Learning at the Moment of Need

Knowledge workers today are required to adapt to ever changing systems and procedures, and the relevancy of this knowledge is often fleeting because of rapid changes in the way companies are doing business in order to remain viable and competitive. From a business standpoint, more important than attaining knowledge for knowledge’s sake is application of knowledge to help workers carry out their job tasks with greater efficiency. As Roger Schank, Director of the Institute of Learning Sciences at Northwestern University puts it, "What you know is trivial. The real issue is what do you know how to do?"

In this short statement, Schank accurately summarizes one of the greatest challenges faced by most organizations today—what do our workers really know how to do? With the substantial technological requirements now associated with most job descriptions, how much knowledge should we realistically expect them to retain? What is the best way to ensure that they are able to gain access to relevant information when they need it to assist them in developing and maintaining their job-related competencies? How do we retain our knowledge pool when there is so much employee attrition, and, therefore, so much need for ongoing training?

An often cited study developed by Dr. Robert Kelley, Adjunct Professor of Business at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University, puts the knowledge retention dilemma into perspective. Dr. Kelly concluded that in 1986, workers could retain in memory as much as 75% of what they needed to know to perform their job tasks. By 1997, knowledge retention dropped dramatically to 15%-20%. In 2006, it was estimated that as little as 8%-10% of what one needed to know to perform their job tasks could, on average, be retained in memory.

Why the dramatic shift in knowledge retention? One could argue that the primary reason is that there is simply too much to know. We are bombarded with the need for application and procedural knowledge to the point that in many cases, we don’t really want to know more. However, an equally compelling argument for the decline in worker knowledge retention is that workers are no longer really required to know everything related to their job tasks because of all the knowledge access tools that are now available to help them find information.

Search engine Google is a prime example. Although the company is only nine years old, many would be hard pressed to imagine life without Google or other search engine tools, like Yahoo and Live Search. Why? Because they have opened the floodgates to nearly instantaneous fingertip knowledge on a massive scale and in ways that were simply unimaginable and unattainable only a decade ago.

Exciting innovation that is specifically tailored to learning and that is designed to address complex knowledge access and retention challenges head on is emerging very rapidly. In some respects, we are witnessing a new frontier in learning, one that will dramatically shift how organizations develop and maintain their knowledge assets. For more than a decade, significant discussion has been centered on a concept called "process-embedded learning," more commonly referred to as "performance support.." Technologies that surround this concept, commonly referred to as Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS), have advanced, in quite dramatic fashion, to the point at which effective performance support, once unattainable for most organizations, is now an affordable alternative to traditional instructor-led training and e-learning. The purpose of this paper is to explain the concept of performance support while outlining reasons why a process-embedded solution can bring dramatic positive change to an organization by empowering workers with resources that will significantly improve their performance.

(Exerpt from Transcensus white paper "Learning at the Moment of Need")