While the Friday night lights or college quad of your youth might feel light-years away, the foundation to your high school and college experience—learning—should remain a regular part of your routine to succeed in business today. But traditional corporate training programs, with online modules that employees half-heartedly click through to receive a certificate of completion, often result in little to no improvement for an employee’s skills. Nor do they have much impact on the overall business. That’s why learning design strategist Carmen Morin works with companies to design training that helps employers build upon a simple knowledge transfer. Morin’s performance-based approach identifies performance gaps and next steps that will truly boost employee decision-making, organizational performance and talent retention.
“You can take all the quizzes in the world and do all the compliance tests,” she says. “It will make no difference to that interaction unless you actually get out and practice it.”
What is Performance-Based Learning?
Morin experienced firsthand the power of performance-based training and learning, as it helped transform her from a toddler, tinkering on the piano at age 2, to an internationally awarded concert pianist. When she launched a virtual music school in 2018, after teaching at a university conservatory and founding a brick-and-mortar performing arts school, she realized that the principles of results-based learning—long applied in her performance training—could also benefit a wide range of industries. This led to Morin getting her certificate in learning design, and today, she consults with companies to design training that focuses on measurable outcomes, not just content delivery. She is also the co-founder of agentdevelopment.com, which helps real estate teams drive production through performance-based agent training.
“That’s the big key when it comes to performance-based learning [and] experiential learning,” Morin says. “You never ask, ‘What do you need to know?' You ask, ‘What do you need to be able to do?' And you never can answer it with something that can’t be observed publicly.”
For example, while salespeople might read up on the most effective techniques for closing a deal, Morin says that doesn’t mean they can show up and do it when they’re on the spot and under pressure.
For salespeople, “being able to talk to someone they’ve never spoken to before and convert to meet them for an appointment, that is the gap,” she says.
She then helps companies focus their training and education around how to bridge those performance gaps, which she believes can be identified by answering the question of what their employees need to be able to do to be great at their job. For sales training programs, that could involve education and application opportunities around how to engage prospects in dialogue, design a hook that captures interest and drive behavior to the next step.
“When you think about how leaders are really able to advance in their careers, it’s not just about what they know; it’s about their behaviors. It’s about their decision-making. It’s how they’re able to recognize patterns. It’s how they’ve developed instincts,” she says. “So, within that performance gap, knowledge is one component, but you also have actions. You have skills, you have tools and resources and things that they need to be able to close that gap.”
In addition to what a performance-based learning approach can net a business, like an increase in sales or a higher conversion rate, Morin also believes there’s a cultural benefit to the social learning employees experience together.
“You’re creating those experiences and you’re able to learn within many different levels, but everyone can learn alongside each other at different points in the journey but all be equally challenged,” she says.
Closing Employee Skill Gaps with Performance-Based Training
Morin thinks companies have a misconception that incorporating performance-based learning into training could add a lot more work.
“But really, it’s not about stacking more, it’s about going deeper with a smaller amount of material,” she says.
In initial assessments Morin has conducted, a company might have nearly 300 online lessons in a content library. Following her counsel, they could cull that down to one-tenth of the information.
“It actually becomes way more lean,” she says. “It’s really just this laser focus. Anything that goes into that training program is going through a filter of what performance gap does it address, how does it [do that]—it’s really intentional,” she says.
With artificial intelligence increasing speed and access to information, potentially leading to less critical and creative thinking, Morin thinks we should consider why the regurgitation of someone else’s knowledge is the only marker of whether we deem a person as educated. She is excited by the disruption the technology brings, which she believes creates a crucial opportunity to rethink how we teach and learn and what we can do it better.
“So, it’s not just that you can get that information, can you frame it in an article that’s going to resonate with different people and can you frame it in different ways and can you communicate it on the fly?” she says. “And all these things are actually making you successful at what you do, not just the knowledge that you can repeat back.”
Morin believes that we should think of ourselves less as the conduits of knowledge and shift instead to orchestrating experiences.
“What are the experiences that you have to have to be able to put that knowledge into practice and demonstrate that you can shape who you are and the world around you from that knowledge?” Morin asks.
Continual, Ongoing Learning Is Key
Unlike traditional corporate training, which might be shelved for a year until an email notification about an annual requirement appears, performance-based training is not a set-it-and-forget-it thing. Instead, Morin believes it’s about taking a company’s foundational skills and the main performance gaps and then determining how you sharpen and refine them on an ongoing basis.
“That’s actually how you continue to keep the retention, keep the engagement, keep the value of your organization,” she says.
Image courtesy of ©HarderLee Photography
This article was first published in the January/February 2026 issue of SUCCESS Magazine. Get your copy here.
