Reference or Competency-Based Education: Which Should You Offer?

In the early days of customer training, the goal was to show customers how to use the system or tool they’ve just purchased. Customer training was typically conducted by dedicated trainers, who often went to the client’s office to conduct a one-off training, or account managers who provided training as part of a larger onboarding process. In either case, the process mirrored on-the-job employee training, with emphasis specifically on the tasks to do and processes to follow. Today, however, we see quite a variety of education and training offerings, from customer academies, help centers, certification programs, webinars, and live training, and these often cover a variety of content outside of simply using the product. With so many options to deliver education, how do you know which is right for your program? The answer begins with identifying two distinct types of education.

Comparing reference-based vs competency-based education

It’s important to distinguish two types of educational material. We refer to the first as reference-based, and it serves to help an individual get unstuck in a workflow or accomplish a specific job to be done. This type of material is typically delivered as a short tutorial or knowledge base article. If you’ve ever tried to repair something in your home or car, you may have referenced a YouTube tutorial that covers the steps to take. Or, you may have followed instructions provided in a manual to set up a new appliance. These are examples of reference-based learning, where you learned what you needed to in that moment, in the flow of working on the task to be done.

The second type is competency-based and it serves to build a learner’s skill and competency in a particular subject through instructional design principles. It is best suited to promote long-term behavior change and is typically presented in a series of lessons. If you’ve taken a course to learn a new skill, such as web design or beekeeping, you’ve participated in competency-based education. This means that by the conclusion of the course you’ve increased your competency in the topic at hand. Competency-based learning is generally proactive, and reference-based is generally reactive.

While the YouTube tutorial may have helped you change your car’s oil, it hardly prepared you to work in a mechanic shop.

Is competency-based education always long-form?

It’s not uncommon to hear business executives bristle at the idea of competency-based education. The industry has been promoting the idea of in-the-moment, just-in-time learning to such an extent that any other approach seems “outdated.” However, this thinking is usually due to a misunderstanding that competency-based training must mean long-form content. While it’s true that this type of training focuses on the long-term, it certainly can be delivered in-app via microlearning, or short lessons, using adaptive learning methods. It does not mean that you have to force your customers (or other learners) through hours of instruction in one or two sessions.

As an example, imagine that you’re in charge of training customers for an accounting platform. In order for your customers to get maximum value from the system, they should have a basic understanding of bookkeeping. You’ve identified a segment of customers that are brand new to this as first-time business owners, so you design a bookkeeping fundamentals course. The course covers revenue and expenses, invoicing, and payroll. Now, you could offer this as a 3-hour live workshop, or you could break the instruction out into 14 micro-lessons that are delivered via email once a day. Both aim to build competency, but the latter may be a better option for busy professionals who aren’t necessarily interested in taking a long course.

Choosing the most effective method

Now that we’ve differentiated these two types of education, you may be wondering, “which is better for my customer education program?” The answer is, it depends. (And if you follow us, you know that’s often the answer!)

It depends both on the goals of your program and the learners’ needs. Let’s say, for example, you have identified a learner segment of customers who are getting stuck on implementation steps; they share frustration in voice-of-customer channels and send support tickets regularly asking for help. You may choose to address this problem with a program aimed to unblock these customers. Your content would likely be technical articles and tutorials provided “just in time” so the busy professionals could find and leverage the material, learn exactly what they need when they need it, and move forward with your platform. This program would best leverage reference-based learning, delivered via a CMS-powered help center or contextual help in-app.

Now, let’s say that you see the same problem as above, but after careful analysis, you learn that the root of the frustration lies in this segment’s lack of understanding about industry practices. In other words, it’s not simple point-and-click instruction that’s needed, but rather, a building of conceptual knowledge that will help the end user make the right critical choices under a variety of circumstances. Similar to our bookkeeping example discussed earlier, this is often the case when your product or platform provides maximum value to industry professionals who are proficient in key industry practices. Sometimes, you need to help customers build that proficiency, and that’s accomplished via competency-based education.

You can see that it’s essential to understand both your business purpose for the program (to reduce support tickets or increase customer value) and your learners’ true needs (to get unstuck or to build proficiency in a topic). The choice for the type of program you build will unfold from these two strategies.

The best of both worlds

Early stage customer education programs are often focused on one particular goal or segment, so you’ll likely start with either a reference-based or competency-based program. As you scale, though, you’ll uncover new audiences, business problems to address, and topics to cover. A mature customer education initiative often includes a balance of reference-based and competency-based programs. It’s common to see a help center with short tutorials and articles alongside a customer academy hosted on a learning management system. These mature programs target different problems and personas in a complementary way, helping you achieve impactful business results.

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