MindLeaders: Fueling the Learning Revolution

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?

PILAR Award open for nominations

The 2009 MindLeaders Performance Improvement and Learning Achievement Recognition (PILAR) awards are open for nominations - have you submitted your company for recognition?

Award submissions - any award submissions, although I have a personal particular love for this one - are a great way to take stock of learning programs and how they're doing at achieving their goals. Of course, they do this while also offering a chance for some useful recognition of yourself and your work.

Nominations are open until August 31, and will be awarded at another great Award Dinner event.

The award categories are:

• Best First Year Program
• Best Marketing Program
• Best ‘Blended Learning’ Solution
• Most Innovative Channel Partner
• Best Measured Results or Impact on an Organization
• Founders Award for Overall Program Excellence

Hope you'll think about applying; the 2009 PILAR PDF will give you all the information about the award and the application process.

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?

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?

The best way to make training succeed: experiment!

Last week I built a page for MindLeaders on Facebook. I've been asked multiple times: "Why?" My answer is "We're trying things out." The longer answer is that it's one of many new avenues we're trying to connect more deeply with MindLeaders clients and the larger training community. Is this specific page going to work? Don't know yet, we have to see whether people respond to it.

In courseware development, we're testing new kinds of pages for our Classroom of One format that we use for technical and certification courses. At the same time, our development mad geniuses are working on a whole new course approach to teach people how to communicate across global cultures... more on that to come.

We're batting around new Web 2.0 and proto-3.0 technologies to look for new ways to harness learning, to make it easier to integrate what people need to learn into the work they need to do. We're kicking a lot of tires and taking a lot of test drives.

I thought of this beehive of activity today when I read what seems like my 3,000th article about how bad our economy is, and how scared people are for their jobs and careers (this article by Tom is full of great ideas, awesome information).

When we're nervous, our natural inclination is to hunker down and stick to what's safe. (Or to flee like our office is a house on fire, but we'll assume that's not a viable option.) But to protect the value of our work and ourselves, we need to do the opposite. We need to experiment, to expand, to look for the better ways of doing what we do.

In each new training program you embark on, try something new in it. Something that has the potential to make that program really sing. It might work, it might not. But track the results, and you'll learn from the experience, and either way, the next training program will be even better.

When the budget police come calling, the question won't be "What did you do in the last five years?", it'll be "What have you done for us lately?" Experimenting with new ideas, using specific goals and measurable results, will make it obvious what you're doing lately and how valuable it is.

What works today won't work as well next year. New possibilities are being born every day. Keep your game fresh. It's recession insurance for your current job and for your larger career.

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.

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.

Integrating Your Learning Program

Your company has made the decision to make online learning part of their training solution, and you have been given the task of making it successful.

What is the key ingredient found within most successful training programs? Integration!

Four foundational principles of integration are:

1. Monitoring learning performance
2. Working with managers
3. Communicating with your target audience
4. Offering reward incentives

Those 4 principles represent one cycle.  Since integration is a cyclical process, the follow up – starting the cycle over again and analyzing the data - is what successful integration is all about.

To learn more, visit the “Integrating Your Learning Program” trailer in the MindLeaders Training and Development Toolbox under the Resource Center tab, or schedule an appointment with your Education Services Consultant.

Brandon Hall Excellence in Learning Awards are accepting entrants

Got a training program, ROI tracking system, or learning content that you're proud of? Want a fantastic way to show off to your managers and the rest of the world how awesome it is? Brandon Hall has announced the opening of their 2009 Excellence in Learning awards.

Awards are being given in the following categories:

• Best Custom Content
• Best Innovation in Learning Technology
• Best Integration of Learning and Talent Management
• Best Learning Game
• Best Learning Team
• Best Results of a Learning Program
• Best Use of Blended Learning
• Best Use of Games for Learning
• Best Use of Mobile Learning
• Best Use of Video for Learning
• Best Use of Virtual Worlds for Learning
• Best Use of Web 2.0 Tools for Learning

Entries can be submitted until March 6 (April 3 for the "Best Custom Content" category).

I'm a big believer in awards. Not for the hardware that collects dust, but because even applying for awards makes me take a fresh look at the measurable impact my projects have. And, of course, winning an award is gold for third-party confirmation of the worth of a program.

By all means, set aside a little time to take a look at the categories and think about submitting a training project you're working on!

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!