FocusOn Learning Performance

Economic stress, learning technologies, global competition, and the learning sciences present opportunities and threats to learning and performance professionals. How will you respond as we move to more mobile, performance support, and video?

Your business sponsor wants to cut costs and improve performance. Your end users want lots of high-quality, traditional training. You need solutions that focus on enabling performance through the use of both formal training and effective performance support. How can you effectively evaluate learning and performance needs and implement solutions that leverage both formal training and performance support in the most efficient way possible?

Technology continues to advance rapidly, changing how people live and interact with the world around them. Today’s learning professionals face the challenge of staying ahead of this curve and tracking the technologies that are shaping the future of organizational learning, while at the same time recognizing technologies that may be more of a passing fad.

Within the learning and development professional community, we don’t always focus on the tools we need to enable our performance. The phrase “The shoemaker’s children have no shoes” comes to mind here. In this session we will discuss a performance support solution created for instructional designers participating in the 5 Moments of Learning Need™ certificate program. We will preview the solution and discuss how it helps instructional designers both as a tool during learning and, more importantly, as a support tool while they apply 5 Moments of Learning Need™ methods on the job.

Organizations transforming their businesses for new digital platforms and marketplaces need to make such transition as effective and painless as possible. During the rollout of new software platforms, companies need to continuously monitor the impact that new digital procedures and processes are having on workforce acceptance and customers’ engagement. More effective and intelligent solutions are needed to make companies cross the digital chasm—without falling into it.

Juggling the related-but-different needs for effective formal learning and informal performance support can be daunting. So how do you keep your project from falling short in delivering client needs on time and within budget? How do you adjust when client needs are often changing? Agile provides a framework for adapting to change as it happens and working with the client to deliver the content most needed by learners.

Business leaders often request training when there are better options available. Even when they do need “courses,” it’s often only to check off a box. In these situations, you have a responsibility to validate that creating a course is the most effective and efficient approach. Even when courses are appropriate, they’re rarely enough on their own to drive the change organizations need.

As a performance support professional, you “get it,” but what if your leadership doesn’t? How do you prove that PS is the way to address a business issue and move your organization toward innovation? This session will review a step-by-step framework for developing a proof of concept and demonstrate several budget-friendly tools you can use to make PS come alive.

When investing in technologies and applications to enable effective workforce performance support, who is buying? Who is investing time? Who manages them? Who creates the assets? Who deploys the assets? Who are the beneficiaries? 

Many people accept that the way to extend learning solutions to the moment of need is through performance support. But while L&D professionals recognize the value of this approach, actually knowing how to take existing projects and transform them into solutions that truly support people in the moment can be a challenge.

“If you taught them this, why don’t they do it?” Educational services staff at Saint Vincent Hospital got tired of hearing this question and started looking for a new learning paradigm for the institution. The solution was found in performance support. By blending learning opportunities and performance support for associates before a class, during a class, and on the job, organizations are able to significantly impact job performance.

Learning and development professionals strive to meet on-the-job performance support needs in a typical work environment. Now, imagine the needs of a laboratory where employees are responsible for manufacturing radiopharmaceuticals (radioactive drugs). Cardinal Health technicians operate in a highly regulated lab environment with ever-changing operating procedures that affect a manufacturing process in which one misstep could impact a patient.

With its shift of learning away from information overload delivered in large chunks to learning in more manageable increments within the context of work, performance support is already an improvement on traditional methods of training. Looking to further improve learner performance, in this session we’ll discuss the possibilities of imagining “support” as “learning” with insights from psychological and neuroscience research. Building on unconventional notions about the nature of memory, constructing learning methods on a “remembering” curve, and attending to the learning environment are just a few of the opportunities we will explore in this open conversation with panelists.

If your organization is going through change, you’re probably doing a lot to make sure your people are prepared—videos, emails, tools, learning, meetings, etc. The problem is motivating people to care enough before go-live (before the moment of apply) to engage in those helpful experiences. Here’s an example of how you can elevate your change initiative above the noise and get your people to want to get ready.

Implementing effective performance support is challenging. How do you deliver useful information at the time of need without being disruptive to the employee’s workflow? How do you integrate the content effectively within the context of the user’s task at hand? How do you leverage the available technology (devices, web access, security) to reach the target audience and provide a strong user experience?

Performance support is very different from training. In a world where many people are conditioned to think that learning should look like school, with teachers, students, and formal instruction, it can be difficult to get an organization and its workers to adjust to a performance support approach.

With more companies taking advantage of satellite offices and field employees, recognizing the differences in their needs from on-site teams is crucial. Their physical distance from training and marketing teams means they can’t easily access key information, and when they can, it’s often out-of-date. The result? A potentially negative impact on your relationships with top channel partners.

As a follow-up to 2015’s Performance Support Symposium presentation, we present the results and lessons learned!

Electronic performance support systems, workflow learning, just-in-time training, help on steroids. Even though performance support (PS) has existed as a concept for more than 25 years, its many names are a testament to how difficult it can be to explain, let alone sell, PS to customers, senior leaders, or sometimes even your own team.

With the proliferation of mobile deployment to training audiences and rapidly emerging technology, training and development professionals often struggle with keeping their mobile knowledge and skills current. Sprint University confronted this problem head-on by implementing a mobile learning program.

The Nature Conservancy recently implemented a new constituent relationship management (CRM) application used by more than 1,000 staff members across the organization. The new CRM application not only changed how staff tracks and manages constituent relationships in an application, but also significantly changed the business processes surrounding CRM. An instructor-led training program was developed; however, staff needed ongoing support to address knowledge gaps and ongoing changes to the business processes.

Getting started is often the hardest challenge when implementing a performance support solution. You have recognized the need for performance support and want to implement it in your organization, but where to begin? What factors should you take into consideration? What resources are required? Where should you first deploy the solution? Across which business processes? These questions and more will be addressed in this session.

Performance support can be a powerful addition to an organization’s learning and performance ecosystem as it is tasked with delivering more content in less time. Well-designed performance support solutions provide task-based information in a layered approach for intuitive fingertip access to specific resources at the performer’s moment of need. But how do you really design for the moment of apply?

Preparing to implement a performance support process requires forethought and planning, but it doesn’t need to be daunting or overwhelming. In this session, we will explore ways you can prepare for a successful implementation and share real-world examples of how outlining the right steps beforehand will ensure the best outcome. 

Undefined business processes, untested and incomplete systems, continually changing requirements, and scope creep—sound familiar? One or all of these conditions can wreak havoc on a project and cause it to continue on well past its targeted end date. How do you develop content for a project that continually evolves? How do you maximize limited resources under these conditions? How do you survive the project that never seems to end?

This session addresses learning designers’ challenges with determining which type of performance support is suitable for a given audience, their role, and the tools they have access to in their work environment. At the Bank of Montreal, access to technology-based performance support varies widely and affects how learning and transfer materials can be designed.

Skill training in first aid had changed little since the Knights of St. John formalized the process in the 11^th century. The focus had been on in-class demonstrations, in-class practice, and paper-based exams, and students updated their skills only every three years. Fast forward to 2016; people aren’t learning that way anymore. So how do you transform hundreds of years of subject matter expertise into a 21^st-century learning solution? Follow St. John Ambulance’s journey from inspiration at mLearnCon 2014 to leaping forward to embrace evolution through mobile learning.

The performance support industry has been searching for a true “blended learning” solution for years and has fallen short because it has been about blending training only. That has limited instructors’ impact and reach beyond the classroom, leaving them to be seen as event-based only.

Moments after a performance support solution has been introduced, it is quite possible that it contains irrelevant or inaccurate information due to the constant state of change businesses are experiencing in technology, policy, and process. A core tenet of performance support is that it is immediately helpful. Often, it takes just one irrelevant or inaccurate experience to cause a user to abandon a performance support solution permanently.

Most performance support systems assume an environment where Internet and a tablet or laptop are available. However, there are situations in which access to Internet devices is not possible, like in remote education or when sales agents work in remote areas. In such places, SMS is the only channel for delivering performance support.

Incorporating video in a responsive performance support project can be daunting. Video done for vertical delivery comes with specific dos and don’ts. This session shows how to use vertical video, the new Adobe Animate CC, and Adobe Captivate to make cost-effective, rapid mobile performance support modules.

JLG, a leading manufacturer of lift equipment for various industries, needed a way for site supervisors to verify whether an operator had the proper certifications to operate any given piece of equipment, down to the specific model. The company struggled with providing immediate compliance instructions.

The quickening pace of change and increasing learner expectations demand learning approaches that can be produced quickly, at lower cost, and are easily accessible and readily available. Removing employees from the workflow for classroom sessions is not always feasible, nor does it provide the necessary just-in-time support. At the same time, the knowledge and information learners must have to support customers has expanded. Finally, the workforce is more distributed, more virtual.

Performance is not just an end result but a continuous flow of interactions between the individual and the environment, leading to a defined goal. Organizations normally try to keep this process in line through periodic evaluations or other methods, but tracking performance at work on a continuous basis with a geographically dispersed workforce is a challenge. This can result in failed objectives or substandard outcomes.

All too often, embedded performance support (EPS) is seen as a technology or a software application to purchase. While both may come into play, EPS is a discipline that drives new skills in L&D as well as new methods and, potentially, new technology. History shows that being ready to pursue adoption of EPS is not the same as being in a state of readiness to sustain the adoption.