It's time for another edition of the Learning and Development Roundup! (See also previous editions at the archive page.)
ASTD Employee Learning Week is December 7 - 11
The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) is again celebrating employee learning in organizations with their Employee Learning Week (ELW) program December 7-11, 2009. As their website indicates, "Employee Learning Week is an awareness campaign highlighting the important connection between learning and achieving organizational results." Learning and training are more important now than ever before, as "the growing skills gap and the increased need to compete in today's economy require organizations to develop a knowledgeable and highly skilled workforce." See their list of ideas for how your organization can get involved and read about the ways that dozens of your peers celebrated ELW in 2007 and 2008.
Celebrating 50 Years of Four Levels
There is another celebration going on in our industry, a birthday of sorts for a key L&D industry model: Donald Kirkpatrick's Four Levels Model for evaluating the impact of workforce development initiatives. The November issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine focused on this, starting with the great article "The Kirkpatrick Model: Past, Present and Future" by Jim and Wendy Kirkpatrick. Additional articles in the same issue include "The Father of the Four Levels" by Daniel Margolis, "Simplified ROI: Measuring What Matters Most" by Howard Prager and Susan Vece, "Emerging Issues in Measurement" by Jeffrey Berk, "It's Time for Measurement Strategy" by Chris Moore, and finally a closing column by Donald Kirkpatrick himself "Same Model, New Challenges." For anyone who either wants to get up to speed with learning measurement and the history of the Kirkpatrick model, or is in the middle of implementing any sort of evaluation or ROI-measurement system, this issue is a goldmine.
Two Key Recent Industry Reports
The L&D industry has seen several new and important reports released in the past few months. ASTD recently announced their 2009 State of the Industry report, "a comprehensive look at the training and development investments, practices, and trends for 2008." This report for ASTD members provides data for from 301 organizations, including members of the ASTD Benchmarking Forum and ASTD BEST Award winners.
Also, industry analysts Ambient Insight have released their latest study, "The U.S. Market for Self-Paced E-Learning Products and Services: 2009-2014 Forecast and Analysis." Their press release notes that the U.S. E-Learning market will reach $16.7 billion in 2009, with demand growing by a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.4%, with revenues reaching $23.8 billion by 2014. I highly recommend that you read their free executive overview.
2009 Brandon Hall Excellence in Learning Awards Announced
Also announced recently were the 2009 edition of the Brandon Hall Excellence in Learning Awards. Element K is proud to have garnered two of these coveted awards: Best Custom Content (Silver) for the course "The Green Grid Measures and Metrics" and Best Innovation in Learning Technology (Bronze) for our incorporation of Web 2.0 collaboration tools into the KnowledgeHub LMS to support informal learning. Selections for the Brandon Hall Awards are based on potential impact, applicability, ease of adoption, and overall value for learning professionals.
Learning Circuits Big Question: What is the Value of Social Media for Learning?
How do I communicate the value of social media as a learning tool to my organization? That is the question that ASTD's Learning Circuits asked the L&D blogging community for the month of November. As always, the "big question" generated plenty of interesting responses, including perspectives from folks such as Jay Cross, Jane Hart, Karl Kapp, Clive Shepherd, Clark Quinn, Tony Karrer, and many others. If you are trying to convince others in your organization (or yourself!) of the value of social media for learning, this series of blog postings is a great place to start.
Jane Hart on Five Categories of Learning
Most people recognize the high-level distinction between what is called Formal Learning vs. Informal Learning. In considering how social media can be used for learning in an organization, Jane Hart wasn't comfortable with just these two categories, so she set out to get a bit more precise in how we conceptualize the learning that occurs in our organizations. She arrived at five categories, which she named at her blog as follows:
- Intra-Organizational Learning (IOL)—Keeping the organization up to date and up to speed on strategic and other internal initiatives and activities.
- Formal Structured Learning (FSL)—Formal education and training like classes, courses, workshops, etc. (both synchronous and asynchronous).
- Group Directed Learning (GDL)—Groups of individuals working in teams, projects, study groups, etc. Even two people working together in a coaching and mentoring capacity.
- Personal Directed Learning (PDL)—Individuals organizing and managing their own personal or professional learning.
- Accidental & Serendipitous Learning (ASL)—Individuals learning without consciously realizing it (aka incidental or random learning).
While its not likely that this set of acronyms will catch on in our industry right away, I think Jane has done us all a great service in clarifying these five distinct concepts. Jane's colleague Harold Jarche then assisted by providing a useful visual of these five concepts, that clearly identifies each on a grid representing Individual, Group, Organization on one axis and Undirected, Self-Directed, Directed on the other axis. Then Jane took her analysis a step further and provided dozens of examples of how social media can be used for each learning approach. This mapping of examples to concepts is a great resource for you as you consider learning in your own organization, and how best to blend the use of social media tools.
Harold Jarche on Train Speeds and Bridging the Adoption Chasm
Harold Jarche's blog had several great postings this week, and I'd like to draw your attention to two of them. First he draws your attention to an analogy found in Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s book, Revolutionary Wealth, which compares various societal structures and institutions and their willingness to change. This is very instructive given the amazing pace of change facing L&D professionals today. He also wrote about the need to bridge the chasm between early adopters and the early majority, and provided an insightful table that suggests the average current stage for many of the Web 2.0 and other new technologies L&D professionals are integrating into their learning programs. Where is your organization in the practical adoption of some of these innovative learning approaches?
David Mallon on Back to Basics in 2010
And finally, at this time of year most magazines, bloggers, and others will set out to either give a wrap-up look back at the year that was, and/or make some predictions about what we might expect in learning and development in the year ahead. One of the first to do so this year is David Mallon of Bersin & Associates, in his blog posting Back to Basics in '10. After noting the tough year that was 2009, Mallon notes that "The learning industry as a whole seems to get that it has reached a point in its history where it must evolve or face rapid obsolescence." He then clarifies what he means by "back to basics" as "cutting through the distractions, asking ourselves hard questions about where and how we can add the most value to the organization, and optimizing our processes to leave no possible question of underutilization or inefficiency." He notes that L&D departments need to be focused on two key questions: "Are we truly working on the right things to help the business get where it needs to go? And, are we as good at the business of learning as we must be in order to succeed?" In discussing these two questions, Mallon argues that a focus on social learning is anything but a distraction, but rather a means to get "back to basics" by giving the L&D group a way to better enable informal learning. In other words, given that informal learning has always been around, isn't it high time you took the reins and started to better support and enable it?
Updates from Element K
As usual, I'll end this roundup posting with links to our newsletter service that we launched earlier this year. Each newsletter includes several articles of relevance to the Learning and Development field, as well as updates about Element K events and our latest product releases. You can see the latest newsletters here: June, July, August, September, October, November, and December.
— Thomas Stone (Tom_Stone@elementk.com, and on Twitter @ThomasStone)
Comments