Electronic performance support for Royal Navy technicians-a new paradigm for engineering training?

The current way in which technicians are trained is not sustainable in the medium term. Modern and near-future equipment will not provide technicians with the practical experience which was an underlying assumption to the existing maintenance training paradigm. The Electronic Performance Support Project was instigated to investigate whether technology-based training techniques could be exploited. Initial research indicated the concept of Performance Support, embodied in an Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS) could offer an alternative approach. With funding provided from the UK Defence Logistics Organisation, representative examples of such a system were procured and subjected to a rigorous objective assessment, where the performance of technicians who had undertaken standard training was compared with those using the novel approach. It was determined that the new approach provides a more effective and efficient solution than the current training method.