There are many great sources of information in the Learning and Development industry, from several high-quality magazines, to dozens of outstanding blogs (see my RSS overview posting), and now the steady stream of links, ideas, and conversations from industry experts and practitioners on Twitter (see my posting about Twitter and the L&D industry).
In fact, typically the problem isn't lack of information but lack of time to keep up with the latest news, trends, and advice. With this posting I'm introducing what I intend to be a regularly recurring feature of Element K Blog, tentatively titled the "Learning and Development Roundup." The idea is to recruit lots of my smart colleagues here at Element K, ask them to send me their biggest takeaways from what they are reading and seeing in the field, and I'll act as a funnel to organize the information and post it here in a consistent format.
With that said, this first installment is entirely from my own recent reading and research. Here are the items from around the L&D industry that I hope you didn't miss in the past six weeks or so:
Elliott asks "What keeps you up at night?"
At LearningTown, Elliott Masie asks another provocative question, and thus far has gotten 60 responses from L&D leaders and practitioners. These ranged from questions of keeping training relevant to skills needed today, increasing the value of the L&D function in your organization, weathering the economic recession, challenges with specific projects, and much more.
Jay Cross' latest two CLO Magazine columns.
Jay's February column "Get Out of the Training Business" was one of his most provocative yet. After giving a recap of his views of the salient history leading up to the present, he provides the "pitch I’d offer the most senior person I could get a hearing with." This begins with "Next week, we will close the training department. We are shifting our focus from training to performance. Any remaining training staff will become mentors, coaches, and facilitators who work on improving core business processes, strengthening relationships with customers, and cutting costs." Read the rest of his column to find out the rest of this radical (or is it?) pitch, and for more along these lines, see also "The Future of the Training Department" by Jay Cross and Harold Jarche.
In his March column "Internet Culture" Jay is a bit less provocative, but just as insightful. He begins by noting that the Internet is so pervasive that Internet values are cropping up all over the place in real life. He then describes nine Internet values that will have relevance for corporate learning now and in the future: peer power, authenticity, transparency, perpetual beta, the long tail, connections, asymmetrical productivity, loose coupling, and ambient find-ability. I strongly recommend this article to learn Jay's thoughts on each of these.
ASTD Learning Circuits Blog's "Big Question" for March: Workplace Learning in 10 Years.
This posting asks the following set of questions: "If you peer inside an organization in 10 years time and you look at how workplace learning is being supported by that organization, what will you see? What will the mix of Push vs. Pull Learning; Formal vs. Informal supported by the organization? Are there training departments? What are they doing? How big are they as compared to today? What new departments will be responsible for parts of workplace learning? What will current members of training departments be doing in 10 years?" With over two dozen response postings, there is no shortage of opinions and insights. Who will be right? Be sure to bookmark this page and check back in 2019.
And to really stretch your mind for what might be coming in the future, see the Microsoft video that Jay Cross noted in response to this Big Question.
Clark Quinn's blog posting "The Future of Failing Formal"
As Clark notes, this post is adding to the controversial debate kicked off by Saul Carliner's response to the March "Big Question" described above: "Long Live Instructor-Led Learning" at eLearn Magazine. (I recommend reading Saul's article first.) Clark gives his frank opinion of weaknesses of the various formal learning modalities, and then concludes as follows: "By and large, lots of formal instruction isn’t worth the resources it took to develop, or the learners’ time. Saul’s right that there’s a role for formal, but it needs to be better in many ways…and it shouldn’t be isolated from informal. I believe that formal learning ought to have an elegant segue from formal to the broader learning community, rather than in isolation. Yes, formal is part of the full spectrum, the full ecosystem, the full learnscape of solutions. But the ‘classroom’ shouldn’t be the standard bearer. We aren’t calling for the death of formal instruction, we’re calling for a) acknowledging and incorporating informal learning, and b) death of the classroom as a ’showup and throwup’ or ’spray and pray’ proposition."
ASTD Learning Circuits article "E-Learning and the Economy"
In February, Learning Circuits asked readers how their learning departments were "adapting to these difficult economic conditions." Consistent with other such surveys, we see an increase in e-learning: 71% were considering e-learning as a way to extend the learning function during the economic downturn. A second question asked what technologies or approaches will you be increasing/decreasing use of, and the top vote-getters are also those that you can make a good cost-savings argument for:
- Web conferencing/virtual meetings for travel cost-saving reasons. (66%)
- Use low-cost Web 2.0 technologies, such as wikis and blogs. (66%)
- Re-use existing content, such as creating e-learning via PowerPoint conversion. (65%)
See the full results for the data for many other areas, such as mobile learning, the use of games and simulations in learning, coaching and mentoring, and more. And see also my recent blog posting on Elliott Masie's recent industry "Barometer" survey.
— Thomas Stone (Tom_Stone@elementk.com)
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