Rethinking how Army learns, assesses, and recognises capability

Army has spent considerable effort transforming how it trains. Distributed learning, self-paced learning, simulation, and technology-enabled approaches have progressively challenged the assumption that training must always occur in a classroom or on a residential course.

Army’s Future Ready Training System has previously called for a training system that is more flexible, responsive, and better aligned with how our people learn (James, 2019; The Cove, 2020).

Perhaps there is another assumption worth challenging.

Does learning necessarily need to be separated from work in the first place?

Much of our individual training still follows a recognisable sequence:

course → learning activity/artificial exercise → assessment → qualification → workplace application

There are very good reasons for this. Courses provide structure, consistency, access to expertise, and opportunities to learn and practise things that may be difficult, unsafe, or inappropriate to learn through normal work. Some capabilities require controlled environments, specialist resources, or repeated practice before they can safely be exercised in the workplace.

But this should not prevent us asking whether the sequence is always necessary. Some of the work for which we prepare people may already provide the learning opportunities and evidence of capability that we subsequently recreate within training.

This article proposes that Army consider a broader learning and assessment ecosystem. Formal training remains essential, but it should sit alongside learning, feedback and, where appropriate, assessment in the flow of work.

At the centre of that proposition is a relatively simple idea:

The workplace can generate the evidence; the assessment system must assure the judgement.

Work is already a learning environment

Recent scholarship on workplace learning offers a useful way of thinking about this. Ajjawi, Woodward-Kron and Tai (2026), drawing particularly on the workplace learning literature, argue that learning emerges through an interdependent relationship between the individual and their workplace.

The workplace is not simply somewhere that previously acquired knowledge is subsequently applied; the activities, people, tools, systems, conversations, spaces, and outcomes associated with work all create opportunities for learning.

This shifts our conception of feedback as well. We commonly think of feedback as something another person gives us: an instructor observes a performance and then tells the learner what was done well and what needs improvement.

Ajjawi and colleagues offer a broader concept: performance-relevant information, meaning information arising through workplace performance and interaction that helps learners make sense of how they are performing.

Consider an officer participating in a planning activity. Information about their performance might come from an instructor or commander, but it may also arise from questions from subordinates that expose ambiguity in intent, a peer challenging an assumption, doctrine against which a proposed approach can be compared, or an unsuccessful brief.

It may also come from difficulties executing the resulting plan, the behaviour of a headquarters or team, observations of a more experienced practitioner, an after-action review (AAR), or the consequences of decisions during execution.

The work itself is producing information about performance. The educational challenge, therefore, is not simply to give people more feedback, but to help them become better at recognising, seeking, interpreting, and acting upon the information already generated through professional activity. This suggests a different learning loop:

authentic work → performance-relevant information → feedback and reflection → adaptation → improved performance

Learning becomes something occurring with and through work rather than something necessarily preceding it.

From learning in the workplace to assessment through work

There is a further implication. Army understandably needs evidence before determining that somebody is competent: assessment involves gathering evidence in order to make a considered judgement against a prescribed standard. Previous discussion on The Cove has nevertheless questioned the tendency to treat assessment as an administrative event separated from learning and has argued for greater authenticity in military assessment (Ashford-Rowe, 2018; Sylvester, 2019).

This raises an interesting question: if somebody is already performing relevant, authentic work, could that performance sometimes provide better evidence of competence than an activity constructed specifically for assessment? Rather than always requiring:

course → artificial exercise → assessment

Army might, where appropriate, recognise:

authentic work → workplace evidence → professional judgement → recognition of competence

The qualification “where appropriate” matters. This is not an argument that simply doing a job demonstrates competence. Nor is it an argument for removing formal training or controlled assessment. It is an argument for asking whether credible evidence of competence already generated through authentic professional activity should count.

If a learner can provide sufficient evidence that they have demonstrated the required capability in an appropriate context, what additional value is created by taking them away from that environment and requiring them to reproduce substantially the same performance within an artificial one?

Army has already moved some distance towards this way of thinking through distributed learning, recognition of prior learning, and attempts to capture professional development occurring in units rather than unnecessarily reproducing it residentially. Assessment in the flow of work would extend that logic.

The workplace is authentic – but it isn’t standardised

There is, however, an obvious problem: not all workplaces are equal. Bearman (2026), examining feedback culture in workplace learning, cautions against treating the workplace as a culturally neutral environment into which learning can simply be inserted.

Different workplaces develop different norms concerning how performance is discussed, how feedback is sought and provided, who can challenge whom, whether uncertainty can safely be exposed, and what constitutes good performance.

That should sound familiar to anyone who has served in more than one Army unit. Different units, headquarters, schools, and even sub-units may have different standards, supervisory capability, opportunities, feedback cultures, expectations, relationships, and interpretations of competence. One learner may work for an exceptional supervisor who deliberately creates developmental opportunities, encourages questions, provides constructive challenge, and discusses performance regularly; another may have a very different experience.

This is one of the strongest objections to assessment in the flow of work: if the workplace experiences aren’t standardised, how can the resulting assessment be trusted? The answer may be that we are trying to standardise the wrong thing.

Standardise the judgement, not necessarily the experience

Authenticity inevitably produces variation. Two officers may demonstrate the same underlying capability through different planning activities, exercises, headquarters, or appointments. Trying to make their experiences identical would remove some of the very authenticity that makes workplace learning valuable.

Army does not necessarily need to standardise every experience through which capability is demonstrated; what it does need is sufficient consistency in the basis upon which competence is recognised:

common standards + appropriate evidence requirements + assessor judgement + moderation + quality assurance

This produces an important distinction:

The workplace generates the evidence; the assessment system assures the judgement.

The purpose of the assessment system is therefore not necessarily to manufacture identical experiences for everybody. It is to provide sufficient assurance that different authentic experiences can generate evidence capable of supporting consistent and defensible judgements against a common standard.

That shifts some of our attention from standardising assessment activities towards strengthening the professional judgement of assessors.

Professional judgement matters

This isn’t an entirely new idea for Army. In earlier Cove discussion of authentic military assessment (Ashford-Rowe, 2018), I argued that the meaning of competent extends beyond a rubric or marking guide: ultimately an experienced professional observes evidence of performance and makes a judgement that another person is capable. Assessment in the flow of work makes that professional judgement even more important.

The assessor’s task is not simply to confirm that an activity occurred or that every box on a checklist has been ticked. It is to determine whether the available evidence is authentic, relevant, and sufficient to support a judgement against the required standard. That creates risk if assessor judgements themselves vary.

The answer is not necessarily more prescription. It is stronger assessor development, calibration, and moderation. Moderation allows assessors to discuss evidence, compare judgements, establish shared interpretations of standards, and test whether they would reach similar conclusions when presented with different examples of authentic performance.

The desired outcome becomes less:

Everyone completes exactly the same assessment activity.

and more:

Everyone is judged against the same capability standard with an appropriate level of evidential and assessment assurance.

But not everything at work should become assessment

There is another danger. If we embed assessment within work too enthusiastically, we risk turning every learning opportunity into an assessment opportunity.

Bearman’s analysis of workplace feedback culture is particularly important here: effective workplace learning depends upon people being willing to expose uncertainty, ask questions, experiment, seek help, and discuss mistakes. Rank, authority, and relationships inevitably affect those behaviours.

If every mistake or admission of uncertainty might contribute to a formal judgement of competence, rational learners will become more careful about exposing them. That would be counterproductive.

We therefore need to distinguish between three things: performance-relevant information, which is generated continuously through work; developmental feedback, which helps learners interpret that information and improve; and assessment evidence, which is deliberately selected information of sufficient quality to contribute to a formal judgement of competence.

Not everything that tells somebody something useful about their performance should become assessment evidence. There must remain room to learn without constantly being judged.

Feedback literacy as a professional capability

This also changes our conception of the learner. Bearman draws upon Carless and Boud’s (2018) idea of feedback literacy: the understandings, capabilities and dispositions necessary to make sense of feedback and use it productively.

For Army, that potentially means developing people who do not simply wait for instructors or commanders to tell them how they performed:

noticing → seeking → questioning → interpreting → triangulating → reflecting → adapting

That looks less like an educational technique and more like an attribute of the reflective military professional. It also has implications for leadership. Commanders and supervisors are not merely providers of feedback; through their behaviour, they help create the feedback culture in which others learn.

A commander who asks, “What did you see that I didn’t?” encourages a different learning environment from one in which performance discussion travels only down the chain of command. Feedback literacy should therefore be thought about on both sides of the interaction: learners need to become skilled users of feedback, while commanders, supervisors and instructors need to become skilled creators of environments in which productive feedback can occur.

An Army learning and assessment ecosystem

Taken together, these ideas suggest something broader than workplace assessment. They point towards a learning ecosystem in which:

formal learning ↔ authentic work ↔ feedback ↔ reflection ↔ professional judgement ↔ recognition of capability

are deliberately connected.

Formal courses remain an important part of that ecosystem. They should concentrate effort where formal training adds particular value: introducing new knowledge, providing specialist instruction, enabling deliberate practice, exposing learners to experiences unavailable in their workplace, bringing people together for collective learning, or controlling risk while new capabilities are developed.

The workplace does something different: it provides authenticity, complexity, consequence, professional relationships and repeated opportunities to practise and demonstrate capability in context. The opportunity is to connect those components more deliberately.

A particular opportunity for Army Reserve

There may be particular value here for the Army Reserve. Time is one of the most precious resources available to a Reservist, and every additional day of residential training potentially competes with civilian employment, family commitments, and other military requirements. That does not justify lowering standards; it makes it even more important that Army uses the available time intelligently.

A Reservist may already be participating in relevant planning, instruction, exercises, headquarters activities, or other authentic professional work. Where that work generates credible evidence against an established standard, we should at least ask why it would not count.

Conversely, where the required capability cannot be demonstrated through the individual’s workplace experience, formal training and assessment remain necessary.

The objective is therefore not less training. It is a more intelligent allocation of training effort: recognising what has already been learned or demonstrated, identifying what remains to be developed, and concentrating formal training resources where they add the greatest value.

What might we do differently?

This need not begin with wholesale reform of the training system. It could begin with individual courses and capabilities.

1. What genuinely needs to be taught?
2. What needs to be practised under controlled conditions?
3. What must be assessed directly?
4. What could be learned through authentic work?
5. What workplace activity already generates credible evidence against the required standard?
6. What evidence would an assessor need to make a defensible judgement?
7. How would assessors be calibrated and their decisions moderated?
8. What developmental activities should explicitly remain outside formal assessment?

These questions could lead to a very different course design. For some capabilities, the answer may remain a predominantly residential course. For others, it might produce a blended model. For personnel already capable of demonstrating the required performance, it might create a credible assessment-only pathway based substantially on authentic evidence.

The important point is that the learning and assessment requirement drives the model, rather than the historical shape of the course driving the learning and assessment requirement.

What if the work is the training?

Army’s training system exists to generate capability – not courses – and that distinction matters. Courses are an extraordinarily useful mechanism for developing capability, but they are not the only place in which soldiers and officers learn.

People learn through doing their jobs, solving problems, observing others, making decisions, experiencing consequences, receiving challenge, participating in professional conversations, and reflecting upon performance.

The question is whether our formal learning and assessment systems are sufficiently connected to that reality. Perhaps we should therefore reconsider the assumption that learning happens principally on courses and is subsequently applied at work.

The alternative is not a choice between courses and workplace learning. It is an ecosystem that deliberately connects them:

• Formal training where formal training adds value.
• Authentic work where authentic work provides the better learning experience.
• Workplace evidence where it credibly demonstrates capability.
• Professional judgement to interpret that evidence.
• Moderation and quality assurance to assure the judgement.
• Sufficient separation between development and assessment to ensure that people remain willing to ask questions, expose uncertainty, and learn.

In a time-constrained Army, the question may therefore not be whether we can afford to move more learning and assessment into the flow of work. Perhaps we should also ask whether we can afford to keep taking people away from authentic work to recreate experiences that the workplace can already provide.

The workplace can generate the evidence. Army’s assessment system must assure the judgement.

Still Interested?

Why not also read Assessment Within the Military Environment

Cove+ also has short learning courses on similar topics, including Project Leadership and Teams.