LEARNING

CURVE

Course Teacher:

Engr. Ather Muhammad Tousif

B.Sc (Engg.) IPE, MBA (SCM), MIEB
Learning curve
is a process, where
people develop
a skill by learning
from
their mistakes
What Is a Learning Curve?
• A learning curve is a mathematical concept that graphically depicts how a process
is improved over time due to learning and increased proficiency. The learning
curve theory is that tasks will require less time and resources the more they are
performed because of proficiencies gained as the process is learned.
• The learning curve was first described by psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885 and is used as
a way to measure production efficiency and to forecast costs.
• A learning curve is typically described with a percentage that identifies the rate of improvement.
• In the visual representation of a learning curve, a steeper slope indicates initial learning translates
into higher cost savings, and subsequent learnings result in increasingly slower, more difficult cost
savings.
Understanding a Learning Curve
• The learning curve also is referred to as the experience curve, the cost curve, the efficiency curve, or the
productivity curve. This is because the learning curve provides cost-benefit measurements and insight into all
the above aspects of a company.
• The idea behind this is that any employee, regardless of position, takes time to learn how to carry out a specific
task or duty. The amount of time needed to produce the associated output is high. Then, as the task is
repeated, the employee learns how to complete it quickly, and that reduces the amount of time needed for a
unit of output.
• That is why the learning curve is downward sloping in the beginning with a flat slope toward the end, with the
cost per unit depicted on the Y-axis and total output on the X-axis. As learning increases, it decreases the cost
per unit of output initially before flattening out, as it becomes harder to increase the efficiencies gained
through learning.
• Learning curves are often associated with percentages that identify the rate of improvement. For example, a
90% learning curve means that for every time the cumulative quantity is doubled, there is a 10% efficiency
gained in the cumulative average production time per unit. The percentage states the percentage of time that
will carry over to future iterations of the task when production is doubled.
Learning curve formula
• The original model uses the formula: Y = aXb
• Where:
Y is the average time over the measured duration
a represents the time to complete the task the first time
X represents the total amount of attempts completed
b represents the slope of the function

• The formula can be used as a prediction tool to forecast

future performance.
• The formula stipulates that the more attempts that are
included, the more the overall time will decrease. The
formula can be used to predict a learner’s rate of
learning of a simple task or even help businesses to
predict the production rate of a product.
Learning Curve Table

Cumulative Cumulative Production Cumulative Average Time

Incremental Time
Quantity Time Per Unit

1 1,000 hours 1,000 hours 1,000 hours

2 1,600 hours 800 hours 600 hours

4 2,560 hours 640 hours 960 hours

80% Learning Curve Table, Assuming First Task Takes 1,000 Hours
Examples and mathematical modeling
• A learning curve is a plot of proxy measures for
implied learning (proficiency or progression toward a limit)
with experience.
• For the performance of one person in a series of trials the curve
can be erratic, with proficiency increasing, decreasing or leveling
out in a plateau.
• When the results of a large number of individual trials
are averaged then a smooth curve results, which can often be
described with a mathematical function
 • The horizontal axis represents experience either directly as
Examples and time (clock time, or the time spent on the activity), or can be
related to time (a number of trials, or the total number of

mathematical
units produced).

modeling • The vertical axis is a measure representing 'learning' or

'proficiency' or other proxy for "efficiency" or "productivity".
It can either be increasing (for example, the score in a test),
or decreasing (the time to complete a test).
1. The S-Curve or Sigmoid function
• The S-Curve or Sigmoid function is the idealized
general form of all learning curves, with slowly
accumulating small steps at first followed by
larger steps and then successively smaller ones
later, as the learning activity reaches its limit.
• That idealizes the normal progression from
discovery of something to learn about followed to
the limit of learning about it.
• In this case the improvement of proficiency starts
slowly, then increases rapidly, and finally levels
off.
2. Exponential growth

the proficiency can increase without

limit, as in Exponential growth
3. Exponential rise or fall to a Limit
• proficiency can exponentially approach a limit
• similar to that in which a capacitor charges or
discharges (exponential decay) through a resistor.
• The increase in skill or retention of information
may increase rapidly to its maximum rate during the
initial attempts, and then gradually levels out,
meaning that the subject's skill does not improve
much with each later repetition, with less new
knowledge gained over time.
4. Power law
• similar in appearance to an exponential
decay function
• almost always used for a decreasing
performance metric, such as cost.
Real world examples of application the learning curve theory
❑The learning curve is known by different names partly due to its wide variety of
application.
❑Terms used to describe the learning curve include:
➢experience curves,
➢cost curves,
➢efficiency curves,
➢productivity curves.
❑The model can be used to determine how long it takes for a single person to
master a skill or how long it takes a group of people to manufacture a product.
❑In most applications, the “learning” in the curve is actually referred to as process
improvement.
 Before using learning curves, some cautions are in order:
❖Because learning curves differ from company to company, as well as
industry to industry, estimates for each organization should be
developed rather than applying someone else’s.
Limitations ❖Learning curves are often based on the time necessary to complete the
early units; therefore, those times must be accurate. As current
of Learning information becomes available, reevaluation is appropriate.
❖Any changes in personnel, design, or procedure can be expected to alter
the learning curve, causing the curve to spike up for a short time, even if
Curves it is going to drop in the long run.
❖While workers and processes may improve, the same learning curves do
not always apply to indirect labor and material.
❖The culture of the workplace, as well as resource availability and
changes in the process, may alter the learning curve. For instance, as a
project nears its end, worker interest and effort may drop, curtailing
progress down the curve.
General learning limits
• Learning curves, [also called experience curves], relate to the much broader subject of natural limits for resources and
technologies in general.

• Such limits generally present themselves as increasing complications that slow the learning of how to do things more efficiently,
like the well-known limits of perfecting any process or product or to perfecting measurements.

• These practical experiences match the predictions of the second law of thermodynamics for the limits of waste reduction
generally.

• Approaching limits of perfecting things to eliminate waste meets geometrically increasing effort to make progress and provides
an environmental measure of all factors seen and unseen changing the learning experience.

• Perfecting things becomes ever more difficult despite increasing effort despite continuing positive, if ever diminishing, results.

• The same kind of slowing progress due to complications in learning also appears in the limits of useful technologies and of
profitable markets applying to product life cycle management and software development cycles.

• Remaining market segments or remaining potential efficiencies or efficiencies are found in successively less convenient forms.

• Efficiency and development curves typically follow a two-phase process of first bigger steps corresponding to finding things
easier, followed by smaller steps of finding things more difficult. It reflects bursts of learning following breakthroughs that make
learning easier followed by meeting constraints that make learning ever harder, perhaps toward a point of cessation.
General learning limits (Contd.)
• Natural Limits
• One of the key studies in the area concerns diminishing returns on investments generally, either
physical or financial, pointing to whole system limits for resource development or other efforts.
• The most studied of these may be Energy Return on Energy Invested or EROEI
• The energy needed to produce energy is a measure of our difficulty in learning how to make
remaining energy resources useful in relation to the effort expended.
• Energy returns on energy invested have been in continual decline for some time, caused by
natural resource limits and increasing investment.
• Energy is both natures and our own principal resource for making things happen.
• The point of diminishing returns is when increasing investment makes the resource more
expensive. As natural limits are approached, easily used sources are exhausted and ones
with more complications need to be used instead. As an environmental signal persistently
diminishing EROEI indicates an approach of whole system limits in our ability to make
things happen.
General learning limits (Contd.)
• Useful Natural Limits
• EROEI measures the return on invested effort as a ratio of R/I or learning
progress.
• The inverse I/R measures learning difficulty.
• The simple difference is that if R approaches zero R/I will too, but I/R will
approach infinity.
• When complications emerge to limit learning progress the limit of useful
returns, uR, is approached and R-uR approaches zero.
• The difficulty of useful learning I/(R-uR) approaches infinity as
increasingly difficult tasks make the effort unproductive.