After more than half a decade, what’s the current state of mobile learning? Looking around the industry, one would think that little has changed since 2010. The focus still seems to be on porting your content over and designing small courses and modules for your learners. This is a core problem holding mobile learning back at many organizations today. They’re missing the bigger picture.

When it comes to organizational learning, the potential impact of mobile is off the charts. Mobile has evolved well beyond the idea of course completion on a phone and now presents a singular opportunity for the learning and development (L&D) community to transform itself into an indispensable strategic partner.

Most learning solutions today fail to meet employees where they are in their learning journey. Cognitive overload while in training, knowledge and skill gaps in the moment of need, and information access issues prevent employees and teams from performing at their very best. Each of these has a major impact on productivity. The solution? Contextualized learning provides content at the moment of need, in the space where it is needed most.

Business moves fast. Does your learning team struggle to keep up sometimes? Are you being left out of the loop when updates are made to business tools and processes? Are you leveraging all available tools to keep the knowledge gap as small as possible? Time Warner Cable has a great relationship with its business partners, but these were all questions that it couldn’t answer the way it wanted to.

Performance support, mLearning, and more are part of a bigger picture, a shift in the role of learning and development (L&D). The realization is that competitive pressures are requiring organizations to become more nimble, with an ability to adapt, but what role does performance support play in this bigger picture? Understanding the drivers and opportunities implied by increasing changes augurs a new and valuable way for L&D to contribute.