Efficient Training for Busy Professionals - Conserving Attention

As I’ve moved from traditional high school and university education into corporate Sales Enablement training, a very noticeable change is the culture and expectations about how instructors demand time from their learners.

Traditional Education vs. Corporate Reality

The culture around traditional education is pretty cavalier about making demands on learners’ time. Students are expected to commit to a set number of in‐class hours plus a significant chunk of out‐of‐class time for study, homework, and projects. It’s fair to say that most classroom instructors design learning activities without fully weighing the “cost” of the time they are requesting from learners.

Contrast this with the sales executives we support in corporate sales enablement, who are under explicit time pressures. Time spent learning for them is time taken away from their main focus: making sales and hitting quotas. All of the metrics for evaluating their success in their position are based on their sales performance, not their performance on learning and training tasks, even though those tasks directly support that performance. And it’s not just sellers – their managers and their entire division’s effectiveness is judged by the amount of revenue they bring in, so there is an organization‐level tension between sales and training who each jealously covet as many minutes of sellers’ time as they can get.
In this paradigm, every second spent learning must be maximally impactful on the seller’s job performance. It’s our job as instructional designers to use their time with maximum efficiency to expose them to information and measure their comprehension, and to make sure that training activities are directly aligned to the measures of performance they will. ultimately be evaluated by.

The Modern “Attention Economy”

In truth, all learners today have to make hard choices about their time. More and more people are balancing work with family responsibilities and various adulting tasks. This is compounded by a growing attention economy—social media and streaming entertainment—that seeks to capture and monetize every free moment of our attention. We only have so many waking hours of attention to divide between all these various objectives, and everyone is acutely feeling the stretch of balancing their time amidst competing priorities.

Design Decisions Matter

This reality becomes critical when we sit down to design a learning experience for the modern learner. Small decisions have a huge effect on motivation and attention, such as encoding learning content as a 30‐minute unedited Zoom meeting versus 5 minutes of tightly edited, concentrated video content limited to a specific topic. We instructional designers need to judiciously decide between offering content as a conventional clickable eLearning courseware package vs. a job aid that learners can refer to at the time of need. Now in the age of AI it’s a real option to consider which content should be bundled into an AI chatbot to provide quick answers vs. which content requires us to walk learners through a sequenced learning experience.
At every step in the design process, I am always asking whether learners need this content to be committed into their memory or if it’s sufficient to give it to them in a format they can quickly refer back to when they need it. My Design for Forgetting philosophy is based upon the idea that we should be surrounding learner with quick, searchable tools that will give them the right answer at the time they need it rather than expecting them to retain it in perfect fidelity for use at some uncertain future date.

Design for Forgetting is highly compatible with the idea of microlearning, though there’s nuance needed in how it’s implemented. While we should constantly strive to save our most valuable learning resources in small, topic‐focused chunks that can easily be consumed in a single sitting, we must also think of them as an interconnected whole that can be searched for in a central location so the busy learner can quickly access exactly what they need with a minimum of time or cognitive load searching for what they need. 

Efficient Training Requires Supportive Platform Decisions

The need to support learners’ valuable attention efficiently affects the platform decisions we make about how content is stored and organized. I deliberately designed my onboarding program and knowledge base around a Confluence wiki site rather than an eLearning LMS because I wanted all content contained within the whole wiki to all be accessible from one central search bar. Encoding all course content as HTML text within a wiki exposes all of that content to a centralized search bar, while saving key content as PDFs, eLearning assets, podcasts, and videos can complicate a learners’ ability to quickly search and find it at their moment of need.