Transforming your LMS: Moving Beyond Learning To Automated Performance Support

Transforming your LMS: Moving Beyond Learning To Automated Performance Support
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January 24, 2019

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Since their inception, Learning Management Systems have provided organizations with a platform to keep their workforce trained, educated and compliant.

But with rapid advancements in technology, the need to enable, equip and empower employees to work more effectively and efficiently in the workplace has become paramount. Previously, what an employee learned had a years-long shelf life; now, knowledge and skills can be rendered obsolete in months.

Now, organizations must reimagine their learning and development from a static LMS program to a living, breathing thing with automated performance support – or find themselves grappling with an ill-equipped workforce.

How An LMS Closes The Skills Gap

To keep pace with demanding industry changes and evolutions, technology facilitates learning new skills that can be more rapidly acquired and lead to career development and advancement.

Employees can continuously improve upon existing skills and acquire new skills by incorporating learning into everyday work experience, progressing at their own pace or as their needs or goals dictate.

The concept of career-long learning, through the approach of the 70-20-10 rule – 70 percent experiential, on-the-job learning, 20 percent social learning, and 10 percent formal learning through training – reinforces the importance of informal learning for career development.

Once a learner has defined a career path within their organization and has identified the skills, steps, and certifications necessary to advance, they can make consistent progress and take small steps every day to achieve their long-term goals.

But before we can address how, exactly, automated performance support can help train and educate a workforce, we must first understand the science of learning with a quick refresher on how our brains forget – and how they retain information, too.

The Science of Forgetting

As we’ve discussed previously, the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve suggests that within one hour, people forget an average of 50 percent of the information presented, 70 percent within 24 hours, and 90 percent within a week.

With modern content, robust backend data-collection capabilities, and mobile delivery options, organizations can make great instructional strides. However, to see actual operational benefits, there needs to be a focus on knowledge application.

The Science of Retention

Point-of-need instructional access is, of course, the answer. Organizations can prompt productivity gains by providing performance support tools that allow workers to review training materials as they navigate their day-to-day duties. In fact, this kind of access is in demand among modern learners as approximately 56 percent prefer to apply newly learned techniques in real time.

That immediate recall and subsequent on-the-job application interrupt the forgetting curve at its earliest stage of decline. In fact, research has shown that when a student learns from, interacts with, and has an impact on the real world, higher retention of learning will occur.

ENTER: Automated Performance Support Tools

Performance Support Tools are point-of-need, job-specific learning aids that help learners perform better. In fact, according to one expert, ‘Integrating resources in the workplace … to get the tools and resources [to employees] while actively working is the goal. Work process and roles are the primary filters. The mechanisms vary: portals, performance-centered workflow interfaces, enterprise applications, integration projects, etc, but what’s important is that performer be able to name that tune in one note, to perform in exemplary fashion.’

7 Benefits of Performance Support Tools

Still not convinced that performance support tools are the answer? Consider just a few of the benefits.

  1. Adaptable. They are a great fit for informal learning and also can be used to support formal training to enhance retention for eventual on-the-job application.
  2. Empowering. Performance support tools empower learners with control over where, when and what they learn.
  3. Simple. They are designed to be quickly and easily assimilated and applied.
  4. Time-Saving. Performance support tools enable learners to quickly locate required or desired information.
  5. Quick-Hitting: Performance support tools enable the new employees to pick and choose the tips, modules, and best practices that best suit their needs or interests at their exact moment of need or interest.
  6. Less Waste: Since performance support tools are customized to meet specific needs, learners get everything they want and need – and nothing they don’t.
  7. Real-Time Updates: Performance support tools can be updated in real-time to include new features, upgrades, or change management as they become available.

Automated performance support takes your LMS to the next level, serving to not only deliver real-time information and knowledge, but also guidance and support at the learner’s exact moment of real-time application to increase the impact of formal training. The future of learning and development is here – is your organization ready?

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