Have you ever left a class or training program excited about what you learned, only to realize a month later that you have applied little of it back on the job? As a training manager have you ever invested significant dollars and resources to carefully design and deploy a training program only to see little or no shift in individual behavior or culture afterwards? Even when your students passed the knowledge tests and you are certain learning occurred?

As learning professionals, we often focus on the easy goal--imparting knowledge--and ignoring what it really takes to create lasting change. Creating a lasting impact on people and organizations requires much more than knowledge transfer. Lasting change occurs when learners practice and perfect what they have learned back on the job, building real skills instead of acquiring factual information, and, most difficult of all, changing habits so those new skills are applied consistently for real business results and bad habits are killed off.

Today there is little time in class to practice skills to a minimal level of proficiency, let alone achieve outstanding performance. Learners focus their attention back to their job and forget what they learned, despite all good intentions. Post-training reinforcement has been difficult and labor intensive. Traditional action learning can be effective but the resources needed to do it properly are not always available for every training effort. In today's world, instructors and managers don't have the time to monitor key objectives once students leave the classroom (or the learning management system). The follow-up to monitor cohort teams and schedule discussions can overwhelm instructors or training organizations. Sound familiar?

The good news is that "#SUCCESSFUL CORPORATE LEARNING tweet Book10: Making Learning Stick: Transforming Knowledge into Performance" is full of simple research-based techniques you can use to make training stick. Ways to activate knowledge, improve retention, and extend skill practice. Techniques to shape behavior change when students leave the classroom and go back to work. And the most exciting part is that emerging web and mobile technologies can be used today to extend your reach, and help you to reinforce learning, promote retention, build better habits, and create lasting success.

"#SUCCESSFUL CORPORATE LEARNING tweet Book10" is part of the THiNKaha series whose slim and handy books contain 140 well-thought-out quotes (tweets/ahas).

Born in Sao Paulo, 1953 and raised in Watford, John Moxley left school at 16, joined the Merchant Navy and went to sea in the late 1960's to escape his criminal past. His adventures led him into numerous hotspots where he crossed swords with, among others, American bikers, manic seamen, the forces of law and order, and a psychotic Maori. He explains how the naivety of youth took him within a hair's breadth of being jailed for drug smuggling, how his first trip as an officer found him in the Vietnam warzone, and how his rebellious nature brought him close to blows with his Captain before jumping ship. He fled two days before a court appearance and worked his way around Australia and New Zealand, from a dockside bar as a bouncer to a sugar plantation in far north Queensland. He returned to London at the forefront of the punk revolution of '77 before eventually settling down to become an honest financier. This is an authentic tale told at a reckless pace without gloss or sentimentality but with plenty of humour.