Whenever I want to make a perfect French omelette, I turn to the master: Jacques Pépin. I open YouTube, watch two minutes of his expert demonstration… and then cook. I’ve done this multiple times over the years.

And yet—every single time—I have to rewatch the video. Why? Because I’ve never trained myself to remember it. What I’ve done is access knowledge, not embed it. Jacques lives in my short-term memory, not my long-term one.

Now, imagine I wanted to train myself to make that omelette intuitively. I’d need to:

·       Watch the video several times over a few weeks

·       Write down the steps

·       Practise them

·       Test myself from memory

·       Repeat the cycle over time

That’s what long-term memory training looks like. It’s how habits and behaviour change get embedded. And it’s also the key reason why so much soft skills training in organisations fails.

Most corporate learning is built around short-term interventions—content-heavy workshops, one-off seminars, or videos in a learning library. The goal is often “coverage” instead of change. No surprise then that Harvard Business Review calls most of it “the transfer of quickly forgotten information.”

Soft Skills like communication, collaboration, resilience, and critical thinking aren’t transferred through content alone. They require cognitive science-informed approaches that space repetition, encourage active recall, and embed learning over time.

In other words: if you want to build behavioural skills that stick, you can’t just show a video. You need to train the brain to remember and apply.

Because the future of work in the Age of AI won’t be won by what people can Google. It will be won by what they can remember, apply, and adapt.