The arguments are hard to ignore and the reasons to move beyond ‘training’ are myriad. Things are moving faster, information is doubling at a rapid rate, the ability for products and services to be copied is down to almost minutes. No matter how entrenched your industry, or how deep your pockets, imminent threats are promised. Knowledge work is the proposed differentiator for organizations, going forward.
However, is it the elearning function’s job? Let’s start from the contrary position. Formal learning helps novices become practitioners, and that needs to happen. However, if we consider the range of individual ability, it goes way beyond novices, through practitioners to experts. And there are learning needs for these folks, including mentoring, performance support, and collaboration. We could abandon that to other groups, maybe letting IT run knowledge management and supporting social infrastructure, and allowing product or service teams to provide information about their offerings, and sales to support their folks.
The problem is, we know how well that works (or, rather, not). The information from the functions is hard to find, not well organized, and not well-written. IT is more concerned about keeping a secure and stable environment than empowering people. And who better to support organizational learning than the learning function? Yet there are a lot of established ways that technology can help along the whole range of expertise.
That may seem like a lot of responsibility, but no one’s suggesting you need to take it on all at once. More important is to take it on step-by-step, with an awareness of the larger picture. And note the upside: the more you’re facilitating activities that go beyond just competency training, and supporting individuals to contribute in richer ways to organizational success, the more you’re becoming not just a cost-center, but a major contributor to organizational strategy. This is the path to relevance, and a seat at the table. Your executives should be seeing the need for accelerating the knowledge work that contributes most to the bottom line, and you are offering a viable path.
Let’s acknowledge that these are tough times. The learning function, like everyone else, is being asked to do more with less. And, of course, traditionally training is the first to go. Counter to all that is the notion that the best action to take in tough times is to develop internal capacity, to be poised when things get better. Which is admittedly an optimistic approach, and the reality is your organization may be concerned more about mere survival.
However, there are significant steps that can be taken that are relatively inexpensive, and offer a strong potential upside; the proverbial low-hanging fruit. What are these steps?
Simple steps
Deeper eLearning. First, most of the elearning is, frankly, not as well done as could be expected. The low-hanging fruit here is an elearning review, looking at sample content and working backward through the design processes to tighten up the definitions around the components. Regardless of whether it’s in-house or outsourced, there almost always are opportunities for improvement. Mind you, I’m not talking about better production values, but instead really getting at the cognitive and affective components that make learning experiences really stick. Most designers don’t know the nuances, sadly, yet tightening up the templates is an easy step to take, resulting in learning that will work better. If the team is under your control, setting up a workshop to detail the thinking that goes into the revised templates will work better, but even just an update to your provider’s model will help both learner engagement and final outcomes.
Portal optimization. Another missed opportunity is not coming to grips with the proliferation of portals. It’s not uncommon their to be a plethora of portals in even medium-sized organizations, which consequently get underused. Two problems exist: there are so many portals people don’t know where to go, and when they get there, the portals aren’t organized well nor kept up to date. Consequently, the benefits originally intended to be gained from portals get lost. Reviewing your organization’s portals and developing a plan to consolidate and optimize the user experience is a major opportunity to improve employee productivity.
Going mobile. Going more informal, real potential exists in the increasing ubiquity of mobile devices. Many now have devices that can play audio, or even video, and access web-based content. While more interactive experiences can be designed, the platform differences mean that mobile may be more involved than you think. However, there’s probably a lot of content that could already be made available for mobile delivery with minor tweaks, and the opportunity is big. Off-time access has proved useful for engineering groups to listen to each other’s white papers, firms to capture significant speeches, and share captured learning events, all as podcasts. Videos have been used to support service technicians and sales folks improve their field performance. Finally, access of content can serve both convenience and context-based access. Naturally, more optimized uses are possible, but just providing such access meets an untapped opportunity.
Getting social. Another opportunity is to consider the use of social media to help support capturing and sharing knowledge. Firms have found big benefits in enabling conversations internally and with customers. Customers will self-help and help each other if there is an effective approach in place. And internally, conversations can be conducted more broadly, lessons learned can be shared. The installation of a social learning environment is relatively easy, but more effort is required in nurturing the environment to achieve critical mass. The benefits however, – employees finding the needed expertise, sharing answers, collaborating to solve problems and create new opportunities – are huge. Enabling and optimizing the flow of employee communication is the key opportunity to capitalize on knowledge work.
Modelling content. A further step from here is to systematize around not just the content development process, but the content models. This is moving towards content governance, standards, and tags, starting with separating the content from it’s delivery format. The opportunity here is to maximize efficiency by eliminating redundancy, and providing opportunities to start offering personalization and mass customization. This systematization provides the foundation for smart business going forward, and also is an enabler for mobile in particular.
The point is that, no matter where you are, there’s a next step available.
A step above
Of course, ideally you’d survey where you are today, look across these opportunities, take in the broader context, and prioritze these not just for the immediate step, but in order that they systematically build capability in your organization. The point is to build an over-arching strategy that gives you not only tomorrow’s next step, but next month’s, and next year’s, and… With such a strategy in hand, you’ve got ammunition to talk to the business leaders, and start taking the leadership role that you’ve been entitled to but have neglected.
While these steps vary some in their costs, all have specific steps that can create improvement on a very reasonable budget. And the status quo is not an option: the imperatives are real, and those who don’t address it head on are doomed to be left in the dust. The take home lesson is to take a next step, whether it’s one of the tactics, or to first put the tactics into a prioritized order. So what are you waiting for?
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