MindLeaders: Fueling the Learning Revolution

Social Media's Rise Doesn't Mean Formal Learning is Dead

The landscape of employee development is shifting under our feet. While learning and development organizations are facing lots of changes, two developments are driving most of them.

·     Technology and social media are allowing information to be shared quickly and easily

·     Learning management and talent management are converging

Remember when e-learning came into the market and there was lots of talk about the death of instructor-led training? Stand up training is still here. E-learning is here. And now we have the influx of social media platforms and a lot of chatter about how it will wipe out formal learning (and e-mail and other forms of communication). And guess what? It won’t.

Formal learning is far from dead. The fact that learning management and talent management are converging is one reason why. Integrating learning into career development and performance improvement will always be formalized in organizations. And of course content lends itself to different deliveries. That which lends itself to instructor-led or e-learning formats isn’t likely to be completely replaced by the new social media and information sharing technologies. So social media's rise hardly means the death for formal learning. It does make for some interesting challlenges though.

Learning organizations are faced with helping organizations integrate these technologies in a way that makes sense. New roles will emerge and new skills will become necessary for learning organizations to move forward effectively.  But the ones who can will reap some real benefits. These new technologies let peers easily share information. They allow transparency between groups. They make it harder to blow smoke about what you are up to. They practically eliminate the ability to information-hoard. Yes, there are some who won’t like that much, but the benefit of easily accessible organizational knowledge is well-worth the price.   

Separate your social media updates by audience

We're in the awkward teenage phase of social media and putting information about ourselves online. Everything feels new, and people are terrified and flummoxed by the idea of becoming searchable.

• "You mean that if a future team member Googles me they might find my latest recipes?"
• "How can these college kids put party pictures of themselves online? What will happen when they look for a job later?"

In our office, there's a fun video on YouTube of our chief accountant boogying at his daughter's wedding reception. (I'll be kind and won't share the name or link.) It hasn't hurt his ability to crunch the numbers one bit. Coworkers get a kick out of it and like him better for it.

In ten years (maybe even five), our worries are going to seem silly. Everyone will be able to Google up a photo or two of their boss, coworker, and client in their swimwear or with a drink in their hand. The lines are blurring between work life and the rest of our lives: we're all going to be considered whole people, and it won't hurt our professional credibility. Before long, the people who have no personal lives online will be the strange ones. ("What's she hiding?")

Until then, just like any kind of socializing at work, common sense must prevail, and while we're in these awkward teenage years we have to deal with them. By all means, get out there online and get involved with the social networks. Online information is here to stay, and we'll only learn how to use it well by trying it out. Each of these sites has a different audience, and the best plan right now is to remember that things you share should be geared for each site's listeners. Here's what I mean on some of the most common social networks out there:

Site	Audience	Content
LinkedIn	Public (mostly). Google-able. Business and professional connections of all types.	LinkedIn is the place where you put on your best business clothes - it's designed that way and wants to stay that way. No option here for photos and videos (except for your profile picture - and you should use that!). This site's purpose and the content you'll put on it is pretty cut and dried.
Twitter	Public. Google-able. Industry and areas-of-interest leaders. Anyone you want to listen to, and those who want to listen to you.	Twitter is all about who you listen to. Think about that as you tweet: go for high impact content that says something about who you are and what you're involved in. Twitter is kind of like a cocktail reception at a networking event - you won't have much time to talk, and everything you say, whether small talk or deep insight, will make a fleeting impression.
YouTube, Flickr, etc.	Public, Google-able. The whole world is watching and searching.	Have a ball here, but remember that everything you post is public. Personally, I share lots of travel and animal photography, but I don't put up family photos or videos. Not for fear of my professional credibility, but just to protect my family's privacy. (Which I'm sure will also be outmoded someday, but I'm willing to be a pioneer myself, not for my family.)
Facebook	Walled garden, and this is the key difference! In Facebook, you have tight control over your privacy settings. Only your approved friends, family, and contacts will see what you post. You can have even more precise control by assigning your Facebook friends into groups and then determining what each group can see.	Go wild. Post those embarrassing videos and photos: falling on your face in a kick line, mooning your arch-rival sports team, your high school prom fashion faux pas. Keep in mind that anything that gets committed to the Internet could someday find its way into the wild, so I don't recommend doing anything completely irretrievable, but this is where you can let those crazy awkward teenage experiments run rampant.

That's the system I currently use when I have a new status update or tidbit of information in my hands and I'm deciding where I want to share it. What do you do? Any other social networks you think should be on this list?

What if Learning Was Free?

A few weeks ago Seth Godin blogged that if TV ads were free, people would have learned to do advertising by simply doing it. Without that barrier to entry, people would just do advertising instead of talking about it and obsessing about it because it’s expensive.

Harold Jarche picked up on the parallels that can be drawn with corporate learning.  Instructional design systems and curriculum development is expensive. It takes time and energy. And once created, no one wants to do it again, or make significant changes to it.

Technology is removing barriers to entry in every industry and discipline. Internet technologies make distributing information to lots of people cheap. Want to engage with a community and ask for their feedback? Consider a focused blog directed at that audience. Want to build a collaborative group? Enter social media platforms. Didn’t get the results you wanted? Try, try again. After all, in the brave new world of technology learning really can be free.

But here’s the trick. You’ll have to let go of some control. You’ll have to facilitate and be a conduit, rather than a director. This can be scary, but it can work. Need proof? Take the Work Literacy site which helps teach Web 2.0 technology to learning professionals. Cost to develop: Zero. Time to create: A week. Content updates: Courtesy of participants. So there’s the proof that it can work. (Check out the site, it’s got some great content.)

Oh and get out there and start experimenting! If it doesn’t work the way you’d hoped, try something else. But stop waiting. The time is now.

What do you think? How has technology removed the barriers to entry for learning? Are you experimenting enough?

Using Talent Management and L&D to Meet Strategic Goals

In their September newsletter, Bersin and Associates featured a case study on one of our local companies – Nationwide Insurance. In 2007, Nationwide decided to migrate most of its applications from a COBOL/mainframe environment to a Java/web services model. Needless to say, this had huge implications for the organization and its IT staff. Nationwide had to decide whether to buy, build or rent the capabilities it needed. The case study is about their decisions and how things worked out. Here’s what I loved about it:

• Nationwide decided to build their talent pool’s skills to match their needs, rather than lay off most of the staff that had served it well to that point.
• Nationwide took the time to set clear goals for the program, including:
• Executive sponsorship from both IT and HR branches of the organization
• Incorporating both technical and business process training in their program
• Determining performance results, best practices and work environment
• Evaluating the appropriate mix of classroom training, coaching, practice, and informal learning
• Interested associates had to apply and be selected to participate in the training program.
• Communications about the program were frequent and in many forms such as e-mail, newsletters, meetings, etc. They emphasized the future direction of the company and the intensive nature of the training.
• They got great results! 70% of program grads were at expectations for their salary band within 3 months; 100% within 9 months. Better yet, all hiring managers would recommend the program based upon the quality of the results.

As Nationwide has demonstrated, properly managing your talent pool allows for the flexibility to meet the changing demands of the marketplace. This is certainly an instance where HR, L&D, and management goals were clearly aligned to meet a company’s strategic needs. The case study is available to anyone who wants to read it for a limited time. Go out and take a look!

Why Are We Compelled to Compare Classrooms and E-Learning?

It’s the inevitable thing that happens if you’ve been in the business of providing e-learning for more than five minutes. At some point someone will turn to you and say, “But it’s not the same as being in a classroom.” Not to state the obvious, but “well, duh.”

The interesting thing here is the implication of classroom training being the gold standard. And that’s the real issue. Because most of us have gone through the public school system, the classroom experience is the one we are most familiar with. But familiarity hardly makes for an inherently superior learning experience.

Like all forms of training, the classroom experience has its strengths and weaknesses. Expecting e-learning to be a classroom experience is like expecting an apple to magically transform into an orange. On the other hand, dismissing e-learning as somehow subpar because it is not a classroom is poor logic. After all, you wouldn’t say that you can’t learn anything from a book or a hands-on experience simply because it didn’t happen in a classroom. As with a classroom, books and experiences simply have different strengths that lend themselves to particular kinds of learners and learning. That’s all.

So why are we compelled to compare? Well, comparisons do help bring a new thing into the range of most people’s experience. Yet e-learning is hardly brand new, and still the comparisons continue. Would it not be more productive to simply understand the things that e-learning does really well and capitalize on them when appropriate? Things like learning at one’s own pace, the ability to quickly review a presented point, being able to search through content to easily find something, and the ability to immediately check learning and get feedback. All things that the classroom setting does relatively poorly.

What do you think? Is the classroom the gold standard in training? Are all the comparisons productive? Or is it simply better to pick the medium (or blend of mediums) that works best for the situation and move on?

The social media truth lies between the hype and the cynicism

There's a new variation of the classic "Did You Know" video about the ways our world is changing.

This one is called "Social Media Revolution" and, of course, focuses on statistics about social media, how rapidly it's expanding, and how we're using it.

The new video is guilty of hyperbole; the number of new Facebook users in the past year or is in no way equivalent to how long it took people to bring televisions into their homes. (Did You Know does a better job of presenting statistics validly.)

It's this kind of Oo-golly-wow-this-is-the-biggest-thing-EVAH hype that brings out the nay-sayers who pile mockery onto anything that smells of web 2.0 or social media as Just Another Fad.

There are two truths under all this: Society always shifts and changes, and social media is changing the way we communicate. Social media is not a be-all end-all, but it is part of a process.

 

I drew this as a linear progression, but that doesn't mean the earlier methods get abandoned - we still talk with our neighbors in our yard. But we're also just as likely to add them as friends in Facebook. And there's an arrow at the end because changes will keep coming, building on how we exchange information and keep in touch with the people we care about.

And for us trainers, this affects our delivery and methods, too - and it profoundly affects the expectations and learning styles of our students.

Don't get swept up by the hype, but don't refuse to explore new options, either. Sure, in 10 years we'll be laughing about how obsessed we were with Twitter and Facebook, but it'll be because we've moved on to bigger and better things. What worked in the past still has uses, but success depends on continually taking advantage of the new.

From Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0?

Jakob Nielsen recently released a report on the progress and impact of social networking tools on corporate intranets. Social networking isn’t a passing fad or a trend that can be ignored. As the pervasiveness of social networking tools grows, more people expect to be able to communicate with their friends, co-workers, companies, and customers in this way. For organizations, it means letting go of controlling every communication (which they really don’t anyway) and moving to Enterprise 2.0. For those that do, there are some benefits, including:

·        Breaking down communication barriers

·        Allowing workers to more easily collaborate to solve business problems

·        Engage workers who expect innovation and to share ideas at work

·        Capture and preserve information which is exchanged informally between co-workers (informal learning, anyone?)

·        Self policing communities

Most companies aren’t very far along with Enterprise 2.0. Efforts are largely being driven by grassroots efforts of front-line employees. Senior management, often as not, is a barrier since the perception is that these are “tools that teenagers use.” When considering Enterprise 2.0 tools, there are some best practices to keep in mind:

·        Choose tools that have capabilities to help solve specific business problems (rather than integrating whatever is “hot” on the web)

·        Integrate social tools into the main intranet to avoid double work and having the same content in two places

·        Know and allow the participation inequality that is part of most online communities. The lurkers will benefit from the content as much as those posting it.

·        Ban anonymity

·        Take a thoughtful and staged approach, consulting with employees when needed

You can read Nielsen’s full summary here and also access a link to purchase the complete case study. Where is your company on the Enterprise 2.0 scale?

Where Is Your Training Dollar Focused?

I read an interesting post on the Informal Learning Blog that had me pondering this very question. Where are most training dollars focused? My suspicion is that it’s the basics. Things like getting the newbies ramped up in their new jobs, teaching basic tasks in new software, and providing new managers the fundamentals.

But is this the best place to focus? The Pareto Principle tells us 20% of employees generate 80% of a company’s returns. Given the incredible impact of that 20% (read star performers), wouldn’t it make sense to focus more attention there? Taking a handful of average performers and turning them into superstars would make an incredible difference in bottom-line results. Talk about demonstrable ROI!

Of course, this is a tougher group to train. Taking a very good project manager and making them exceptional requires specialized content, maybe even personalized. Same goes for sales people or managers or developers. Each very good performer will have their own set of weaknesses which has to be improved to make them superstars. And with limited resources, training groups are often forced to focus on what can be given to the many to keep things running, rather than to the few that would move things to the next level. Some thoughts to consider if you’re trying to improve the results of your training program:

• Do you know which job titles in your organization drive 80% of the revenues?
• Do you know who the superstars are in that group?
• Do you know who the very good performers are in that group?
• Have you talked to either one?

What do you think? Are your training dollars focused on the basics? Or the 20%?

How to Use Twitter to Share Culture

Everyone has been hearing about the importance of social media. Yet I think the hurdle that most businesses face when entering this new arena is how to make the most of what social media has to offer. I saw a great article on Mashable.com that gives some ideas for using twitter to share corporate culture.

• Tweet events such as company awards or entering new markets

• Share corporate mission by tweeting about goals or upcoming plans

• Provide industry insight by tweeting about things that impact anyone in that sector such as legislation or educational information

• Recognize employees by tweeting about benefits and employee achievements

• Highlight customer successes such as awards they've won or how they've used your product/service to achieve a goal

• Use tweets as a customer service tool to answer hot questions publicly and quickly

• Ask questions to your customers and prospects

Twitter can be used to promote your learning program using many of these If the goal is to create a culture of learning, then use social media tools to share that culture and keep employees engaged. Thoughts on what to tweet include:

• New topics or learning tools which have been made available to employees

• Reminders about job aids that apply to a current issue many employees are facing

• Provide updates on long-term L&D projects

• Use as a service tool to quickly answer questions on a new program

• Share how L&D fits into and forwards company goals

• Ask questions of employees on what they’d like to see in their training program

I’m sure there’s more ways to use Twitter to keep employees engaged and excited about their learning options. What others can you think of?

Does learning all boil down to searching?

We have a lot of words for new directions that learning is taking:

• Learning 2.0
• Informal learning
• Personal Learning Environments

I see a lot of common themes in these trends, like the use of technology, the decentralization of learning, and user control over their own learning.

Does it all boil down to searching?

The information we need is out there and accessible to us. We just have to be able to retrieve it when we need it, preferably with as little disruption as possible to what we're working on.

This is the keystone to the rise of Google: there's a ridiculous amount of information on the web, but it's useless to us unless we can search for it. The fact that Google does that for us in a pretty quick and seamless way has made it a ubiquitous part of our lives.

In organizational learning, we're trying to apply training and information more strategically, but it's the same concept. Knowledge Management, Content Management, and process and document tools are being used more and more because they're trying to provide this.

MindLeaders has been kicking this idea around for a while: we've been expanding our search capabilities and chunking information into smaller pieces that can be pulled to answer questions for people when the need arises for them.

So here's my oversimplification of the week: is corporate or organizational learning all about searching? To go back to a graph I mentioned a couple of months ago, 75% of learning is informal as we adopt and adapt to our work.

 

Is making the data that people informally talk about and use as accessible as possible 75% of our task? What do you think?