Reprinted by permission of Jane Bozarth, The Learning Guild
The 2019 Towards Maturity report shows that more than half of workers queried prefer to learn at the point of need, 94% of them at their own pace.
Problem: The Wall Between Training and Work
An unending challenge for L&D professionals is overcoming the wall between training and work. The way we learn to do our jobs may start with formal training (how to install the wiring on a 757, performing basic functions in Excel, assigning the criticality of a help desk call) but on the job, much more learning occurs as we apply what we know alongside other humans and in ever-changing real contexts.
The worker installing the wiring will encounter co-workers who offer shortcuts or find that the color of wires provided doesn’t match what was shown in training; the call center staffer will have to navigate the unspoken politics of which managers always get pushed to the top of the “urgent” response category; the casual Excel user may need to locate a tutorial every time she uses it, or may find that the next time she accesses Excel there’s a new iteration and the interface doesn’t look quite like it did in the training class. The key takeaway is that performance and learning are not separate endeavors. A great deal of workflow learning comes not from learning everything from scratch, but from workers refining and recalibrating what they already know.
Is it Always Literally “Learning” in the Workflow?
In many instances workflow learning takes the form of what we more often call performance support—something in the moment that helps a worker execute a task or make a decision that enables them to meet a performance standard without having to memorize. Some tools take this out of our hands completely: few of us need to memorize phone numbers anymore—for that matter, we don’t even have to enter the numbers we used to dial.
For other tasks, the question of whether “learning” in the sense of permanent behaviour change occurs depends largely on frequency and complexity of the task. (For more on the effect of repetition on learning see Will Thalheimer’s excellent recap of research on spacing learning over time.) The help desk worker using a 3x3 decision tool to classify the urgency/criticality of a call—dozens of times a day—will likely eventually not need to look at the tool. Meanwhile, the mechanic installing 60 miles of wiring in a 757 will probably always need to refer to the schematic, at least for parts of the job. For that worker, the learning may be more about developing an understanding of when and where to look for (or perhaps activate) help at the moment of need. Whatever the particulars, a great deal of learning happens in work.
This report looks at tools and approaches that support and enhance learning in the sense of improved performance and, in some cases, in the sense of learning as permanent behaviour change. The focus is on newer technologies and ideas, or those that have been getting a lot of attention in recent years, such as microlearning and social learning.
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