Why Your Organization Needs Performance Mapping to Customize and Scale Your Training

Let’s employ an analogy. Would you leave home for a road trip without some kind of map or GPS to reach your destination? If you did, how could you be sure you’d reach the desired location safely, on time, and knew where to stop before you ran out of gas?

The process to design a learning solution or training – be it an onboarding training, professional development and skills training, brand training, compliance training, sales training or leadership training – can be thought of similarly. To reach your desired destination, in terms of reaching your goals, and to ensure that it meets expectations, you want to have a map in place to guide your learning journey. This process is called performance mapping.

The key to getting the desired ROI from your training program is to use performance mapping techniques to learn more about your learning audience.

The Performance Mapping process provides answers to the most common FAQs:

• What kind of training solution do I need?
• How can I design a training that will engage my employees?
• What learning processes can I use to ensure employees will successfully learn and remember the competencies they need?
• What will make this learning experience meaningful for my team?
• How can I ensure my training will meet the needs of the organization and provide desired outcomes?
• How can we measure successful training?
• How can my organization be sure that the training is designed to meet our desired outcomes?

The performance mapping process is highly collaborative. You don’t have to take the journey alone. It requires more than just taking surveys of management and employees to find out pain points. The process is informed by best practices from instructional design and educational theory.

Ideally, your organization has a person with those skills, or you’ll bring in a performance consultant to help design the roadmap that will help you build the most relevant training.

What is a performance consultant?

It’s worth it to pause for a moment to speak to the value of using a performance consultant in the performance mapping process. The performance consultant is more than just a surveyor, data analyst, or observer. Performance consultants have training in instructional design, professional development practices, and teaching. They are up to date on and understand the most current educational theories to meet the needs of adult learning audiences. This expertise is critical to to design results-driven learning solutions.

Moreover, a performance consultant is trained to find solutions customized to the learning needs of the organization and collaborate with internal teams to coordinate development.

How to proceed with performance mapping

Once you’ve decided whether to use a consultant or someone in your L&D department with those skills, you’re ready to move forward with the performance mapping process.

Ideally, your training is completely customized to your organization and learners. You’ll use your map to determine and meet desired outcomes with measurable KPIs for your training. Your map with demonstrate how best to meet your goals with a plan tailored to your learners needs. You’ll do this by taking into account the subject, learning style, time constraints, and any other issues that would help or hinder learning.

For example, as part of the performance mapping process you’ll take into consideration whether experiential or a more formalized training would work best. You can account for busy schedules with bite sized training and learning modules. You can decide to personalize sensitive subject matter, such as diversity and inclusion training, to broaden your audience and reach more learners. If you have remote workers, you can customize your eLearning to upskill and reskill leadership and a hybrid workforce of both remote and in-person team members.

At AllenComm, our multidisciplinary learning developing teams use performance mapping as part of our holistic approach to customize award-winning learning solutions across multiple industries. Our collaborative teams include performance consultants with the expertise to work within an organization and provide expertise to help direct the development of your training through our instructional designers.

If you could use more information on how performance mapping may be useful to your organization, or are searching for customized turnkey learning solutions, please don’t hesitate to reach out and contact us for more information.