Training - Change Driver or Passive Delivery Boy?

According to a new study, the commonly held belief that adults do not grow new brain cells is not true.

The neurons in our brain continue to grow, and throughout our adult life. This comes from a study led by Wei-Chung Allen Lee of MIT and cited in the Public Library of Science (PLOS) Biology. The study is not online so it cannot be cited here.

At one level you could say that all of this doesnít mean very much but the fact that new brain cells can be formed means that old ideas can be reshaped and new ideas can be laid down, like the tracks on a computer’s hard-disk. This must have profound but subtle effects for HR and training.

According to the research the scale of the growth is not as high as it is for, say children, who resemble sponges when it comes to retention of information, but the capability is there nevertheless.

Neuroscientists have known for a long time that adult neurons can change their firing pattern and responses when faced with new experiences. But no one knew that they could change their structures.

Good News for HR

The figures look good, to a non-medical person like myself. The researchers estimate that on average, about 14 percent of the interneurons they observed showed structural modifications. The figure of 14 percent seems like a lot to me and indicative of an opportunity for HR and training people.

If your boss’s assumption is that no new neurons can be grown throughout a person’s life, and this is what most people believe, he will act according to the old adage ’you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’.

But he would be wrong, according to this study. We were all wrong. Not just China, but everywhere in the world.

If you are in HR or training you now have the evidence to back up your belief that training really does have a strong effect. It’s not a belief anymore, it’s a fact. This could be very important to you if you are trying to introduce an Elearning program in your company or starting your first training audit.

The underpinning element for this is that if neurons can be grown back you must look at staff in the same way that you would look at a child ie. someone who, with effort and support, can learn anything.

This changes the nature of the game.

The training department is a driver of change, not a passive delivery boy for training content. But we already knew this, right?.

The bad news is that we can still lose brain cells .... Oh, well.

Comments to: frank.mulligan@recruit-china.com

Frank Mulligan is the Managing Director of Talent Software, which is based in Shanghai, China. The company is a producer of Talent Management Systems (TMS) for a broad variety of industries. The flagship product is simply called Talent and is a fully featured, bi-lingual English/Chinese Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

Talent offers support for Skills Testing, Phone Screening, Job Interviewing, Psychometric Profiling, Reference Checking, Exit Interviewing, Job Offers, Background Checks and Recruitment Metrics & Analytics.

This article first appeared in Talent China