MindLeaders: Fueling the Learning Revolution

Employee Learning Week 2008 is coming

ASTD (American Society for Training & Development) has declared December 8-12 to be Employee Learning Week. It's a handy excuse to do a little end-of-the-year wrapup, highlighting the learning your organization has done and all the work you and your department/co-trainers have accomplished.

There's one more week to go until Employee Learning Week kicks off. Got any ideas on what you'd like your organization to do, see, or hear about? Many (American) companies are in a short-week-pre-Thanksgiving lull, so it's an ideal time to brew up some plans. ASTD offers some posters, brochures and other materials. To toss some kindling in the fire, here are some of the other ideas that we've bounced around ourselves:

• Give some awards/recognitions to the people who have completed the most training or had some really great training results.
• Announce the 2008 training statistics - how much training has everyone taken? In how many topics? What have been the company-wide results?
• Take the chance to get some new feedback - offer a survey throughout the company with raffle prizes for everyone who completes the survey. Ask about training people want, who their favorite trainer is (another prize/recognition opportunity), what they think of the different training vehicles in your organization... anything you've been wanting to know.

What ideas do *you* have? Please share your thoughts in the comments, and for still more ideas, check out the other things companies did last year.

Touch the heart to teach the mind

By day, I'm a mild-mannered e-learning product marketing manager, but at night, I'm a... well, still fairly mild-mannered volunteer docent at the Columbus Zoo. The zoo has a new director, Jeff Swanagan, who spoke to the docents this week. Jeff had a central message for us and the zoo as a whole: "Touch the heart to teach the mind."

His point for the zoo is that we shouldn't discount the valuable things people take home about the importance of animals and conservation just by sharing wide smiles with their families over a neat zoo experience. It got me thinking about how it also applies to corporate training.

We don't have automatic smile-makers like cute, fuzzy animals when we need to teach a bunch of coworkers or colleagues. On the other hand, no one (except a zookeeper) ever furthered their career or made more money by going to the zoo.

Here's my proposal for touching the heart to teach the mind in our training programs: too often, we hold the benefits to be gained from completing training as self-evident. Both the creation of the training and the people who take the training can benefit if, right along with (and maybe instead of) stating the objectives for training, we should be stating WHY those objectives will make our students' lives better, more productive, and further their careers.

In productivity/organization systems, we "begin with the end in mind." Planning a successful project means envisioning exactly what the end result will look like, then building all the steps it will take to reach that. In our e-learning, classroom training, and knowledge management of all types, let's be sure to make that end involve how our training will impact everyday work lives and careers.

Not just...
  "You'll learn how to manage projects"
But...
  "Your projects will be completed in less time and with fewer glitches."

Not just...
  "You'll learn how to make a pivot chart in Excel."
But...
  "You'll present the data you gather in a way that will knock people's socks off."

It's two ways of saying the same thing, but the second way is what will touch the heart to teach the mind.