The concept of Just in Time training has been around for a long time. It makes sense, the idea of getting trained on a subject just before you need it. The Just in Time moniker was borrowed from Lean Manufacturing, and specifically draws on the Kanban principle for optimizing inventory.

When it comes to learning, though, an idea that’s just as useful – and maybe more – is what I call At the Time training. My favorite example, from a great discussion thread on the Edward Tufte website:

A lot of learning industry experts talk about this all the time, but they don’t really give it a name. For example, Dennis Coxe wrote recently in a post about the importance of timeliness in good instructional design:

It has to be made available when the learner needs it, not when the LMS says he or she can attend … [It should be] chunked appropriately so that it can be digested in little bits and can be easily searched to locate the critical learning bit when it is needed.

It seems to me that At the Time training should be the holy grail of training objectives. Which is why I got awfully excited when I came across the Tufte discussion thread mentioned above (the first post in this thread, by the way, was in March 2004, and has remained active ever since – with a new post as recently as June 29th of this year).

In the corporate world, we see more companies setting up sophisticated Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS) every year. For some reason, though, this topic doesn’t seem very buzz-friendly among the eLearning cognoscenti. In fact, a Technorati search on ‘EPSS’ turns up just one blog (The Learned Man) containing the term.

I plan to dig a bit more around who’s using EPSS systems and for what. For a bit more background on EPSS systems, click here. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from anyone who has experience with these systems, good or bad. Because learning At the Time is where it’s at.