performance support
looking for – is already available. The art is finding it, sorting it, and applying it. This has changed the way we perform and relate to the workplace. Today almost 40% of professionals are mobile. Many of us work for a number of physically dispersed, global entities, and are used to employing several means of communication at once to discover and share information. And with more opportunities for personal development and professional diversification, as we see the rise of the intrapreneur and this increasingly flexible workforce, it’s essential for both learners and businesses to connect the right people to the right resources at the right time.
Distracted and disengaged However, the reality is that time is still being wasted searching. It’s standard to have several programs and platforms open at once. We are continuously in and out of our emails, social networks, search-engines and software, whilst navigating between network files and folders. With all this going on, we find ourselves becoming distracted, wasting time, and becoming disengaged from the essential task at hand. Research shows professionals spend 20-25% of their time at work searching for information – that’s an entire day, every week. This loss of time is one of the reasons the shift to a digital service economy hasn’t yet seen a corresponding and much anticipated uplift in productivity, particularly in the UK. It’s why we need better tools for organising the data and supporting our critical, problem-solving abilities. There’s more for L&D to do here than just try to work around the familiar feeling
of information-overload that comes from switching between platforms too rapidly and without a clear focus. The complexity of these personal learning processes makes the new skills and knowledge that flow into the organisation through these channels difficult to track and measure. They don’t leave a legible data trail – the insights we gain from them stay in the head of the learner and go no further, and there is no feedback loop: we can’t use the information to measure what comes in, and we can’t leverage that data to make future learning strategies and interventions into efficient value drivers. When faced with the everyday difficulties of living and learning in the future,
there’s always the risk that we will seek to escape by going back-to-basics: for the neo-luddites there’s always the reassuring stability of the classroom. This age-old learning format can still be particularly effective for changing attitudes and imparting soft skills of course, but it’s not without its limitations, the main one being retention. For instance, if you’re heading to the classroom to walk learners through a complex process step-by-step, it’s unlikely they’re going to remember it when they get back to their laptops. Just 20% of the learning we get from training actually makes it into our long term memory. Employees need to be able to refer back to learning when they’re putting it into practice. The established solution for this is performance support – that is, content and materials that support recall and retention of learning interventions at the time of need. Research has shown performance support to be more effective than unassisted training alternatives – though both together tend to give the most powerful results. In order to support efficient and effective learning cultures, forward thinking organisations are looking more to performance support strategies. Performance support represents a more autonomous and progressive way of addressing learning requirements, facilitating a more personalised approach. The learner decides when and what information is needed and can seek it out in their own time and at their own pace. They are guided by the needs of the task rather than those of their instructor or manager, and are self-motivated, since they already recognise their own need for further knowledge. Unlike classroom training, the challenge with performance support is not how to motivate or sustain engagement, but getting the content designed, delivered and digested at the point of need.
e.learning age april 2016
The skilled professional is the source of all innovation in tomorrow’s economy: it is they who will locate, extract, develop and share each new cycle of value, revenue and growth.
The ten-minute rule
Most performance support providers work to the ten-minute rule: with the right performance support, learners should be able to solve an issue in hand within ten minutes or less. This is why the most appropriate forms of content are often video, PDFs, infographics or process diagrams. ‘Short and snappy’ is the guiding design principle. But it’s also why experts tend to prefer ‘intrinsic’ performance support systems over ‘extrinsic’. With the former, learners don’t have to halt the task at hand to access the support resource – the resource is embedded as part of the workflow. It’s integrated in the software or tool they’re using to perform the task, or forms part of a multi-functional system they use for communication, admin and learning needs. Using adaptive technologies and new capacities from within the learning space itself – from xAPI to collaborative learning platforms – today’s performance support technologies model the workflow and the learner’s interactions with it, predicting friction points and automatically deploying targeted performance support materials where needs arise.
Injecting social and collaborative learning elements into a performance support system can have a dual effect: it supports problem-solving on an immediate basis (‘Can someone help me do x?’) but also generates performance support content for the future. A collaborative platform branches the information search out to people as well as learning content, systems and resources. Information is often held in the minds of individual SMEs – and rarely those responsible for creating and distributing learning materials. A social learning platform can be used to extract information and knowledge held by experts and managers into storage for the benefit of the wider team, mitigating the problems that arise when valued employees move on.
As the sheer mass of digital data continues to grow – artificial general intelligence and the Internet of Things have barely started yet – and as our pace of working increases, it is only by facilitating personalised and collaborative performance support that we can focus the autonomous learner’s continuous quest for information to create real business value. The skilled professional is the source of all innovation in tomorrow’s economy: it is they who will locate, extract, develop and share each new cycle of value, revenue and growth. Let’s make sure they have the support they need.
Caroline Walmsley is managing director of Brightwave Group @carowalmsley
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