Why Are We Not Talking About Skill Decay?

I love bowling. I’m good at bowling. I used to be really good at bowling.?

Years ago, when I found time to go bowling several times a month, I was regularly bowling games north of 175. Scores over 200 weren’t rare and neither were “clean” games (all strikes or spares).?

(Humble brag ending now)

Lately, as I get to a bowling alley a few times a year now at best, I struggle to break 150. It’s frustrating, yes, but fully explainable.

I just haven’t had the practice time to maintain my skill. I know all the right things to do: where to line up, the twist of the fingers for the curve, the importance of maximizing the next ball after a spare—and yet I can’t produce and score as I once could.

What interests me these days isn’t the regret that I’ve let my bowling game go, it’s that we don’t talk about our skills decaying. And when I say “we” here I specifically mean those in and around the Learning & Development space.

Part of the reason we don’t talk about it is because it’s so obvious. I’ve been trying to Google variations of phrases like “lack of practice makes you worse” and the only results I get are trying to explicate the reverse (more practice making someone worse). I don’t need to prove to you that without regular investment or visitation to our abilities, skills, knowledge, etc…they start to wither. We know this.

I'm so curious why our L&D teams don't spend more time thinking about (and, ultimately, trying to combat). I'm curious because it's centrally relevant to the idea of skill growth that our work is aimed at, but it’s also good business.?Let's look at how internal and external Learning teams and companies can think about skill decay, and the opportunity it provides for strategic approach.

Skills Is Big Business—But Decay Gets Ignored

Estimates are that companies spend over $300 billion each year on training and development for employees. Some of this involves mandatory legal and compliance training, but increasingly the focus of this spending is on building employee skills or up-leveling employees from skills they had when hired.?

Much of this effort happens in-house and companies are increasingly concerned with how they measure the effectiveness of what they're spending.

And sometimes what they spend—and hope to spend effectively—is on third party/B2B learning companies. These come mostly in the form content providers or management systems. And the concern is still applicable here—these third parties also need to justify their cost.?

Why go spend externally? Because the third party companies offer something that's hard to build internally: wide access to skill catalogues, skill-building opportunities (courses, workshops, etc...), and data to give back to the org on skill development (and, in some cases, where to target new skill development for years ahead).

Let's hone on that last part: the skills data. The measurement that third parties usually start with giving an organization is a metric like skills built or skills acquired.

I'm familiar with these as I was the program manager for these very metric outputs at LinkedIn Learning a few years ago.

And like most learning companies, we expanded out from simply just skills built or acquired into a fuller positioning for companies to see their organization-wide skill building.

The tag-line or idea of “skill building” is currently on Degreed’s front page, a headline in LinkedIn Learning’s Hub product launch in 2021, and the name of IBM’s current free technical training.?

And YET, In all of this building, one thing I find disappointingly absent from the conversation is the opposite effect—the decay of these very skills.?

One of the most frustrating things I saw during my time at LinkedIn Learning—and subsequently from a slew of the biggest B2B Learning content vendors—was that reports of “total” skills “earned” was always a positive-sum, up-only metric. A report would say something to the effect of: Over the last six months, learners at your organization have learned 110 unique new skills, and over 1,000 learners have learned 2 or more new skills.?

Okay, great! Those are great numbers. But there’d be absolutely no discussion of what those 1,000 learners did after taking a course or program. Did they continue to pursue that skill? Is that skill related to their job? Has it been 5 months since they’ve signed on? And if had been 5,6,12 months since they last took a course on a skill, surely we can't expect them to be as good as learned in that skill as they once were (outside of evidence internally that they've been practicing of course).

The questions above are just not answered in any major L&D tool's reporting. Instead it focused on the mere accumulation of skills. What frustrates me here is that there is a golden opportunity to encourage L&D leaders to position these platforms and content providers as a way to avoid skill decay. As a way to re-certify, re-apply, or re-learn, all of which would add value to employees, especially those who have since faced the decaying of their learning from months prior.

What this means for those B2B vendors is the potential for more sales, more renewals, and more money. And that’s what’s frustrating. Talking only in positive-sum leaves out a win-win-win opportunity (Vendor, Buyer, Employee).?

The Importance of Skill Decay; Or What the U.S. Navy Already Knows

One of the most comprehensive pieces of literature I found on this topic was published in 2010 as part of research conducted with the U.S. Navy. You can find the full report here. It is long and it is fascinating.?

Skill decay is so important to the Navy (and I imagine the other Armed Forces) that they’ve studied it again and again (one time to the tune of $12 million). This makes sense—skills in the Navy could mean life or death and there’s a real need to know what a person is going to remember months after their training when the time comes to use it. The Navy, alone, also spends more than $1 billion a year on training—so they’d really like to know the effectiveness of such efforts.?

Few of us work with such stakes of course, but we can learn a lot from what they’ve studied and found.

So what did they find? The results from the 2010 study looked at qualitative examination from Subject Matter Experts and a series of analyses based on their answers. Learners were divided into specific groups and skills were given attributes (how often they were practiced, how technical they were, etc…).?

Before they were even able to study skill decay objectively, they determined that skill decay was very real and that “experts” saw commonalities around what decayed and how fast. Here’s an example chart:

(source)

One spotlight from this study is that experts found that skills that had difficult time limits, very complex mental requirements, or required a lot of motor skills or control, had an overwhelming likelihood of being totally gone after six months.?

The later studies I linked were so convinced of skill decay that the focus turned (rightfully) on how to mitigate it.?

And, really, I wonder why we in the L&D world are not united in that same mission. For all the talk of skill-building, upskilling, re-skilling, and skilling for the next decade, I have rarely (if ever?!?!) come across language about preventing skill decay in the corporate environment.?

How Fast Do Skills Decay?

The answer, as I’m sure some of you have guessed, is that it depends.?

And the true answer to this—one that can work with those dependencies—is a million (billion?) dollar measurement and algorithm. Start looking!

But, look, it doesn’t matter that much the rate of skill decay (for now), just that we acknowledge it does decay. That should be good enough for L&D teams to mobilize further to combat this head on.

That being said, I’ve thought a lot about this and have done work with Leaders on a framework to lean on. We know that knowledge is forgotten quickly unless it’s reviewed periodically (and quickly after initiation). Skills may not work the same as knowledge but there’s still likely a curve of decay that’s similar to that one shown here.?

Source

My framework divides skills into three circles, totally dependent on the learner, employee, or person themselves. The division of circles tries to account for how often a skill would be practiced or implemented, based on their role, job, or efforts.?

For example, a Product Manager would likely practice something like Agile methodologies or Sprint/Project Planning more often than a HRBP. A graphic designer would of course use visual skills a lot more than a data scientist.?

The circles break down to this:

• Circle 1 - skills you use often (could be as much as daily)
• Circle 2 - skills you use in the periphery (either semi-regularly like weekly, or they’re used less often but in serious phases).?An example here might be goal-setting, which may only happen monthly or quarterly or even yearly depending on your organization
• Circle 3 - skills you don’t use in your role. These could be stretch skills you’re trying to obtain, either to find a new role or just to learn something else.?These could be as random as learning how to play a guitar chord, to learning a programming language when you’re not a software engineer.

The idea of the circles—while not being exact—is just to approximate that rate of decay. Circle 3 should decay much quicker than Circle 1. Some of us are so used to doing the skills in our Circle 1 that we don’t even recognize we’re learning or getting better.?

Because Circle 3 sits outside the realm of experience (getting time to be hands on), we can confidently say that a basic exposure to something in that zone would be forgotten about very quickly if there were no reinforcement mechanisms.?

Skill Decay Is A Value-Add For L&D Teams

Why am I harping on skill decay so much? Because I think it’s an objective positive for L&D teams and efforts. Once we all admit that there is a rate of skill decay (dependent on lots of factors) it means that there is more work for an L&D team to take on and thus more influence.

Said another way: we in Learning & Development teams should be the ones reminding our leadership about skill decay. And we should be building reminders, nudges, and proactive programs to counteract it. We should be building with this in mind and we should take this platform to be just another value-add we give to the company.?

If you are working in Talent at your organization and it offers any kind of “stretch” assignment (mentorship, leadership accelerator, rotational programs - for examples), you should be raising your voice that these skills, if gone unpracticed after the end of that program, will decay.

If you work with a Learning (B2B) content provider and you are seeing folks that took courses more than 6 or 12 months ago, you should be strategizing ways to re-engage these people on that skillset. They have likely forgotten what they’ve learned or suffered from the decay. If they are truly interested in leveling up, the effort will need to be made more consistent. And this is your opportunity.?

Conclusion

It’s always funny to me when an elephant in the room is ignored in the business world. We are supposed to be better than that (I guess). L&D’s elephant is that we know that most of what we teach or train will be forgotten. The forgetting curve is real.?

There are ways to fight it, sure. I’m fascinated by some of those—particularly the use of Spaced Repetition with individuals and the jump in generative AI means we can produce content quickly enough to power these Spaced Rep programs. Companies like Learnswell, Sana, and many others are working to solve this. But, alas, most aren’t there yet.?

Most are still powering their Learning efforts with homegrown eLearning and/or off-the-shelf Learning content (B2B players like LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, Coursera, etc..). And yet in these we just aren’t admitting that without proper practice put in place, that which we attempt to develop and grow will start to fade away.?

We can do better.?