As a girl from a small town in Nova Scotia, my mother had to go a long way for her professional development. It’s 1,200 miles (and they were miles back then, not kilometers) from Inverness to St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, where she did her nurse’s training, just before the outbreak of World War II.

Apart from a belated recognition of Remembrance Day, the Canadian term for what the U.S. calls Veterans Day, it’s as good a way as any to mention Toronto (known in the Victoria era as “Toronto the Good,” for its alleged  propriety). I spent a week there recently at the CSTD Conference there and led a session called Building Job Aids: How, When, Why.

I have some biases regarding job aids.

One is that an awful lot of people who call themselves instructional designers like to design instruction. So they write objectives and plan activities and encourage discovery and structure experiences. Some of them go on to embalm these things in SCOs. All in pursuit of that elusive transfer of learning.

A corollary to that bias: it never seems to occur to some of these people to not design instruction. For example, they don’t create job aids. They don’t see job aids as a way of reducing or eliminating the need for formal training, nor as a tool that people use on the job and thus should practice using during formal training.

Instead, job aids get crammed to the back of the cognitive closet, next to the icebreakers and under the smile sheets. Besides, you can’t track job aid use in an LMS, so how good can they really be?

Guys: if people don’t use it on the job, it’s not a job aid.

I kid because I love. Actually, I kid because I’m puzzled by the non-use of so practical a tool. So, in part because I’d like to make myself better known in Canada, I created a session that I thought would appeal to people who’d thought about job aids, or wondered about them, and who were interested in finding out if job aids made sense for the workplace problems they grapple with.

I included lots of examples of job aids, which I’ve been adding to my show-and-tell blog, Dave’s Ensampler. I included an exercise in which people would describe to a partner some task they knew about, with the listener assessing that task’s suitability to job-aiding using questions that I’ve discussed here before (When to Build a Job Aid).

What I did not do was to first walk them through–which, let’s face it, often means talk them through–that process. Given their likely backgrounds, people in my session were likely capable of putting a decent job aid to use on their own.

So: this allowed more time for the exercise, since I wasn’t going on about the exercise. Second, it provided a clear albeit small demonstration of a job aid taking the place of instruction. If people could get through the task-assessing exercise without my telling them how, even though they hadn’t made this sort of analysis before, then it’s pretty clear you don’t have to train people just because you’ve uncovered a skill-and-knowledge gap.

We discussed the decision questions afterward, and if you can imagine such a thing, there was very little puzzlement or confusion about what goes into the decision and why.

So then I did talk a bit, showing how a good task analysis is whispering very loudly that certain tasks would be great to job-aid. My experience is that this would be a new concept to many, so I demonstrated with a short example, and using that example showed some features common to all job aids.

At that point, we went into a second hands-on exercise. The day before my presentation, I created this as a replacement for what I’d originally planned to do. As I had been rehearsing, I felt that people weren’t getting enough opportunity to do things for themselves.

Why not have them try to create a decision table?  From the web site of the Superior Court for King County, Washington, I copied instructions on how to file for a protection order (an anti-harassment protection order, a domestic violence protection order, and so on). I chose this topic to emphasize that  job aids can apply to important real life tasks and not just to refunding a store purchase.