Despite the ever increasing practices of e-learning, most workplace e-learning applications fail to meet the learners’ needs and ultimately fail to serve the organization’s quest for success. The dominance of technology-oriented approaches makes e-learning applications less goal-effective, and makes them perceived to be of poor quality and design. To solve this problem, a performance oriented approach is presented in this study. This approach aims to align the individual learning needs vis-à-vis the organizational goals and makes learning connected with work performance. Based on the approach, a prototype system has been developed that uses intelligent agent and ontology technology. A set of experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach