Key Takeaways
- Traditional "anticipatory" training fails because employees forget material by the time they need it
- Just-in-time learning provides instant, context-specific answers at the exact moment of need
- AI dramatically lowers the friction of finding information—people just ask instead of searching
- When knowledge is accessible on demand, training can focus on skills that actually require training
There's a moment every employee knows. You're in the middle of something—a customer call, a complex task, a decision that needs to be made—and you realize you don't know something you need to know.
What happens next determines a lot.
Maybe you stop what you're doing and search through your company's systems. You dig through the wiki, try different search terms, and click through folders that might or might not have what you need. Ten minutes later, you've either found the answer or given up.
Maybe you message a colleague. Now you're waiting for them to respond, and they've been interrupted from whatever they were doing.
Maybe you just guess. Make the decision with incomplete information, hope you got it right, and move on.
None of these is great. The first kills your momentum and often fails anyway. The second creates a delay and spreads the interruption. The third creates errors that might take much longer to fix than finding the answer would have.
Just-in-time learning is about changing what happens in that moment.
The Traditional Model Is Broken
The traditional model of corporate learning is anticipatory. We try to predict what people will need to know and teach it to them in advance. Onboarding covers everything a new hire might encounter. Product training covers every feature. Compliance training covers every policy.
The problem is that humans don't retain information very well when there's no immediate use for it.
You can sit through a comprehensive training on your company's expense policy, nod along, pass the quiz, and still not remember the details when you're actually trying to file an expense report three months later. This isn't a failure of attention or intelligence. It's how memory works. Information that isn't used fades.
The Context Gap: Context matters for encoding and retrieval. Learning something in a training room and needing it in the flow of work are different cognitive contexts. The anticipatory training was mostly wasted—not because it was bad training, but because the timing was wrong.
Just-in-Time Learning Flips the Model
Instead of trying to teach everything in advance, you make knowledge accessible at the moment of need. This is fundamentally different from the traditional training approach where comprehensive courses try to cover everything upfront.
When someone is filing an expense report and has a question about what's allowed, the answer is right there. When a salesperson is about to call a prospect and needs to understand a product feature, they can access it in seconds. When a support agent is handling a customer issue they haven't seen before, guidance is immediately available.
The learning happens when it's relevant. The information arrives in context. And because there's an immediate need, retention is much stronger—you remember things you use, not things you passively absorb.
Prerequisites for Success
For just-in-time learning to work, a few things have to be true.
- The information has to exist. A lot of organizational knowledge lives in people's heads rather than in any accessible form. Documentation, knowledge bases, and recorded expertise are prerequisites.
- The information has to be findable. If someone has to search through fifteen folders and three systems to find what they need, the friction is too high. They'll give up, ask someone, or guess.
- The information has to be current. Nothing destroys trust faster than finding an answer that turns out to be outdated.
- The access has to be low-friction. If getting an answer requires logging into a separate system or navigating complex menus, people won't bother.
This Is Where AI Changes Things Substantially
Traditional knowledge systems require people to know where to look and what to search for. You need the right keywords. AI knowledge assistants let people just ask.
"What's our policy on returning items without a receipt?"
"How do I process a refund for a customer in Canada?"
"What's the difference between our standard and premium service levels?"
The AI does the searching and reading. It finds the relevant information across whatever sources it has access to, synthesizes an answer, and presents it directly.
The person asking doesn't need to know where the information lives or how it's organized.
The Interface Shift: This dramatically lowers the friction. When getting an answer is as easy as typing a question—and you trust that the answer is accurate—people actually use the system. Just-in-time learning becomes viable in ways it wasn't when it required navigating complex knowledge bases.
The Implications Extend Beyond Efficiency
When people can get answers instantly, they make better decisions. They don't guess when they shouldn't. They don't make errors that come from not knowing.
When people can learn in the moment of need, training can focus on what actually requires training. The foundational skills. The complex capabilities. The things that genuinely need practice and development. Instead of trying to teach everything, training can target what matters most.
When knowledge is accessible, expertise becomes less bottlenecked. The one person who knows everything about a topic isn't constantly interrupted. Their expertise lives in a system that others can access.
The New Role of L&D
The shift toward just-in-time learning is also a shift in what L&D does.
Less creating training content for every possible need. More curating and organizing knowledge that can be accessed on demand.
Less trying to anticipate every question and teach answers in advance. More building systems that let people find answers themselves.
L&D becomes less about delivering content and more about enabling access. Less about what people learn before they need it and more about what they can access when they need it. This shift also addresses the persistent problem of knowledge silos—when information is accessible on demand, it stops being trapped in one department or one person's head.
The moment of need isn't going away. Employees will always encounter situations where they don't know something they need to know. The question is what happens next—a frustrating search, a disruptive interruption, a risky guess, or an instant answer.
JoySuite is built for just-in-time learning. Employees ask questions, Joy answers from your knowledge—instantly, with sources. With instant upskilling capabilities, the moment of need becomes a moment of learning.
