The goal of learning in the workplace is performance–individual and organizational.  If we’ve learned nothing else in recent years, we’ve learned that improving performance through learning is more effective the more it is integrated with real work.  There is incredible variety in the business settings where we work, the jobs we support and the latitude we have to build our solutions.  Learning pundits encourage the “integration of learning and work” but don’t always offer practical strategies that busy learning professionals can to use to make it happen. 

Informal Learning Blog ← Enterprise learning Join our dialog about the Un-book → Whatever Happened to Performance Support? August 24th, 2008 | general Where did the dinosaurs go? And what happened to performance support? The most respected scientific speculation today suggests that most dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago when a massive asteroid collided with earth. One group of dinosaurs did survive the asteroid crash: today we

Interest in informal learning by the training function is tangible and growing.  The 2008 ASTD State of the Industry report contained a special survey section on informal learning.  The report concluded the following: ” Not only did survey participants acknowledge that informal learning plays a role in today’s workplaces, they also predicted that it would grow in the next three years. More than half of respondents reported that informal learning would increase during that time period” When asked of the “incidence” of

RESPOND: Support the work; Connect people; Share experiences; Develop tools It’s premised on the beliefs that management has access to the necessary strategic information and knowledge. Researcher and analyst, Jon Husband, says that wirearchy is, “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology”. The latter 20th Century was the golden era of the training department. Before the 20th Century, training per se did not exist outside the special needs of the church and

Great post by Jay Cross that uses the history of performance support to set up the need for what Jay calls Learnscapes. Jay tells us: Performance support is blossoming in organizations today under the label of Web 2.0. Remember the original premise of PS, making information available to workers instead of forcing them to memorize it? I've been a long-time believer in EPSS and ePerformance . That’s how we use Google and corporate wikis and instant messenger.

First,  how jobs can be designed (using performance feedback) to optimize natural learning (strategy #9) and second,  how elements of the job can be used to improve formal learning (strategy #10). Build a performance support system 4. Use social media to facilitate informal learning 6. This is the fifth and final post in the “10 Strategies for Integrating Learning and Work” series.  The series seems to have struck a chord and I appreciate the comments and e-mails in response to previous posts. 

The informal learning movement, powered by constructivist concepts of learning and web 2.0 too believe that facilitating informal learning in the workplace is critical and has been long overlooked by the Learning function.  However, we’re creating an artificial competition between formal and informal learning and should be careful not to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. Formal learning (structured and designed classroom or e-learning programs) has been taking a beating these days.  applications is well underway.  

Instruction is organized around the whole task, usually in an easy to difficult progression, which “scaffolds” learning support from “lots to little” as learners progress. The use of a variety of resources rather than a limited number of preselected references requires students to detect relevant from irrelevant information. Tags: Learning Design e The traditional approach to instructional design has been bruised and battered for some years now.  Sometimes the criticism is legitimate and thoughtful and other times it is shallow and faddish.  

Gladwell covers similar territory (and draws on the same research) as Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates world Class Performers from Everybody Else, another excellent book that elaborates on an article Colvin wrote for Fortune magazine a few years ago: “What it Takes To Be Great” . Both books debunk the assumption that “gifted” skill and great performance comes from innate talent, personal traits or hard wired competencies and ability.  I’m back from some vacation where I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers on the beach at our cottage (along with some very funny David Sedaris). Even if you haven’t read Outliers yet you probably know that it sets out to dispel myths that intelligence or innate ability are the primary predictors of success. 

Informal learning takes place outside of traditional settings like classrooms, training rooms and self study programmes. Although humans have been learning informally for thousands of years, recently there has been a huge increase in technology enabled informal learning. Examples of such informal knowledge transfer include instant messaging, a phone call, an Internet chat room, a chance meeting in the kitchen, a scheduled WebEx meeting with real-time It is essentially tacit knowledge which we obtain or locate from talking to the correct person. Virtually all real