This may be a dumb question for all of you, but what is the difference between learning objectives versus performance objectives?

The reason I ask is that in my industry, training needs to directly relate to sales performance. It would seem that if I emphasize how the training will increase performance and link to specific objectives there will be a lot more learner motivation going on.

Cate,
In my world, performance objectives are what we intend people to be able to do when they are back in their work environment. Learning objectives are what we need to be sure to cover in our training so that performance objectives can be met.

Example: Performance Objective: an employee has to create a PowerPoint presentation and include animation on his slides. Learning Objective: teaching how to create animation using PowerPoint.

I hope this helps.

Example:

Performance Objective: Joe Smith will increase his customer base by 50% by the end of quarter one.

The wording is specifically about performance that will drive the business results. This is an objective for Joe to meet in a specific timeframe. A learning objective would come out of observing what Joe is doing now and comparing it to what he should be doing to reach that objective - you look at the gap and determine what factors, if any, are related to skill/knowledge. In other words, if, through analysis, you see that Joe needs certain skill/knowledge to help him meet that performance objective, that begets learning objectives.

Learning Objective: After completing this learning opportunity, the learner should be able to correctly enter all necessary data in the customer relationship manager system.

That's just one possible example of many things Joe may need to learn to reach his objective. I would only know that through analysis.

This is basic instructional design stuff -- you can get details, more example, and how to do this from just about any good resource on instructional design. Three books I strongly recommend:

Performance Consulting (Robinson and Robinson)

High-impact Learning (Brinkerhoff)

Mastering Instructional Design (this is an oldie but a goodie - standard text book on instructional design but has everything you would need... and if this type of thing - differentiating between performance objectives and learning objectives - is new to you, I would strongly urge you to start with this book)

Once you have this stuff under your belt, and you have clearly defined performance objectives and learning objectives, definitely move on to The Accelerated Learning Handbook to put it all together into good design and delivery.

P.S. In ANY industry, learning opportunities should link directly to performance and business goals. That's where true ROI comes from. (Refer to the Brinkerhoff book for more on this)

Here's another way to look at it. Performance objectives are commonly part of performance planning and performance goals that may have nothing to do with training at all.

For example a performance goal could be to increase sales by 10% this year. This could be accomplished by simply making more calls or calling on different types of customers.

If however, there was a skill or knowledge deficiency which stands in the way of reaching that goal, training becomes the appropriate solution. Now you need to determine the learning objectives that address that training need. For example, if the salesperson can't figure out how to increase the number of calls each day, the learning objective might be to: apply the principles of time management to creating a sales plan.

So to tie learning objectives to performance objectives, you need to determine the training need that is preventing desired performance. Don't be surprised when you do this that training isn't the issue but something else.