Businesses are always looking for a secret formula that will quickly prepare their graduates for the world of work.
In reality, however, the truth is simple. Graduates will only develop their skills and ready themselves for their long term roles if they are given the opportunity to practice regularly.
Graduate programmes need to be carefully structured to cater to specific needs, with clear KPIs and objectives outlined beforehand.
At MDA Training, we are experts in utilising experiential learning to support onboarding and graduate development programmes. We’ve listed three ways in which experiential learning helps graduates improve their skills compared to traditional learning methods below:
1 Accelerated Learning
Rather than learning and revising endless pages of content or continuous presentation slides, experiential learning allows people to put their skills into action, learning as they go along.
This speeds up both the delivery and learning process, providing graduates with an environment and programme that resonates with them from day one. In fact, retention rates from experiential learning methods can be as much as 90%.
2 Learning from mistakes
By taking part in an experiential learning programme, graduates are able to learn what they perform well at, and perhaps more importantly, what they need to improve on.
Making mistakes is a natural part of graduate development, and experiential learning allows for these mistakes to be made in a risk-free environment.
3 Accurate assessment of performance
As well as helping graduates to learn from their mistakes, experiential learning gives business leaders and training specialists a much clearer view of how their new employees are performing.
While business leaders will know a lot about the qualities and personalities of their new hires, an experiential learning programme will give them a chance to see how they react to specific situations and how capable they are.
In addition, the flexibility of experiential learning allows businesses to identify precisely how an employee learns best, based on their own performance.
From here, leaders can use the assessment data they receive to help shape future development programmes in order to improve their training solutions.