’ knowledge retention, including its timeliness and its relevance to their day to day role – how quickly they can go off and apply it.

The way you design your workshop, using accelerated learning techniques and appealing to your managers’ learning styles will all make a significant contribution too.

But, Ebbinghaus may be an antique theory, but it has stood the test of time and serves to reinforce the efficacy of blended learning and importance of post-workshop reinforcement.

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