Skills development: how to optimize your training goals?

What increase in skills can you expect from a day of training? Thanks to cognitive science, learn how to set realistic training goals that are adapted to the time you have

Panic on board: all of your organization's sensitive data is gone into the wild! To prevent this from happening again, you want all of your employees to increase their skills in cybersecurity, a subject they know almost nothing about. Unfortunately, your budget only allows you to offer one day of training per person this year. What are you doing? This typical problem raises the question of the granularity of educational goals: what skill can you reasonably expect to develop in what time frame? Again, the functioning of our brain can provide us with answers.

Respect the natural boundaries of the brain

You won't turn a novice into an expert in six hours, even with a particularly dense learning program. Indeed, we know that The brain has a limited working memory and can quickly find himself in a situation of mental overload (see the Cog'X training on quality of life at work). If you multiply the elements that require a conscious effort to treat, the silo overflows and all the learning falls apart. But the less we know, the more effort we have to make to learn.

Take reading as an example. It is likely that when you read this text, you will almost instantly recognize the words, their meaning, and how they combine to form a sentence. However, when you were a child, you first had to painstakingly learn to recognize the letters of the alphabet, and then the syllables. With time and practice, your brain has automated These operations, so you no longer realize the complexity of the task. Alone in front of the text, the child that you were would obviously not have had the keys to learn anything.

Divide the skills to be transmitted into small blocks

What is true for children is also true for adults. So, if you ask a beginner to cook leek risotto, they're going to get stuck on each step. How do I slice leeks? How do I cook risotto? How do I season? All complex learning can thus be broken down into a series of elementary operations. Where the experienced manager sees a single skill (sending a reminder email), the trainee sees several, each with its own set of pitfalls and possible errors (choosing the subject of the email, the recipients in copy, the polite form...).

Whatever your ideal goal is, you can't skip steps. To avoid overload, you need to identify each task that needs to be automated, and start with simple automations before moving on to the more complex ones. The functioning of our brain therefore requires in all cases to segment learning into small blocks: micro-skills.. This “small steps” method may seem less ambitious, but it produces better results.

Aim for realistic change and stick to it

Given the limitations of our brain, what can we learn in a day of training? Much more than one might think. The key is to think of learning as a change: someone who has learned is able to do what they could not do before. A seemingly minimal change forlearner can have a huge impact. Think of recycling rules, for example! Knowing which trash can to throw your boxes into does not require excessive processing effort. However, these basic gestures, if they become automatic, contribute greatly to the preservation of our environment.

So ask yourself: what is the realistic change that would make us the most progress towards our overall goal? Identify a simple, concrete change, and above all, make sure that it has been achieved. Again, it's better to move a little bit in the right direction than to go in circles when faced with an impossible task! This is why it is essential to rely on the fundamental mechanisms of learning, with a focus on practical application (see our article on Testing Effect) and always calibrating the difficulty to the right level (see our article on desirable difficulties).


If we go back to our collaborators who are new to cybersecurity, a solution could be to prioritize your educational goals based on standard errors who represent the greatest danger for your organization: to change is also to correct mistakes. You will not be able to make your learners experts who can explain the main principles of cybersecurity or network architecture to you. This is not realistic and not necessarily useful. On the other hand, you can teach them the few reflexes and simple gestures that will prevent you from massive data theft in the future: identify an email from phishing (phishing), or a bad password.

A completely different philosophy of learning comes from this method. Respecting the functioning of our brain leads us to more humility in the face of time. : by focusing on a few micro-skills that are easy to learn, you will probably have the impression that your learners are progressing more slowly, or that they are covering fewer topics, but they will learn better and will ultimately go further.