LearningGuide argues for greater shift

to performance-centred informal learning

LearningGuide
25/01/2005
's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands

LearningGuide, the workplace performance support company, believes the success of many organizations will depend on their ability to support change with performance-centered learning that enables workers to quickly and accurately resolve procedural queries.

"The pace of change for organizations is increasing and workers are feeling the pressure because many firms are not putting in place the right kind of support for new systems and new procedures," said Cees Louwers, CEO of LearningGuide, who is arguing for greater attention to be paid to the informal learning that takes place in organizations.

"The largest portion of organizational learning budgets is spent on formal learning, in classrooms or through e-learning courses, as opposed to informal learning during tasks, which is the moment when new skills are needed. Workers typically don't retain enough of the new skills learnt on formal courses and that which is retained is often difficult to apply to their own specific tasks. As a result workers end up spending lots of time learning 'informally', trying to find out answers by searching their intranet, desktop files, e-mails and training materials and asking colleagues for help."

"Continually focusing on the formal learning, providing more courses that require greater time and resource commitments, is not going to sustain today's ever-increasing learning needs," added Louwers. "Instead, we need to switch our attentions to all of the informal learning that is going to take place anyway, increasingly a huge unseen cost for many organizations, to help workers to resolve queries in the workplace as and when they arise. Typically, performance support systems do this by bringing short support objects into the workplace, centered on the workers' tasks and making learning and support more immediate and more relevant to every worker."

LearningGuide has produced a paper that highlights the ways organizations spend training budgets between informal and formal approaches to learning and presents the case for placing performance-centered learning at the heart of organizational learning strategy. The paper is available free of charge from LearningGuide.

Notes to editors

About LearningGuide
LearningGuide provides workplace learning and support solutions that accelerate enterprise application ROI and reduce traditional training, e-learning and support costs. LearningGuide contains its own content authoring and publishing application, LearningGuide Manager, which is used for creating learning and support objects and publishing LearningGuides. LearningGuide customers include Deloitte, Heineken, Novartis, Organon, Boskalis Westminster and TNT.