“I get the feeling lately that L&D professionals, consultants, and vendors don’t understand the essence of workflow learning. Their approach is to extend traditional forms of training and serve them up on the job. In practice, this means repackaging (shrinking) content from e-learning or training modules to make them more consumable. In organizations I speak to, workflow learning is often interpreted as moving the teacher into the workplace—teaching by the machine, or by a patient’s bedside in the hospital. On websites, vendors offer standard or customized e-learning solutions under the heading of workflow learning or even as performance support solutions. These really don’t reflect what a real workflow learning or performance support solution should be. Old wine in new bottles, yes, because they focus on learning in the sense of knowledge acquisition rather than learning that supports the performance of employees in their flow of work. That’s what organizations should be focusing on.”
