Faster and faster change. Does that mean faster and faster learning?
When everything is changing faster and faster, we need to learn faster and faster, right? In a recent interview, this question was posed to two prominent advocates of performance support: Ontuitive’s Conrad Gottfredson and Bob Mosher, pioneers of working and learning simultaneously.
The interview asks important questions about the challenges of learning in business today and highlights ways in which performance support can help. The full interview, first published in HR Square Magazine, is available on Ontuitive’s website: Faster and faster change. Does that mean faster and faster learning?
“In a world where drastic technological changes constantly challenge the workforce, market and society, both employers and employees have to acknowledge that permanent learning is crucial. But there's a sense of frustration among both. Even when the content is a hit, employees hardly ever remember anything they have learned when they need to apply it,” says Bob Mosher, Microsoft’s former training director and now the chief learning and strategy evangelist at Ontuitive.
“The big problem with training in a business context is not that there isn't enough training - there's often too much of it - but that people don't get the best out of it.”
- What is performance support?
Bob Mosher: “Performance support offers the correct information to employees exactly when they need it: during work. It can be compared to a brief instruction that an employee reads - learning something new or refreshing memory - immediately applying the instruction.”
“The problem with training is that it often loses its connection with performance: as soon as we abandon the perspective of application, our view of training changes. Performance support organises training differently, shifting the focus from ‘learning to use', to the ‘application of what’s learned’.”
- Should the trainers ensure that learning is applied?
“Of course,” says Conrad Gottfredson, Chief Learning Strategist at Ontuitive and co-author of ‘Innovative Performance Support – Strategies and Practices for Learning in the Workflow. “Trainers have put too much emphasis on learning: they have spent far too much time on learning to memorise skills and too little on the learning needed to apply them. With performance support, trainers stick to the fundamental skills needed for people to be able to get started and their emphasis shifts to problem-based learning. The trainer is no longer just a teacher, they’re also a guide who builds bridges between the course and the workplace."
Conrad Gottfredson: “Think of the increasingly shorter shelf life of certain products. Some course material is outdated the moment the course starts. To survive, organisations have to be able to learn at the same speed at which changes take place - constantly learning and applying new skills.”
- Does this mean the end of standard training, the general packages?
Conrad Gottfredson: “No, absolutely not. But we have to make the most of it in the time we're being allocated.”
Bob Mosher: “The trainer has a very important role, as a teacher of the essentials and as the person who learns to use the support instruments and references. The trainer is not one to answer questions, more to increase the employees' level of self-sufficiency.”
Faster and faster change. Does that mean faster and faster learning? is available to download from Ontuitive’s web site.