Karen Crawford Kinaxis Photo.jpg

In this special Halloween edition of our Training Tips series, we asked Karen Crawford, Knowledge Services, Training & Delivery Manager at Kinaxis, what keeps her up at night. 

You know that nightmare everyone has? You’re about to write an exam and you realize you’ve forgotten everything you knew about the subject? And you wake up in a cold sweat? That keeps me up at night. Except, I’m thinking about my customers who took a training course and have that feeling when they go to apply that learning two or three months later. And they only remember half of it.

Continuous learning matters. We know that skills and performance degrade over time without ongoing training. Google the Herman Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve to understand the scientific research. There are various studies out there that will quantify how much capability an organization loses over time. A common belief is that you need to hear something seven times for it to truly stick.

Keeping skills up to date is always a challenge. It’s a challenge we must tackle because continuous learning is essential to combatting that forgetting curve and enabling user communities to embrace and adopt whatever it is you are trying to teach them. If you search benefits of repeated learning, you will see a laundry list of articles on the benefits and the stickiness of repeated learning. Repeated learning is proven to have successful results—think Pavlov!

Our approach to supporting customers on their continuous learning journey has been through learning subscriptions. Whether students enjoy the flexibility of self-paced learning which allows them to take the training at their own pace and on their own time-table, or want the benefits of learning guided by a certified instructor, we enable them to acquire that knowledge with our continuous learning subscriptions.

Knowing that our customers can continuously acquire and retain the knowledge they need to be successful is as good as a cup of warm milk before bed—and keeps the nightmares away!   

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In our Training Tips series, we asked Training, Marketing, and Customer Success Managers what some of their best practices are to get the most out of a customer training program. Stay tuned for new Q&As each month!