In no particular order, here are some of the most interesting themes and ideas I heard this week that might be great takeaways:
- In the Expo Halls, lots of companies are talking about tracking and reporting on people, but very few are talking about how to train them and how to meet their day-to-day learning and social/informal learning networking needs. Analysts in one of the panels touched on this as the two "bookends" of talent management. Since I come from the learning bookend, I'd love to see us get some more weight on that side of the equation.
- According to Bersin & Associate's new study on Talent Management customer experiences, two of the best things you can do when you're deciding on a talent management vendor (and I think this applies to learning management systems, too) are:
- Check with the vendor that they've handled your kind of situation before. As they put it in the conference session, "You don't want to be a test case."
- Talk to some current clients, and ask them whether the final product matched up with what they were promised by sales. This can be one of the biggest determinants of satisfaction with your vendor.
- In the panel of leading industry analysts, one of the big themes that they talked about was the importance for Human Resources and other talent management/learning & development leaders to be able to talk in terms of business and hard numbers. I wish I remembered who it was, but someone in the discussions said that we "need to stop feeling guilty about not supplying analytics and just do it." It was a clarion call to read some books or take some courses in business basics and statistics and start applying it to our jobs every day.
- In the session about Creating a Private Social Network for your business, Kris Dunn gave the best one-sentence suggestion for a social media policy that I’ve heard: just tell everyone that when participating online in public or private, they’re responsible for everything in the employee handbook. Simple and to the point.
- Don Tapscott, during his keynote address about the Net Generation and the attitudes they're bringing to the workplace, presented this formula as a summary of the way that the newest entrants into the workforce see the world: "Work = Collaboration = Learning = Fun". None of these components are separate, they should be tied together intrinsically. Whether they are in your office will be one of the determinants of whether young workers will come to and stay in your organization, and it sounds to me like a darned fine recipe for all of us.
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