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Optimal competence is vital in safety-critical professions. To optimize (refresher) training, insight into the process of competence decay and influencing factors on competence decay is crucial. Although retention of knowledge and simple skills has been studied for many years, literature on retention of complex skills remains limited. This literature review focuses on the factors influencing retention that have been studied empirically since 2010 in the context of safety-critical professions. Furthermore, the nature of competence retention curves over time was studied.

The initial search yielded 882 articles, which were scanned systematically according to inclusion criteria. The main inclusion criteria were whether refresher training or longitudinal designs were used to study competence retention. The final set of articles included in this review contains 40 articles.

39 studies were carried out in the medical …