Beyond e-learning: bridging the knowing-doing gap

Any teaching tool is only as useful as the support it’s given in the workplace. By expanding the breadth of support for learning within an organization, best practices encouraged in formal training can make a bigger impact

By Tom Gram

Consider this common scenario: your company has just implemented a customer relationship management (CRM) system, and you’ve been asked to develop the training. Conscious of the need to reduce the amount of time sales reps are in the classroom, you choose an e-learning approach. You include an assessment component to ensure skill transfer has occurred and you inform your colleagues when the training is complete so they can launch the new system.

You’re confident that the e-learning program will teach users how to complete CRM system tasks, but you’re uncomfortable that it doesn’t fully match the company sales and territory management processes. They will know how to use the system, but you wonder if it will be enough to improve actual sales performance.

The knowing-doing gap

In the workplace, learning is a means to an end — organizational performance. Training departments that forget this tend to be satisfied with measures of success that stop at learner satisfaction and knowledge retention. However, training departments that see their role as contributing more directly to business results look for ways to get to the heart of individual job performance.

Unfortunately, today’s training approaches don’t always fare well at getting business results. Classroom learning has limitations — delays between learning and application, group pacing that can leave the individual behind, lack of skills reinforcement back on the job. E-learning has provided an answer to some of these limitations. Employees can now learn at their desktop or mobile offices, learning can be presented in smaller segments and personalized to meet individual needs, and “blended learning” can merge e-learning with classroom work to capture the best of both approaches.

But e-learning also has limitations. Like the classroom format, it’s a formal approach to learning. They both require employees to step outside their regular job, learn what they need to, and then return to their regular activities. Because even the best formal learning programs take place in this artificially constructed environment, they are disconnected from the real context of work.

Technology provides us with an opportunity to break out of this box — to create learning and performance solutions that deliberately blur the lines between learning and work, knowing and doing. It allows us to build learning directly into work processes and, in doing so, create solutions that truly have an impact on workplace performance. More and more organizations are using these solutions to enhance their formal learning offerings. Here are three approaches that look beyond formal e-learning and can help you bridge the gap between learning and doing.

Informal learning

Research tells us as much as 80% of learning in an organization happens informally. That’s a startling figure when you realize that training and development departments really only support the 20% of learning in an organization.

Internet-based collaboration and communication tools can help you influence some of that 80%. They allow you to facilitate and support informal learning through learning networks or communities of practice, in which employees freely share best practices, ask questions, discuss and learn from both experts and each other in the course of doing their daily work. With the right care, these learning and sharing environments can be made the home of the knowledge capital of an organization, the collective know-how accumulated through the activities of employees as they go about their business. The knowledge system provides a vehicle to capture, share and leverage the powerful incidental learning that takes place every day.

Knowledge systems such as these should be as much a part of the learning professional’s arsenal as e-learning and classroom learning. To date, these tools have been the domain of knowledge management specialists. Their implementation has lacked focus that good learning professionals can bring. The last few years have seen the merging of e-learning and knowledge management practices. It’s about time.

Electronic performance support systems (EPSS)

A kissing cousin of the knowledge system is the electronic performance support system (EPSS). When specific tasks or procedures must be learned, a well designed EPSS can dramatically reduce or even eliminate training. EPSS solutions usually provide task support for workplace applications. Help in the form of task demonstrations/simulations, procedural information, reference information, expert advice, and task wizards are built directly into the tool (or very close to it). EPSS can also incorporate e-learning segments, which can be very helpful when tasks require conceptual knowledge or are complex enough that they require demonstration (show me!), practice (let me try!) and assessment (test me!).

Instead of asking employees to remember tasks and concepts, the goal of the EPSS is on-demand support, to provide just enough information, just in time to complete the task. After repeated use of the EPSS, a skill often becomes automatic and reliance on the system wanes. The EPSS can provide the bridge between unskilled performance to unconscious, confident use of skills on the job — a bridge between learning and doing.

The business benefits of EPSS are speed to competency, reduced task completion time and automating redesigned work processes. EPSS solutions can also be used to support non-system-based business processes.

Information and “job aids”

Sometimes we train employees when all they really need to improve performance is quick access to well structured information in the form of decision aids, task aids, or reference material.

Sales reps and other professionals often have to sort through cumbersome document management systems or training manuals to find the information they need. If that information can be reconfigured and structured for access within a knowledge system or EPSS, it becomes more valuable.

When you start a project by understanding the performance that’s required instead of a topic list, you will see many opportunities to support the performance with information, and reduce the length of formal training while you’re at it.

And when information access is linked to the work flow or business process, it becomes even more powerful. A quick Google search on “workflow learning” will guide you to an emerging industry that is integrating information and learning directly into business workflow tools.

Performance portals

Many companies have developed learning portals, through which employees gain access to formal classroom and e-learning programs. Why not take the concept a little further to create a performance portal that supports real time job performance? Combining access to e-learning, informal knowledge systems, EPSS, information and job aids, into a portal targeted at specific roles, can be a powerful tool. “Blended learning” takes on a new meaning when you combine a mix of performance solutions, not just the standard e-learning-classroom combo.

Let’s return to our CRM scenario. Instead of the basic CRM e-learning program, what if you developed a sales performance portal that integrated simple e-learning lessons on each phase of the sales process, tools for reps to share best practices and to access experts for specific questions, EPSS-based guidance for CRM system related tasks and a repository of key documents linked to stages of the sales process? The solution would certainly require a multi-disciplinary team and some good front-end analysis to align all the components, but the payoff would be measurably improved sales performance, not simply a manual about the specific skills needed to use the CRM system.

Tom Gram is director of e-Learning and Knowledge Solutions at Klick Communications Inc.

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