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Talent Management is a discipline focused on driving organizational effectiveness. There was a day when all a company needed to do to prosper was hire, manage, and incent the right talent. Clearly, that’s not reality now. The financial tsunami that struck planet earth in 2008 brought about an unpredictable, unrelenting, and unforgiving environment of change. In its aftermath, companies lacking the capacity to anticipate and adapt ahead of their markets have either failed or are failing.

In 1991, Gloria Gerry pioneered the initial ideas and practices of Performance Support (PS) in her book, “Electronic Performance Support Systems”. She rightly proposed that the learning strategies of organizations needed to “be reconceived to influence the primary purpose of organization: to perform effectively and efficiently.” She also observed that the “information, rules and knowledge” that workers needed in order to “optimize performance” were “spread all over the place” and needed to be made “within easy reach.” According to Gerry, organizations needed to “give up the idea that competence must exist within the person and expand [their] view that whenever possible it should be built into the situation.”

A reader of that article, Spence, left a comment and suggested that there might be a “further dimension” within the spectrum where a PS solution “can be more than Just In Time and Just Enough, it can seem like and feel like it's engineered ‘Just for Me.’” Spence … that’s exactly what “smart” performance support does—it observes performers’ behaviors, generalizes to best practices, and automatically adjusts to individual needs.

Most of us can probably agree that traditional approaches to training and eLearning just aren’t enough to support today’s multi-generational, multi-tasking, and multifaceted workforce. Advocates of the 70/20/10 model would argue that 70 percent of learning comes from informal, on-the-job experiences. The key, according to them, is to connect your learners with the content they need, when and where they need it.

I’ve never liked the term “informal learning.” Unlike formal learning, which we qualified well with modalities such as the classroom and e-learning, informal learning seems to be the catchall for anything not formal. Everything from coffee breaks, to emails, to parking lot conversations falls under the informal domain based on this definition. We as learning professionals need to better qualify the non-formal technologies and approaches that we can control and should measure.

Technology is key to business. Upgrades, such as the move to new versions of Windows or Office have the potential to improve productivity in the long run, but they also have the potential to cause a lot of lost productivity during a migration. Few would disagree that training is important to making the most of this. But the way we train often misunderstands how people use technology and how they learn over time.

"Performance support has a real role to play in the world of business and in turn the world of learning...to improve productivity, accomplishment, and satisfaction, in the most cost-effective way possible."

It’s time to rethink how information is aggregated and used. Take a different look at how you use the ever-shrinking time you have with learners in the classroom.

In this work we call training, we design, build, manage, and maintain courseware. We must develop solutions that ensure people can perform effectively.

As the New Year approaches, it’s time to look forward to what will likely dominate our conversations over the next 12 months. Some of these may be reaffirming to you, others may give you pause. You might even find some that are blinding flashes of the obvious, but nevertheless worth highlighting on your list. And if any pique your interest, don’t forget to learn more.

Performance support platforms (also known as EPSS) can be powerful tools for enabling almost instant performance of IT procedures. Corporations consider such solutions to resolve proficiency challenges while reducing training costs. From the end-user’s perspective, the introduction of an embedded performance solution can be challenging and even intimidating. Considering users’ perspective when designing and implementing a performance support solution can contribute significantly to the adoption rate and overall success of the project.

As is often the case, a previous blog triggers a great question that shines the light on something I either missed or have not yet spent any time developing. Several folks I’ve recently talked with have expressed concerns and asked for ideas on how to get their leadership off the dime about considering performance support as a strategic issue for the organization. My gut reaction is this – performance support (PS) is too closely tied to training.

It’s hard to find any one thing in my career in corporate learning more satisfying than the recent buzz surrounding Performance Support (PS). In some ways, I can extract a sense of validation out of the rise in importance of something that has been around for years. I say validated because I’ve been an advocate of PS since being bulldozed by hiring into a company well into their third wave of a SAP implementation. Those were the days that stoked the fire in my belly to defend myself with a new strategy – Performance Support.

Other times demanded a different approach to training. But in this time, 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: Americans Conrad Gottfredson and Bob Mosher, pioneers of working and learning simultaneously.

The ‘new way of working’ relies on information technology. Employees who are able to keep up, adapt and learn quickly are more productive – as are their employers. Cees Louwers is a director with performance support systems and services business Ontuitive and believes that employees' needs for working instructions on software and related working processes is growing: “Change in the ways people carry out their our daily tasks is a significant factor in almost all workforces and change tends to follow change in quick succession. He believes that old ways of learning – stopping work to learn and then applying it to the tasks in hand – are actually preventing people from being adaptable enough, from learning quickly and from getting on with the job.”

The recent post of ”Assembling the Performance Support Strategy Puzzle” has attracted a lot of hits already, and there was one comment in particular that resonated with me…actually the question posed picked a scab from a previous life. When introducing Performance Support (PS) into an organization, I think it is important to recognize there are at least two points of view with which you will have to contend. Those that have not a clue why they should give a rip about PS, and those that fear the implications of embracing PS!

Having been a road warrior sales trainer for enough years to be “platinum-everything” in virtually every frequent traveler program, I have a natural affection for live, stand-up training. The rewards came back to me through good level one evaluations and getting to see the occasional graduate of my new hire product training classes at the year-end President’s Club gala events. It felt good to have a hot shot sales rep come up to me and thank me for the knowledge gained from new-hire training. I did not see it at the time, but having the “occasional graduate” thank me was more of a failure than a success.

It seldom rains in the high desert valleys of southern Utah. Planting crops and keeping them green requires preparation, work, and the miracle of snow. During the winter, snow falls in the mountains around these desert valleys. In the spring it gradually melts and replenishes reservoirs. Water is then systematically released through dams into rivers, channeled off into canals, and finally delivered to farms at periodic intervals called “water-turns.”

“It will become increasingly important to be able to develop a cohesive strategy on how performance support integrates with your learning strategy and how it impacts business performance. It will become essential to identify strengths and weaknesses in your PS strategy and supporting processes to drive continuous improvement. It is critical for us in this field that we evaluate an organization’s maturity in performance support.”

“As employees become more mobile and technology continues to advance, organizations have unprecedented abilities to support employees’ performance at work. Adding a performance support component to formal training allows training departments to bolster performance in ways that are superior to training alone.”

With all the recent press performance support is getting…make that positive press…I’m noticing that we could easily slip into a best practice of admiring the problem of what to do about it. To be a bit less sarcastic, I must clarify that admiration of the problem is NOT a best practice, but it often seems like we manage to do it best.

“At the moment of Apply, there is a fundamental need to get to the specific steps for doing what needs to be done at that moment. Most people think about their work in the context of workflow. That’s why they call it 'workflow.' It is the flow of their work. And a workflow consists of tasks that they need to perform. These tasks have steps. Once a performer gets to the specific steps (within two clicks and ten seconds), there are potentially other needs – beyond the steps."

Create a positive attitude toward EPSS before introducing it in order to support successful implementation.

In 1972, the American legend Yogi Berra was driving his family to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. Somehow he became lost, and while his wife, Carmen, was giving him a hard time about it he responded, “We’re lost, but we’re making good time.”

I have been following the work of Bob Mosher & Conrad Gottfredson (better known as Bob&Con) for several years now. They made a significant contribution to workplace learning studies by introducing the "Five Moments of Need" model (Mosher & Gottfredson, 2011). The model captures both formal and informal learning tracks and needs. In recent years I researched and implemented real- time learning strategies in corporate settings, using performance support platforms.

Imagine this scenario. You want to create the optimum classroom training experience. You build a state-of-the-art training facility, from the technology down to the furniture. You research and purchase award-winning content. You deploy a robust and effective LMS. You open your doors for your first day of class and you don’t have any instructors to teach the courses. What’s your chance of success?

Learning is more about remediation and maintenance than about helping learners start from scratch.

There are five moments when leaders can enhance blended learning. A true blended learning program would create, offer and maintain learning assets and offerings.

“By 2020, timely access to knowledge will be a key differentiator for successful organizations.”

“We need to move much of what we do as far into the natural workflow of the organization as possible; we need to avoid, when we can, pulling people from their work for large periods of time to learn. There has never been a time when we have had greater capacity to do this than now.”

Bringing learning back to the job.

Don’t merely impart knowledge: Ensure workforce performance.

In with the new.

Understanding and tracking informal learning.

Integrating learning into the learner’s environment.

Put mobile learning to the test.

Performance support frameworks may become the leading vehicle by which learning is accessed.

We often assume that if we simply make learning assets available, our learners will make intelligent decisions around using them.

We seem to be an industry that likes to chase the latest and greatest thing. The latest is CoPs.

The discussion around learning has shifted to one of competency, not just mastery.