MindLeaders: Fueling the Learning Revolution

How to Get Excellent Data on Learning Tool Usage

The eLearning Guild sent me a notice about a report that they've produced on the usage levels of various learning methods - instructor-led training, e-learning, mentoring, blogs, podcasts, you name it.

The report was really just a lot of screen shots of the tool that's constantly available on their web site, but it was the perfect reminder to me to do some diving into that tool. If, like me, you haven't visited in a while, or you've never been, check them out: http://www.elearningguild.com/360_reports/.

These reports give you real-time results on the surveys of all guild members about their learning tool usage. You can parse that data out by industry, company size, region, and more. It's an excellent way to take a look at how your company's training programs compare to the world at large or in your sector, to see how your blend of training compares with the recipes that others have come up with.

ASTD's 2008 BEST awards are open for application

ASTD (the American Society for Training & Development) has announced the opening of their 2008 BEST awards for the leading companies in applying workplace learning throughout their organization and to best support their workplace goals.

Fill out this award application is a great project. Even if you're not confident in winning (or in our case, not eligible because we're a learning provider, which I pout about a lot), the application is still very useful. It's a great way to step back and get a widescreen perspective on your organization's learning programs and their implementation, effectiveness, and support.

The BEST web site
The application
Tips for maximizing your submission
Our story about the 2007 BEST winners

Generation Y's impact on training at UPS

Fortune Magazine has published a fascinating article about UPS revamping its training program to better suit Generation Y. (Via Tom Werner at Brandon Hall. They also have a video introduction here.) Here is one of the best concrete examples so far of how the new arrivals in the workforce are having an impact - in UPS's case, first on skyrocketing dropouts and injury rates, then on the pilot program of a complete re-engineering of their training program to deal with these issues.

I worked with a guy in college who also worked at a UPS shipping facility, and he showed me the book full of zip codes that he had to memorize for the job. He was tested on it constantly. Turns out such rote book study doesn't fly so well these days. As we've been seeing for a while now, the NextGen is demanding to see and do it for themselves, and they want to instantly know their results. My favorite line of the article:

Because the young people they're trying to train aren't just Generation Y, they're Generation Why?

That's got to be one of the best one-line descriptions of NextGen that I've seen yet.

But here's the thing that struck me as I read about the new training program that UPS had put together for their workers, one that includes lots of examples along with their quizzes, instant feedback in hard data and video recordings, full-scale simulations and practice runs: that sounds like excellent training for everyone, regardless of generation.

The training innovations that Generation Y are demanding are good innovations that are resulting in better training. Maybe the real difference with Generation Y isn't about their training needs, but because they're demanding it rather than accepting the training that's given to them.

'Tis the Season for Industry Reports

In the past week or so, ASTD and Training Magazine have both published their 2007 industry reports. ASTD leads with the increasing use of technology they're seeing in training programs, and Training Magazine leads with a general increase in the amount of training spending their survey has found.

The amount spent on training per employee was very close in the two surveys: $1,202 according to Training Magazine, $1,040 according to ASTD. Both find 65-70% of that being spent on instructor-led training, about 20% on online training, and the rest on other methods.

Both surveys found that the top training expenses are on profession- or industry-specific programs. ASTD's second-highest spending was on business practices, the next in both surveys was for management and supervisory training.

Lots of great information in both surveys, and taken together, they help provide a very comprehensive look at training in the world around us today. Take a look - where does your company fall into the "average" ranges and where does it differ?

--ASTD's State of the Industry Report 2007
--Training Magazine's 2007 Industry Report

What would agile instructional design look like?

Harold Jarche has posted a very interesting blog post stating that instructional design needs to get more agile. In other words, that it needs to go through a similar revolution that programming has with its agile software development movement: a move away from a set cascade of steps to a system that is producing quickly and constantly changing, with lots of opportunities for feedback and input that changes the requirements of the project.

This got me thinking about what agile instructional design - and, highly related, agile learning programs - would look like. I can think of a few things this would involve:

• Learning modules are highly adaptable and easily changed.
• Learning materials and programs are not produced once and then "done" - they are produced with the expectation of updates and new versions to be produced.
• Good ol' feedback, feedback, feedback. Useful for ROI, performance measurement, and now also useful for knowing what direction those training programs are going in next. There is never too much input from the learners and the from the organization stakeholders.

Those are the top three things that come to my mind. What do you think that agile instruction design and agile learning programs would look like?

ASTD's BEST Award Winners

ASTD has announced the 2007 BEST awards, their recognition of companies with outstanding employee learning programs. Huge congratulations to all of the winners for their outstanding commitment to their people. Of the 42 winners this year, 5 are MindLeaders clients - we're psyched to be part of 10% of these winning programs.

What does it take to have make your organization's learning program one of the BEST? According to ASTD, the defining areas are:

• Alignment
• C-level involvement
• Efficiency
• Effectiveness
• Innovation
• Investment in learning
• Learning opportunities for employees
• Measurement of the effectiveness of learning
• Success with nontraining solutions to business needs

The most interesting thing to me about this list is that two of them (so it must be twice as important!) focus beyond the training program. They center on aligning the training with the organization's goals and on offering business needs solutions to things like organizational development or talent management. These are keystones that we've been preaching at MindLeaders for the past year or more: that training programs are so integrated with the organization's needs and strategies that none of them will function strongly without the other two.

What stands out to you on this list?

Learning 2.0: The Learners Are Taking Over

My presentation at the 2007 MindLeaders International Users Conference was Learning 2.0: The Learners Are Taking Over. I talked with a lot of folks who were very excited about the topic, and I wanted to share the handout here on the blog for anyone who would like a copy. The handout is just a rundown of the most important points of the presentation: That web 2.0 and the social phenomenon that goes with it is bringing information to people in the time, manner, and format they want, and with the chance to deeply interact with it. Learners who come to our organizations' doorsteps will be expecting those same things from their company and their learning programs.

The handout also suggests some places to start getting familiar with web 2.0 technologies and a couple of tips for wading into using some of the 2.0 tools within an organization/learning program for the first time.

Any thoughts, suggestions, and comments are welcome!

The Federal Reserve Chair advises investing in education

"Education is the best investment. ... As executives accustomed to making hard cost-benefit decisions, you doubtless assign a high priority to the quality of your business’s workforce because you know that a key--perhaps the key--to your success is the capabilities of the people you employ.  To a significant extent, those capabilities are the product of education. "

Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, said yesterday that upgrading workers' skills doesn't just improve a company's financial outlook, it improves the outlook of the entire country. This is a great quote for the constant questions trainers face about whether their  training programs are worth spending money on. The leader of the United States banking system just said that it's the best investment you can make. And that it's good for the nation (any nation!), too. If someone is questioning whether to spend money on training your workforce, tell 'em it's the patriotic thing to do!

--Full text of the speech

Pull People Into Training

It was the first day of the trade show at SHRM. As often happened, we had a few people gathered around to chat with us - not enough to clog aisleways or cause a scene, but enough to show that people were interested in talking with us. And I watched another man walking down our aisle who saw the people in our booth, slowed down, pivoted to join us, and told me "I felt the gravitational pull of your booth."

Isn't that always the way? Interest breeds interest - when people are engaged and involved in something, other people want to get engaged and involved in it, too. Gravitational pulls happen in training - and in whole companies - in the same way. It doesn't take a lot of people, but a core of enthusiasm creates the gravitational pull that draws people into your training programs - and makes them much more successful - than would otherwise happen.

The trick, of course, is how to get that gravity started. Wikipedia has an entry about Diffusion, the general theory about how new ideas spread within an organization. I think the biggest component that will make or break a program's success is in its early adopters - target your earliest efforts to people who will be eager to jump on board. When you have those first few, gravity starts to do its work.

What are your favorite methods to building up some gravity for your training programs?

The Right Audience for eLearning 2.0

I went to Dr. Tony Karrer's excellent eLearning 2.0 presentation at ASTD 2007 - it was one of the few seminars I got to attend, but wild horses couldn't have dragged me away from it. He gave an excellent overview of the technologies behind Web 2.0 and the ways that employee training can adopt some of them. I recommend his blog and any chance to hear his information that you come across.

The reactions from the audience were interesting. We seemed to be a pretty mixed blend of Web 2.0 junkies, novices in the field, and a surprising (to a junkie like me) number of people who had never even heard the term "Web 2.0." It was a good reminder for a techie like me to hear the questions, concerns, and flat-out fear that the decentralization of information and control can cause. I think some folks were a bit kerfuffled.

One questioner brought up a new point I hadn't focused on before: the audience for Web 2.0-style learning. The tools that Web 2.0 brings us: wikis, blogs, tagging, and podcastings and mobile technologies, have awesome potential as learning and training tools. They allow unprecendented collaboration and knowledge sharing. But those technologies aren't useful for every kind of learning.

The example of a non-Web-2.0 training need that immediately came to my mind when this was brought up was any orientation to a new topic. If someone is learning a new technology, or starting at a company, or wading into a field for the first time, a wiki is probably not going to answer their foundational, where-do-I-start learning needs. They need a map and a compass, then they'll be able to start traveling all over the landscape.

What situations can you think of that are best suited for e-Learning 2.0? Which ones are best served with more traditional training methods?