In one sense, it is a little strange to speak of any sort of gap between learning and performance in an organization. After all, true learning – the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and competencies through experience, practice, training, or other means – naturally leads to performance improvement when applied on the job. The degree of improvement can vary a great deal based on a variety of factors, but the basic connection between learning and performance, at least superficially, has the feel of common sense.

Unfortunately, in the human resources and talent management realm, developments over the past several decades have often created some lines separating learning and performance. The practices, roles, processes, and systems in many organizations – including software such as learning management systems and performance management systems – have often evolved separately. But the good news is that we are seeing many trends that will greatly improve this situation – to bridge the gaps and erase the unnecessary and unproductive lines separating learning and performance.

The Evolution of the Learning and Development Function

Formal training remains central to most organizations’ learning and development efforts – it has been what they spend most of their time and budget on, including developing objectives-based curricula, delivering training, and then (on some level) evaluating the results. The latest data from Bersin and Associates from their new Corporate Learning Factbook 2012 indicates traditional classroom-based instructor-led training remains the number one training delivery format: although declining from 70% in 2005, it remains at 49% in 2011, compared to 20% for online self-study and 13% virtual ILT. But all three of these approaches are still formal training in nature.

That said, in recent years there has been an increasing recognition of just how much learning in an organization is naturally informal rather than formal (estimates and intuitions vary). Such informal learning is usually still intentional, although at times also happens randomly or by happenstance. It just isn’t objectives-driven, with an instructional designer or subject matter expert creating content that “learners” then learn from.

Further, the rise of Web 2.0/Social Media tools has helped to clarify the value of social learning: learning informally from and with each other has been around for millennia, but technologies that enable it to occur across vast distances and with much greater convenience, content searchability and archivability, etc.,  take those practices to an entirely new level. And yet, in most cases spending to better enable informal and social learning has not come close to matching its known or assumed prevalence in most organizations: Bersin and Associates’ 2011 data indicates that only 25% of organizations spent money on tools or services to better enable informal learning (e.g., 15% spent money on social software and only 12% spent money to support communities of practice.) This gap notwithstanding, no one who reads our industry’s prominent magazines or blogs, or attends L&D or broader HR conferences could fail to see the increasing attention in recent years on enabling more informal and social learning.

As noted earlier, this increasing attention on informal and social learning has not occurred as a means of completely replacing formal training – there is of course a time and place for all of these approaches. Rather, it amounts to a broadening focus of what was once simply the “Training Department,” to what is now almost always referred to as the “Learning and Development” function. This has been a very healthy, if slow, evolution – but we shouldn’t stop there. Learning for its own sake is not particularly helpful to individuals or their organizations, because ultimately what is really desired is performance improvement. This is what will achieve the organization’s ultimate goals and objectives, not simply learning and certainly not merely training.

Further broadening the evolution from training to learning and development to a focus on performance improvement is the next logical (and needed) step for L&D and HR leaders. Aspects of this evolution surface in conversations around evaluation, Kirkpatrick levels, and so on, but I’m talking about something bigger. Whether we see job roles, entire departments, or HR functions renamed and internally rebranded remains to be seen. But L&D professionals and groups will increasingly be focusing laser-like on performance improvement (and hence ultimate business impact). It is perhaps a subtle evolution, but rather than asking “is this good training?” or “will the employees learn from this content or experience?” the question will be “will this improve performance?”

This continued evolution in focus from training to learning and development to performance improvement brings with it the need to align L&D much more closely with performance management – the establishment and tracking of individual goals; the creation of development plans; and the evaluation and review of (hopefully improving) performance over time.

The Need to Align Learning and Performance Management

Given the inherent, common sense connection between learning and performance improvement, and given the evolution described above, organizations will benefit from breaking down any silos between learning management and performance management. Bersin and Associates, as reported in their August 2011 report “High Impact Performance Management” compared the benefits of integrating performance management with various other talent functions, including recruiting, compensation, workforce planning, leadership development, succession planning, career development, and L&D. Given what I’ve described above, I was not at all surprised to see that integrating performance management and learning and development practices came out on top – it had a higher average return than integrating PM with any of the other talent management practice areas.

As they described it:

Overall, we found that organizations more effective at integrating performance management with other talent management processes had better results. Interestingly, some points of integration matter more than others. In Figure 40, we show the results of our analysis. Performance management is at the center of the graphic, with each of the other talent processes surrounding it. The bubble-size of each process indicates the relative impact of effective integration on results; within each bubble, we have shown the impact. For example, organizations highly effective at integrating L&D are three times more likely to have strong employee results.

Based on these results, their advice is “if your organization is just beginning to integrate performance management with other talent management processes, focus first on L&D and compensation.” For more details on this survey and the results, see “High Impact Performance Management.”

The Benefits of PM and L&D Technology Unification

Technology must play an important role in helping organizations evolve their L&D focus from training to learning to performance improvement, and in integrating all of their performance and learning management practices to drive results. After all, even after making key process, role, and best practice changes an organization will not actualize its full potential if the supporting technology continues to involve disconnected PM and LMS applications.

Consider the following scenario, a timely one for many organization’s first quarter of the year. Mary is working with her manager to develop her goals for the new year. These goals are in turn aligned with her manager’s goals and those of the organization. In support of these goals, especially her stretch goals, Mary has some gaps: she needs some knowledge and skills development in particular areas, so she works with her manager to create an aligned development plan. Most of the components of the plan require some combination of formal training, informal learning from online reference materials, as well as some coaching, mentoring, and social learning enabled by her community of practice’s online forum and blog. From within the same application, she searches for and identifies the available resources that her organization provides – the instructor-led classroom and virtual classroom sessions to sign-up for, the self-paced e-Learning and reference content, and even the online spaces enabling greater social learning. She links each of these to relevant aspects of her development plan, which are in turn linked to goals for the year. She now has a rich, goal-aligned development plan that includes all necessary relevant learning components — all that remains is to execute on this plan throughout the year.

Let’s break this story down, to identify some of the key technology features that can make Mary’s scenario an everyday reality for all employees. What such a unified PM and Learning solution provides includes:

• Development plans that link development activities to both specific goals and instantly accessible online learning.
• Development plans that can include the full range of learning activities that employees engage in, from formal training to experiential, informal, and social learning.
• Learning progress that can be tracked from within development plans, without needing to move to another application.
• A searchable learning content catalog that is accessible from within the employee’s development plan.
• The ability to launch learning activities from within development plans.
• Employee talent profiles that include their learning histories.

Consider now what such a unified approach to PM and Learning can bring at the organizational level. When used in support of integrated processes and best practices, such a unified approach allows organizations to better pursue the most strategic and impactful talent management strategies such as:

• Efficient and ongoing talent mobility to make sure you have the right people, in the right place, at the right time.
• Accurate identification of high-potentials for the next leadership development program cycle.
• Establishing stronger bench strength for all critical roles in the organization, not just the top executive levels.
• Greater retention of high-performing individuals through the alignment of L&D opportunities with the individual’s goals and the clearly aligned organizational goals.
• Critical talent intelligence that comes from talent profiles that integrate data from goals and reviews, development plans, and learning activities (as well as pre-hire/recruiting information and more).

The list could go on. The key takeaway is that there are significant benefits to integrating your PM and Learning processes, practices, and supporting technology. For the individual employee they get a consistent, smooth user experience that makes clear the common sense connection between learning and performance that has always existed in reality. The organization not only gets happier, more engaged employees as a result of this, but can more efficiently pursue several strategic talent management practices that are much harder to accomplish when performance and learning remain in some ways separated. It is time to bridge the gaps and help further the evolution from training to learning to consistent performance improvement!