Often, the traditional mandatory training required by regulatory agencies does not adequately prepare staff to perform the tasks as expected. Reviewing the information once a year, staff forget the information before they are required to complete the task on the job. It’s no surprise, then, that when surveys or inspections occur, staff are unable to perform as required.

Do you fear that your employees lack a single place to go when looking for the information needed to do their jobs? Do you worry about delivering consistent customer service experiences? You’re not alone: Allstate had these same concerns before they set a company-wide initiative to build a world-class training environment and knowledge repository for their employees.

Structured, classroom-based training can take a long time and add additional costs, and it can be very frustrating to create resource documents. Who wants paper references that have to be updated constantly, or to use a homemade reference system that is just as painful to maintain? Are you losing good people during or just after their new-hire training? There has to be a better way!

The time was right for The Predictive Index to adopt a performance support mindset. The only problem was, they hadn’t done it before! In spite of the challenges posed by an agile software environment, over 20 languages, and no hint of which tool set to choose, performance support is now alive and well and growing in its adoption around the globe throughout the PI Network. So how did they accomplish this?

70:20:10 is a popular concept in our industry. The framework provides structure that should exist in our efforts to support a workforce. However, what does 70:20:10 look like beyond just the ratio? How are organizations using the framework and, more importantly, what benefits are organizations seeing from using this approach?

Performance support is a methodology that has been around for decades. However, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest and possibilities for performance support as technologies have evolved, which has opened new pathways for supporting workers in their moment of need. While promising, performance support is also a deviation from traditional approaches to training and development. How can you and your organization successfully add performance support to your strategies?

The demands of the modern organization require you to look for more efficient ways to help people build their skills. Because of this, organizations are looking beyond traditional classes and courses that take time away from the job, and they’re also focusing on performance support: providing help directly in the flow of people’s work. These just-in-time options include more than just the job aids you’ve used in the past. Resources such as social technology, EPSS, video, and augmented reality offer new ways to provide employees with instant access to the answers they need.

Many training designers recognize that too much knowledge is lost in the transfer from their courses to the workplace. Performance support and microlearning assets, delivered at the point of need, could solve the problem; but often, the company lacks the tools or infrastructure for delivering just-in-time assets.

Employees want help whenever they need it, but most L&D departments create materials that they store in an LMS or knowledge base. Searching for those materials interrupts your learners’ workflow and takes time out of their day. What if, instead, you could provide help to them in the tools that they use so that all they had to do was simply hover or click a button to get answers?

You’re sold on the benefits of performance support, but your internal customers don’t “get” it. With an LMS full of eLearning courses, your learning organization isn’t ready to jump full bore into a performance support approach to learning, and your IT department won’t be investing in performance support delivery technology anytime soon. How can you use your existing assets to create working solutions that prove the worth of this approach?

Research demonstrates that when learning is embedded in the everyday flow of work, it has more impact on both the business and learners. You should be wary of designing and investing in solutions that increase the barriers between working and learning. Learning must be available at the point of need. Delivering a true holistic learning experience requires modern tools—tools that enable just-in-time content delivery, streamlined curation of critical information, and comprehensive data analytics.