When you’re training a young employee, one of the things you want to do is impart lessons that will stick. Memorable lessons are powerful because when your front line can remember the tasks, procedures, ingredients, steps, etc. involved in a given product or process, they are that much closer to mastering their jobs. Mastery makes your employees productive (which is good for you) and confident (which is also good for you).

Three ways to make lessons really memorable for your Millennial employees:

1. Great mnemonics

I started working at a restaurant after my junior year of high school. As anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant can tell you, one of the biggest challenges when starting is to assimilate the menu into your store of knowledge. The first item I learned to make was a sandwich, and I still remember how to make it because my trainer gave me a really simple way to remember how to make the sandwich: “Red sauce, red bread.” I don’t know if it was the color matching, or just the rhyme, but that’s stuck with me ever since. I found it incredibly helpful at the time, as it was my first step toward actually feeling like I could accomplish my job there.

So, whether your mnemonics are acronyms, rhymes, or other little memory schemes, employ them. They help young people learn.

2. Repetition.

I worked at Panera Bread for years, and I can still rattle off the ingredients for a cafe sandwich quickly enough that you’d think it’s a single long word: ‘Mayonaisemustardlettucetomatoesonionandsaltandpepper.” See? Effortless. And why do I still know that? I must have repeated it 17 million times while I was there.

There’s a difference, though, between plain old repetition (aka - boring) and useful repetition. The useful repetition involves attacking the same material from a number of angles. Whether it’s as the answer to a quiz, actually assembling the pieces you’re listing, seeing who can make the best story about the items you’re listing, or any of a million other ways to address the same information, the key to effective repetition when training young people is that you’re repeating the content while changing up the delivery.

3. Learning The Hard Way

When I started my first restaurant job, I was in the back doing the dishes. For most of my first shift, I spent most of the evening with a brush, scrubbing each fork, knife, and spoon individually. Anyone who has ever washed large amounts of dishes can tell you that this is a horribly slow way to do dishes. A horribly, horribly, horribly slow way to do dishes. With about an hour or so left in the night, one of the trainers finally walked up and offered me a hand for two minutes. He put all the silverware on a tray, sprayed it down, scrubbed a couple stubborn ones, and ran it straight through the sanitizer. Much to my chagrin, he’d accomplished more in about five minutes than I had in the majority of my shift.

I learned a valuable lesson from that - and it wasn’t just that there is a more efficient way to wash silverware. I learned that there are more efficient ways to approach most processes, and that there’s a good reason those approaches are used. But none of it would have stuck if I hadn’t experienced that single moment of painful realization. While I believe that trying to show your Millennials the right way to do something is the best place to start, sometimes it’s more valuable to let them do something the wrong way once so they can see why it’s the wrong way.

Your turn

Leave a comment - tell me about a training strategy that has had a long-term impact on you.