Is Traditional Biz Learning Preventing Adaptation?

Cees Louwers, a director with performance support systems and services business for Ontuitive, believes that the traditional way of learning, where you stop what you’re doing to go on a course or take an e-learning module, won’t be able to help tomorrow’s workers to get to grips with all that they have to and that a new approach to learning is needed.

“Change in the ways people carry out their daily tasks is a significant factor in almost all workforces and change tends to follow change in quick succession. The old ways of learning — stopping work to learn and then applying it to the tasks in hand — are actually preventing people from being adaptable enough, from learning quickly and from getting on with the job,” explains Louwers.

“Businesses must in future support people with what they need to know in work and in their workflow, providing people with the right working instruction right when they need it and also in the just correct ‘dose’ — not too much, not too little,” he adds.

Performance support gives employees working instructions when they really need it. “We work on the principle of just enough information, so not too little but also not more than they need. It is completely different from traditional learning where people have to take in a lot in a short space of time and they then have to apply that in their work. It’s no surprise that workers cite constant change in their workplaces as one of the most stressful and destructive experiences in work today.”

Louwers’ views were published in a recent article in the Dutch magazine Over Het Nieuwe Werken.

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