Performance Support Training: What and Why Do You Need It?
Training and performance support can be a great addition to your learning and training initiatives.
When employees are faced with an unfamiliar task, what do they usually do? Maybe they Google the answer, flip through training manuals or ask a manager. All of this can delay the task at hand and put your customer’s experience at risk, especially if these employees are frontline employees. But, if these same employees can quickly pull up a checklist or other training content on their phone, they’re back on the job in no time. That’s performance support training in a nutshell.
Both employee training and performance support training serve important purposes in your employees’ overall learning journey. If you can strike the right balance between the two, you’ll ensure that they’re not wasting time in virtual classes or relying too heavily on performance support to fill the training gaps.
Performance Based Training
Performance-based training emphasizes targeted outcomes, setting expectations, providing feedback, introducing tools, rewarding skill development, and teaching new skills and knowledge. It aligns learning with practical performance goals, enabling individuals to enhance their capabilities and achieve measurable results in their respective roles.
When to Use Training Performance Support
The easiest way to understand when to provide training performance support tools is to ask yourself: “Is this topic complex or critical enough to postpone work or can employees reference this topic on the job?”
Performance support typically includes minor details that employees never needed to memorize or information that’s continually updated, such as product specs.
On the other hand, employees receive formal employee training when they need to gain:
- Specific skills, such as leadership training
- Meeting certain compliance standards, such as completing a sexual harassment course.
These skills are often imperative to performing their job, and something that employees typically don’t have to reference.
The most notable difference between the two is “postponing work” and “doing work.”
What Training and Performance Support Technologies to Use
First, start with purpose: what purpose does each training component serve, and how does that align with the technology that you’re using?
Corporate Training
Corporate training, which can be in-person or virtual, is often delivered through slides. This requires laptops. This type of content is designed to supplement instructors’ lectures and teaching, not to be used as stand-alone content. Second, phones aren’t typically used for deep-dive reading (e.g. pouring over slides) but rather for quick bursts of activity. In general, consider repackaging your slides if you’d like to take corporate learning mobile.
Training Performance Support
Since performance support needs to be accessible where your employees are, it’s got to be accessible on any mobile device. However, just because you’ve made your content “mobile-accessible,” it doesn’t mean that the content is truly mobile-optimized. For example, if your employees have to pinch and zoom around a PDF on a small screen to read the text, they’ll likely end up frustrated. Instead, make sure that your content is bite-sized and searchable so that it imitates the best qualities of the web.
Both corporate training and employee performance training support are important to a well-rounded learning and development program, but it’s important to consider how they should be used, and with what. You want to make sure that you’re maximizing today’s technologies to make your employees more confident and effective in their roles at your company.
At Inkling, our mobile learning capabilities provide the end user to make learning a continuous experience, improve learning retention, and provide convenient and on-the-go access at any time. Reach out via our chatbot to learn more!
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