Adding performance support to the trainer’s toolbox

by

The way that people work in any organisation is influenced by several factors. When I conduct a performance analysis I look at factors such as expectations, capacity, incentives, feedback, tools and skills.

If you put a group of people in a room and ask them to describe a performance problem at work and then to classify these, you will find that about 15% are due to a lack of skills & knowledge. I’ve seen this on several occasions and my own experience with workplace performance analysis bears it out as well.

Training is an effective instrument to address a lack of skills and knowledge, but not any other performance factors. That means that at best, training helps with less than 1/5 of an organisation’s human performance issues. On the other hand, performance support tools can be used to address a lack of information resources. By just adding performance support (non-instructional interventions) to a training designer’s toolbox, you are likely doubling your value to your organisation or your clients.

My own performance toolbox is a start to learn more, and here are some basic reference books I’ve used over the years:

DIF Analysis

by

Previously, I had mentioned DIF (difficulty, importance, frequency) Analysis as a tool that I used in the military to determine if job tasks required training. I finally got around to creating the expanded model in a digital format, so here it is.

expanded-dif.jpg

In making these tools available online some people ask if I’m giving away some secrets to the trade. I don’t think so, because these are pretty basic tools which I’ve been using for over a decade and many others use as well. Also, the world of work is getting to a point where performance improvement may not be the best approach. In knowledge-intensive workplaces, procedures and tasks can’t be easily quantified. Tools like DIF analysis only work when there are similar jobs done by several people. They won’t help in a creative work environment like a design shop.

My own interest is to develop new tools and methods, beyond human performance technology and instructional design. Methods like online personal knowledge mastery are of current interest.

In Canada, salaried work is a mug’s game

by

If you ever needed a reason to work on your own and join the growing ranks of the self-employed, a recent report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives may give you a clear financial reason. According to the Financial Post (not exactly a socialist paper):

The prolonged period of economic prosperity that Canada has enjoyed resulted in a 72-per-cent increase in economic output between 1975 and 2005, growth that has continued since, it [CCPA] noted.

The benefits of the growth, however, have not been reflected in workers’ paycheques, it added. “Canadians’ average real wages, which are wages adjusted for inflation, have not increased in more than 30 years.”

Corporations have had continuous profits while workers have seen none of it. Trickle down economics doesn’t work. One of the few options for individual workers is to establish a new work contract. However, unions are losing influence and collective bargaining hasn’t done much for workers’ wages.

It’s getting easier for individuals to connect with social applications like Facebook and we are also seeing tools like Linked-In for business. The tools for individual workers to connect and collaborate are now available, though we don’t have the culture or mindset to fully embrace them yet.

Given that corporate profits have been made at the expense of the labour force, free-agentry should be looking  like a better option for a lot of people. Places like work commons can support this shift but other models are necessary. For example, we have a green builders’ cooperative here in town. More flexible taxes could also help new micro-businesses, but first we’ll have to educate the politicians. The data from the CCPA are a start.

Designing Learning for Any Style

by

Learning styles are often used as a catch-phrase to say that the training will be suitable for different tastes and abilities. Clark Quinn has one word on learning styles – rubbish. I agree, noting that Will Thalheimer still hasn’t had to pay anyone on his challenge, “I will give $1000 (US dollars) to the first person or group who can prove that taking learning styles into account in designing instruction can produce meaningful learning benefits.”

Without citing more research (you can follow the links and comments on the above and find out more), here are three practical approaches that you can incorporate into any instruction:

Read Ruth Clark’s Six Principles of Effective e-Learning (PDF) from The E-Learning Guild

Buy the book, Learning to Solve Problems: An Instructional Design Guide by Dave Jonassen

Use CAST’s Universal Design Principles:

  • Multiple means of representation, to give learners various ways of acquiring information and knowledge,
  • Multiple means of expression, to provide learners alternatives for demonstrating what they know,
  • Multiple means of engagement, to tap into learners’ interests, offer appropriate challenges, and increase motivation.

National Day of Action

by

Last week was Canada’s National Aboriginal Day and today is the National Day of Action. You could say that we had the traditional conference last week followed by the unconference this week. Chris Corrigan does a lot of work with First Nations and has written a counter post to a recent article in the Globe & Mail by Margaret Wente. As someone who is close to the problem, but also has a systems view, this is worth reading, especially today:

Those of you that have read my ramblings over the years will know how I feel about education. Learning how to read is a good thing. Learning how to learn is a good thing. Education is another thing. It is the last sacred cow in Indigenous communities, the idea that the school system actually sustains the problems that our communities face. We could talk a lot about this, but I think schools in general don’t hold the solution to all the problems. Learning does though. That’s what the Elders say anyway, not that Margaret Wente puts much stock in them.

Job Aids & Performance Support

by

I’m currently working on a project that requires me to get back to some performance and training analysis. Of course, my initial outlook is that training can often be a problem looking for a solution.

I had to review the basics and decided to read Rossett & Schaffer’s, Job Aids & Performance Support. This is a good introduction to performance support, and more up to date than Gery’s classic EPSS. The section on when performance support is appropriate is a good reminder for everyone in our field:

  • When performance is infrequent
  • When the situation is complex
  • When the consequence of errors is intolerable
  • When performance depends on a large body of information
  • When performance is dependent on knowledge or information that changes frequently
  • When performance can be improved through self-assessment
  • When there is a high turnover rate
  • When there is little time or money for training

Sound like any workplace you know?

There is an excellent sidebar in the book by Marc Rosenberg, author of Beyond e-Learning:

This is our challenge when we blend interventions to solve performance problems. We must recognize that relying solely on blending instructional solutions is not always the best way to meet the economic worth test for long-term, sustainable and valued performance improvement. Including performance support in the mix lowers overall investment, reduces time to competence, and makes the solution more durable over time …

I’m still amazed that performance support is not seen as a standard intervention for all training and learning organisations. The data are there; it works.

Sackville named cultural capital of Canada

by

sackville_waterfowl_park.jpg

Our little town has been named one of the cultural capitals of Canada, winning $500,000 for the under 50,000 population category.  Culture is one of the pillars of our town commons project, along with environment and entrepreneurship. I hope that raising our profile as a town will enable us to secure some more funds for the building so that we can commence construction this year. If you’re thinking of moving to a small town, that still has lots to offer, drop by Sackville this Summer.

Learning 2.0 value chain

by

I made my comments last week about R/WW’s All you need to know about e-learning 2.0, and the discussion has been picked up by several people in our community, most notably Tony Karrer. A recent comment on R/WW , #24, by Hank Horkoff of ChinesePod, is perhaps the most insightful on the real effects of “2.0”:

First, I want to second Tony’s assertion that the changes in learning are paralleling the impact of Web 2.0 on mass media. This fundamental shift, re-constructing the value chain around the needs of the end user/student, rather than the needs of producers of content or educational institutions, will reverberate through the learning industry for decades to come. I just wonder why the label isn’t a little more ‘digital native-esque’ as simply Learning 2.0.

Second, with ChinesePod we have been able to build a business model around a three-point strategy that provides a more integrated learning experience for students. One, provide an attraction (free daily podcast lessons, in our case) to compensate students for their attention. Two, facilitate community involvement through use of a variety of software tools and active human participation to build out a community of practice. Three, continually experiment with a number of paid services to generate the revenue necessary to sustain the service many years into the future. Even though Chinese-training for English-speaking markets is only a ‘small niche business’ in Richard’s words, ChinesePod will do more than a million dollars in revenue this year.

ChinesePod gets it right by understanding the user/learner. This three step model is one that any Web learning business should critically examine, so let me reiterate:

  1. Reward attention, because it’s everything on the Web
  2. Community (not content) is king
  3. Keep tweaking the business model

What do you want people to do?

by

I’ve been looking at some training documentation and it seems that when we get into complicated (not complex) cases of lots of stuff to examine, we miss the forest for the trees. Dave sums it all up quite nicely:

Even if the client’s model of training involves only lectures and PowerPoint, “What do you want people to do?” shifts the focus to the reason they’re on the job – the results they’re supposed to accomplish. (If the client focuses only on how they perform, you can ask about the results they produce – whatever’s left over when the workers go home.)

There are lots of tools to help see the forest in my toolbox.

Disorientation in Learning

by

A model I’ve used several times is Marilyn Taylor’s learning cycle. Her work is not widely published but there is a reference in this PDF on Adult Learning (see page 51). You can also read about the model in Making Sense of Adult Learning.

Taylor observed university students in classrooms, and saw a pattern of Disorientation, Exploration, Reorientation, Equilibrium. Each stage took different periods of time with each student, and not all students completed a full cycle during a formal course. The successful students were the ones who could work through the entire process and continue into another cycle. When students are shown the cycle, many get an “ah ha ” moment and realise that their confusion (disorientation) is quite normal.

taylor1.jpg

According to Taylor, disorientation is a natural state in formal education:

Stage 1 – Disorientation: The learner is presented with an unfamiliar experience or idea which involves new ideas that challenge the student to think critically about his/her beliefs and values. The learner reacts by becoming confused and anxious. Support from the educator at this point is crucial to the learner’s motivation, participation and self-esteem.

Working and learning in our information-rich environments with constantly changing tools and business rules presents us with frequent periods of disorientation. As learning specialists, one of our roles should be to help people with their disorientation and exploration. Our first step should be to communicate that disorientation is quite normal. This may be a greater task than it appears because even acknowledging personal disorientation could be professional suicide in certain organisational cultures.

I think that we should be helping people adapt to life in perpetual Beta.

taylor2.jpg

In information intensive work environments (which are almost everywhere), there will be longer, and more frequent, periods between disorientation and reorientation. That means that we have to be comfortable exploring options and possibilities, even though we lack a solid mental framework or easy solutions. Artists do this all the time and now it’s necessary for all of us.