My Answer to the Big Question for March 2011 at Learning Circuits Blog

The Big Question is for March 2011 at Learning Circuits Blog is:

How do you assess whether your informal learning, social learning, continuous learning, performance support initiatives have the desired impact or achieve the desired results?

Answer: How Do You Measure Performance Competence?

That’s How!

Or is that not the goal for the investments of time and energy and money for the Learning, formal an/or informal that you invest in enabling?

Performance Competence

The ability of the Learner/Performer is to be ready to perform. That takes knowledge and skills to perform the tasks to produce the outputs to stakeholder requirements.

Unless you are talking about some other Context other than an Enterprise Learning Context – in my model there are two others: Educational Learning Context and a Personal Learning Context. Those are different.

Who Exactly Are These Stakeholders?

As always, it depends.

It depends on the situational realities of the process or processes, or function, team or job that one is looking at and attempting to measure and improve.

That’s just one example of a hierarchy – in case some of your stakeholders have conflicting Requirements and Desires. Desires might be the “differentiator” between you and your competition.

As always, it depends.

When to Enable Formal Learning and When to Enable Informal Learning?

Where and when the stakes warrant it! The stakes being the Risks and Rewards – the R’s of ROI.

When to Target

Always Target In Collaboration With Your Stakeholders – align with their critical needs. Not the low hanging fruit.

Use the language of your customer – when talking with the Customer. They aren’t interested in our/your jargon, models or methods. And we can’t even keep our language straight ourselves. No sense in burdening them with that too.

Focus on Performance and Enable That