American novelist Edna Ferber wrote, “Perhaps too much of everything is as bad as too little.” This statement resonates with a common instructional problem: Too often, managers want to overstuff employee training experiences. because of a fear of not fully covering details or a desire to maximize information coverage. In training, as in life, more is not necessarily better.
Effective instruction depends on the quality of the content, not the quantity.
All training content is not equal. The value of instructional content depends on how it addresses business goals, performance objectives and learner audience needs. Training overreaches when essential knowledge and skills are drowned in details that do not necessarily inform or improve performance. Distill your content to its essential elements and reveal the core of complex training problems by using three filters: task analysis, prioritization and use cases.
Task Analysis
The first filter to apply is a task analysis. Understanding the task context is critical to selecting content. Task analysis breaks down content into a performance-level view, revealing what is required, in terms of knowledge, actions and cognitive processes, to achieve task completion.
Taking time to observe a range of employees along the expert-to-novice continuum will help identify specific content that needs amplifying. For example, when observing employees, if you identify a common misconception, you’ll know to address it in training.
Prioritization
The second filter is sorting content by importance and time factors. Sometimes called “criticality sorting,” this method examines content based on its importance to task success and the percentage of time that a particular knowledge, skill or ability (KSA) is spent on a task.
The results from this type of prioritization can be surprising. For example, a task that is rarely performed but critically important requires more content coverage than a routine but non-critical task.
Use Cases
Learners have different needs and uses for training. The most common uses cases for workplace learning are full training, refresher training and performance support.
A new employee needs a different level of instruction than a tenured employee on upgrades to an enterprise software system. The new hire needs full training to understand the purpose, benefits and potential consequences of procedure performance. The experienced employee only needs refresher training to learn how to perform the revised procedure steps. There’s also a set of employees who only use the revised procedure quarterly or annually; they need performance support to be able to retrieve the procedure steps when needed.
Cut the glut of training content! Use task analysis, prioritization and use cases to filter training content.
Mindy Jackson is director of instructional design at Enspire.
