Focus Magazine - Winter 2017 - 28

FEATURESTORY

Training Reinforcement 101
■ By Steven Boller

Training
reinforcement
is essential to
achieve the pullthrough required.

28

T

ake a moment to picture one of your
target learners. Her name is Sarah. She's
a new pharmaceutical sales rep just
getting started in her territory. Sarah has
completed her onboarding and her schedule is
already packed with physician visits.
Sarah also completed her assigned home
study modules and has performed well in each
of the training opportunities. For practical
purposes, a manager would look at her records
and assume that she knows her stuﬀ. But as a
trainer, you know that her initial onboarding
was just the beginning. Is the prescribing
information truly committed to memory, or is
she struggling to look it up on her phone while
sitting in the parking lot? Will she be ready to
respond articulately when a physician fields a
tough objection or asks for clinical trial data?
Pharmaceutical and medical devices sales
are far too complex to support with one-time
training events or "one and done" online
modules. e cognitive load for these roles is
high, and reps must constantly stay as up-todate as the products they sell, industry
regulations, the payer landscape and
competitive shis. To provide adequate
support, trainers need strategies that help reps
commit knowledge and skills to memory, as
well as find and locate key information at the

Pharmaceutical and medical
device sales are far too complex to
support with one-time training events
or "one and done" online modules.
moment of need. To achieve the pull-through
required to make training a worthwhile
investment, training reinforcement is essential.

Design with the Brain in Mind
Have you heard of Herman Ebbinghaus'
famous Forgetting Curve? In case you are
unfamiliar, Ebbinghaus' 1880 and 1885 studies
showed that we begin to forget what we learn
almost instantly aer learning it. e amount of
time it takes us to "relearn" increases steadily,
until we have forgotten as much as 90 percent
of the original content.
Ebbinghaus' Forgetting Curve experiment
has been successfully replicated several times.
Most recently, Jaap M. J. Murre and Joeri Dros
of the University of Amsterdam conducted a
faithful replication of the Forgetting Curve and
published their results in July 2015. While the
original studies are nearly 140 years old, their
conclusions have stood the test of time.
Ebbinghaus was also the first to identify the
"spacing eﬀect." He observed that learning is
greater when studying is spread out over time.
Learners will remember best when they study
in small increments with a few days between
each session.
e research is clear: We are wired to forget
what we learn without continuous relearning
and repetition. Our personal experiences, both
as learners and teachers, validate this as well.
Unfortunately, the event-based training model
is still the norm for most organizations. Reps
show up for the national sales meeting or
product launch event, receive new information
they must internalize and incorporate into their
repertoire, and head back to their territories.
Without additional reinforcement and

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