On-the-job training ends in a signature. A fillable PDF form, proof that a competent person watched. Somebody has to build that form, and building one takes longer than filling one in. Forty-five minutes per form, drawn by hand in Acrobat, by the same person who built the course. PDF manufacturing was never that person’s job.
It came around constantly and cost forty-five minutes every time. Frequency times duration, the calculation anyone would run first. Nobody performed it often enough to keep it in their head, which put it in the wrong place for training. And there was no judgment anywhere in the loop: ten steps, same order, same result, no point at which a designer had to decide anything. A task where nothing is being decided does not need a person to decide it.
Thirty-two screenshots, ten steps labelled A through J. A good document, kept current. A job aid, not training. Nobody ever sat and studied it. Months later, when a form landed, you reached for step F and got on with it. That made it external support: the thing you stop working to go and find.
The shape of the manual build: delete the fields Acrobat invents, then draw every text field, name it, flag it required, set the yes/no dropdowns one property tab at a time, then the date formats, then the tab order, then a script to strip the tooltips Acrobat added on its own.
Electronic Performance Support Systems, and the 1989 paper "Training vs. Performance Support." Training is delivered before the work and decays; support is delivered inside the work, at the moment it is needed. A printed procedure is her textbook example of external support. Most support should be intrinsic, built into the work itself.
The document already knows what the fields are supposed to be. It is in the headings, in the tables, in the empty cell beside "Job title" that was always a text entry, in the column headed "Objective met?" that was always yes or no. The ten steps were a person copying that structure across by hand. The tool reads it instead: drop the source document on the window, and three minutes later the fillable PDF is finished. Fields typed, dropdowns set, dates validated, tab order right.
| 1 | 2 | 3 |
| 4 | 5 | 6 |
One step stays manual on purpose. Saving out as Reader Extended, partly for the licence and partly so a person looks at the form before it goes to the field.
The same run shown above, recorded start to finish: a real OJT source file dropped on the window, and a fillable PDF out the other side.