MindLeaders: Fueling the Learning Revolution

Changing from learning controllers to learning facilitators

Web 2.0 (blogs, wikis, Twitter, social networking, etc.) and the learning tools it gives us are bright, shiny new toys. They're easy to think of as fads or things that only the youngest generation or biggest techies are using. But these tools are having a deeper effect on all of us that's subtle but powerfully important to us as trainers and organizational leaders.

We no longer control information. This applies across every industry.

• The movie and music industries are desperately trying to keep control of their content and are losing their battles.
• News organizations are doing their best to embrace this change: almost every newspaper and TV news web site now devotes tons of space to allowing everyone to post their own news and comment on stories.
• Most major online retailers now allow people to post reviews of products, even when those reviews are unflattering.

For us as training professionals, more learning is happening outside of classrooms than ever. Anyone can Google just about any question from whatever coffee shop work is taking place in. Hallway conversations and cubicle visits are the predominant learning system in almost every workplace. Our work is shifting from being the primary provider of knowledge to facilitating its spread and use.

The truly successful training professional/manager/department of tomorrow will be able to:

• Make information available to people in the organization at any time, from any location where they're working at the moment.
• Provide answers to questions with as little interruption to workflow as possible.
• Capture the information that people accumulate and share in ways that make it easier for everyone to handle ad hoc questions and information needs.

We're never going to lose the need for in-depth classroom training for learning new skills. But that has always been balanced against the learning that goes on everywhere else, and it's becoming more and more critical as our population gets more and more attuned to immediate access and interaction with the information they need.

What do you think - what are some helpful ways we as learning professionals can facilitate needed information "going viral" in our organizations?

New white paper: the investment benefits of training

"We can help."

The economy is slamming all of us. Here in Columbus, Ohio, we got word today that two major local employers, Limited and Longaberger, are laying people off. Everyone seems to be worried about protecting our companies and our jobs.

We've released a new front page for our web site and a new white paper with a common theme: We can help. Training can help.

Our new white paper, Training in Troubled Times, gives some facts and figures about the ways that investing in training helps a company during a recession and beyond. Companies that train their employees make it through recessions better and come out the other side stronger and more ready to capitalize on the recovery opportunities. If you're involved in making budget decisions about training, I hope you'll take a look - it might provide some good statistics for you as you justify your budget costs.

I'd love to hear any comments you have about the new web front page, too! It's the first step in a larger web site redesign by our resident web genius, so any feedback will be immediately useful for us.

What's the balance of learning?

I'm going to throw a question out that we've been talking about in the MindLeaders halls. I have no answer to it, but it's an interesting conversation to continue.

What do you think is the percentage of time that people spend on finding quick answers to questions versus in-depth study of a subject? For example, figuring out how to build a pivot table in Excel versus studying for a certification or building leadership skills?

The closest thing I've thought of that comes close to answering this is informal learning (which will mostly be those quick-hit I-just-need-the-info-and-go experiences) versus formal learning. Wikipedia's entry on informal learning includes the chart at the right. Stretching that data like silly-putty suggests that people spend 20% of their training on reference and longer-term study, and 80% on short-term answer-finding.

I'm tossing this out to see what other thoughts or information people have about this. What's your impression of the balance of pick-up learning versus longer study?

Set your training goals for 2009

Did you know that MindLeaders Education Services department was recently renamed "Professional Services"? I am one of the Professional Services Analysts on the team.  Nice to meet you on the blog!

Our team often receives questions from trainers and Site Administrators on best practices for driving a successful online learning program. Here are a few questions you may wish to consider as you embark on your planning for e-Learning in 2009.

• How does e-Learning fit into your annual corporate goals?
• Can it be used to solve a high priority business problem?
• What was your primary purpose in making e-Learning available for employees?
  • Improving employee morale or retention rates?
  • Cross training employees in new skill sets?
  • Retraining employees that have been displaced?
• What factors will you consider in evaluating program success?
  • Student participation?
  • Specific course completion?
  • Student feedback?
  •  Basic skills acquisition?
  • Skill level improvement?
• Do your managers believe they will benefit from employee access to this training? Will they commit time and resources to permit training to take place?
• What tools will you utilize to measure success?
  • Scores
  • Surveys
  • Usage statistics?
• Are you providing any incentives (such as reward or recognition programs) to encourage student participation and program visibility?
• What would you do differently this year to motivate and inspire your students to take advantage of this opportunity for learning?

What is your experience? Do you have a success story or useful information to add? Tell us!  You may either post a comment to this blog, or for more information contact Professional Services at profserv@mindleaders.com.

How the economic crisis is a call to action for trainers and human resources

It's a sign of how bad the economy has gotten that this weekend, when I saw friends I haven't seen in a month or two, their first question wasn't "How are you doing" or "How's the family," it was "How's your work? Is your job safe?"

The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Speaker of the House just published this chart comparing job losses in the past three recessions. Numbers like these aren't going to make anyone feel any better.

As trainers, we're charged with not just worrying about ourselves, but with providing information that other people need, too. We're the ones who will be teaching new skills to workers who are being asked to do more duties with fewer resources. Eventually, this recession will be over and we should be ready for the next onslaught of onboarding/orientation training, too.

MindLeaders is doing some things to try to help in this economy. We have a new white paper coming that we'll be announcing later this week (stay tuned). And we've put together a new Career Shift package of courses to help people who are looking for a new job. The package includes courses on building resumes, interviewing and negotiating, managing time and selves, and building up skills in the latest Office products.

We're offering this new package to companies that have had to lay off workers to use in their severance packages, and to state agencies and resellers who can reach job-seekers directly.

What are some of the other biggest needs in today's economy that we trainers can meet? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

[Update 2/11/09: Janet Clarey has posted a version of the above chart with even more recessions tracked, all the way back to 1948. Our troubles today look no better.]

Got a company meeting? Jump in and train!

Here at MindLeaders, we're in the midst of our semi-annual company & sales meetings. Like most companies, it's a chance for us to take a look at where we've been, where we're going, celebrate successes, announce new initiatives, and get fired up.

Company meetings should also be a prime opportunity to teach! Beg, borrow, and steal to get yourself a little bit of time in the company meeting. It's a rare opportunity to get everyone's attention when they're not distracted by the other 5,000 things that usually buzz around them at the office.

This is, sometimes, easier said than done. Depending on your company, the company meeting can be a lofty affair reserved for the higher echelons. I think the key to success is another echo of my previous "Omit Needless Words" post: pare what you want to say down to the most essential information. Ask for five minutes to tell the single most important training tidbit of the entire year. If you can't get on the stage, ask to hand out fliers as people leave.

I'm lucky - since I'm in a training company, asking for a few minutes to tell a training story isn't a terribly hard sell. I sometimes get to speak at the company-wide meeting, sometimes at the sales meeting, but I can usually get a few words spoken about those Most Important Things. Got another great tactic for sharing information at company gatherings? Please share them in the comments.

Peer to Peer Support for Training Administrators: The MindLeaders User Group

Are you a training administrator?

Have you ever wondered how other training administrators use their MindLeaders products?

Got a great idea for promoting your training programs that you'd love to share?

Want to know how colleagues tackle the problems that are causing you the most pain?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may be interested to know that MindLeaders has a user group just for you! MindLeaders User Group (MUG) is a mailing list and Google Group web site for training administrators using MindLeaders products. Take advantage of the MUG to connect, network, and build on each others' successes

For more information or to join MUG, contact Education Services at EdServices@MindLeaders.com!

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.

Top six things new managers need to know

This week's Inside Training included information about a newly-released study of new managers' questions, problems, and assumptions as they transitioned into their new roles. The survey covered 2,600 managers and 149 companies over five years.

One of the highlights of their study:

The five most difficult transition challenges in order of frequency were:

1. Doing versus managing the work;
2. Managing former peers;
3. Letting go of being the expert;
4. Lack of time to get things done; and
5. Producing results versus developing and coaching people.

We all know the drill: first-time managers are usually not selected because they have management skills, but are selected instead because they really know the work they're now managing. Management, though, requires a completely different set of competencies than working the front lines. It's tough for new managers to take a step back; sometimes they don't even realize that they now need to be caring for the people doing the work rather than doing the work themselves, let alone figure out how to do that.

This issue has been a huge one on the mind of MindLeaders in the past year+. We released a Management Skills Introduction series specifically to hit those most-needed topics for new managers. Our top six topics are:

• Motivating - firing up and giving constructive feedback to your team
• Planning - taking a look at the big picture, communicating that to your team, and setting them in the right direction
• Communication - speaking clearly with the team, even when it's about bad news, and listening to and probing what the team thinks
• Getting input - getting honest, candid, and constructive thoughts from your team and really hearing what they have to say
• Dealing with challenging people and times - keeping your head during change, or when a team member is out of line
• Building management success - managing up and building relationships with coworkers, managing your time and yourself

What do you think of that list? What are the most important topics you'd give to new managers when they arrive at their new job?

Learning leaders need to know more than just how to train

Citrix Online is sponsoring a Forrester Research report on the new competencies that learning leaders need to have. It's making an important point about one of my favorite organizational development themes: the need for training to be aligned directly with the organization's goals.

In order to properly align those learning and company goals, this report points out, the managers of learning have to be fluent in executive-speak, in the functions of the business, and directly involved in the organization as a whole. I heartily agree, and this report gives interesting lists of what they see as the specific roles and functions that learning leaders need to be prepared for.

Great food for thought for all of us in learning, including the executives and executives-to-be. Check it out!

H/T The eLearning Guild