The one-day workshop survives because it is convenient for everyone except the learner. It is one diary entry, one trainer booking, one room. It also crams six hours of new material into a single sitting, most of which is gone within days. The format is built around the organiser's calendar, not around how a human brain actually holds on to a skill.
The counter-argument is not an opinion. It is the spacing effect, one of the most replicated findings in the study of memory: the same amount of learning, spread out over time, is remembered far better than the same learning crammed into one block.1 Ebbinghaus measured it in the 1880s and a century of research has kept confirming it. Six one-hour sessions across six weeks will beat one six-hour day, for the same total time, on what people can still do a month later.
Why cramming feels better and works worse
Crammed learning feels productive because it is fluent in the moment. You understand it while the trainer is explaining it, so you assume you have learned it. That fluency is the trap. Retrieval, having to pull the thing back out of memory after a gap, is what actually strengthens it, and a single long day gives you almost no chance to retrieve. Spacing forces retrieval by design. The mild discomfort of half-remembering last week's session is not a bug, it is the mechanism.
So is microlearning always the answer? No.
Here is where the honest version differs from the sales pitch. Microlearning is not a magic format, and short does not automatically mean effective. A workshop still wins when the point is to build shared understanding in a room, work through a hard scenario together, or change something that needs discussion and trust. The tool depends on the job, and the mistake is defaulting to the one-day block for everything because it is easy to schedule.
The solution, as a decision matrix
Which format for which job
| If the goal is... | Use | Because |
|---|---|---|
| Retaining facts, rules or procedures | Spaced microlearning | Retrieval across gaps beats one long exposure. |
| Building a skill through practice | Short sessions plus on-the-job reps | Skill needs spacing and doing, not watching. |
| Shared understanding or culture change | Workshop, then reinforcement | Discussion and trust need a room; retention needs follow-up. |
| A one-off event, low stakes | Whatever is cheapest | Not everything needs to stick. |
| Compliance people must actually apply | Spaced scenarios, not an annual dump | Once a year is the definition of forgetting by design. |
The compliance row is the one most organisations get exactly backwards. The classic model is a long annual module, taken once, forgotten fast, repeated next year. It satisfies the audit and teaches almost nothing. Spacing the same content into short scenarios through the year costs no more hours and leaves people able to act when the situation actually turns up. The regulator did not ask for one long day. It asked for people who behave correctly, which is a retention problem, which spacing solves.
Questions to ask before booking the one-day workshop
- Is the goal understanding in a room, or retention over time?
- Could the same hours be spread across weeks for the same cost?
- Where will people retrieve and use this between sessions?
- Are we choosing one day because it works, or because it is easy to schedule?
- For anything people must apply, is it spaced, or dumped once a year?
None of this asks you to ban workshops. It asks you to stop treating the one-day block as the default. Match the format to the job, spread anything that has to be remembered, and keep the room for the things that genuinely need one. The calendar will complain. The retention numbers will not.
Notes and sources
From the book
Training That SticksA practical method for designing training that moves behaviour, embedding it in the first thirty days, and proving the difference it made, with no training department.