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As 2010 gets going, many in the L&D industry continue to face the job-search struggle. Many more will encounter a similar need this year or in years ahead, so I thought it might be helpful to provide a blog posting with some resources to aid your search. I'm not talking about the obvious "big and broad" sites for job hunting, places like Monster, CareerBuilder, and others, or the social networking sites, like LinkedIn, that can be so crucial during a job search. Rather, I want to share some sites and other resources that focus on just our Learning and Development field.
First off, many of the key organizations in our industry provide help for those searching for work or looking to further develop their careers. A few of these (with an emphasis on North America) include:
See also page 84 of the July T+D Magazine, "Know Your Value in the Marketplace," by Judy Estrin.
Another good resource is the salary data provided on page 24 of the October/November issue of Training magazine.
And my friend Mike Lally provides sage advice in his presentation on Using Social Media in Your Job Search.
And lastly, an interesting and perhaps, at times, humorous resource for you is this wiki of obsolete skills.
So those are just a few links that I hope will be helpful for those in the job hunt in the L&D industry. What key resources did I miss? Which organization sites and job banks are the best for Europe, Asia, and other areas of the world? What sites have you found helpful in your own job search or career development? Please provide good links in the comments to this post!
— Thomas Stone (Tom_Stone@elementk.com, and on Twitter @ThomasStone)
It’s time for another edition of the Learning and Development Roundup! (See also volumes one, two, and three.)
On Learning Evaluation and ROI
To start things off, I want to link back to my two most recent postings here at Element K Blog, on the “Increasing Discussion for Learning Evaluation and ROI”: see both Part 1 and Part 2. There I link to and briefly comment on one research report from the eLearning Guild and five articles from Chief Learning Officer magazine and Training magazine. If you only have time to read one of these items, don’t miss the article by Jay Cross and Jon Husband in the July 2009 issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine.
New Skills for Learning Professionals
The "Big Question" posted at the beginning of July — New Skills for Learning Professionals — at ASTD's Learning Circuits blog has by now generated a wealth of responses. Included are postings from such notables as Jay Cross, Harold Jarche, Jane Bozarth, Clark Quinn, Tony Karrer, David Mallon, Ray Jimenez, and many others. If you are looking for work in the learning and development industry, or are just concerned about keeping your career skills current, check out the many responses these experts have provided.
Also on this topic, Clive Shepherd posted a good presentation he developed titled "The E-Learning Skills Gap." Watch this presentation and note Clive's new "SkillsJourney" project mentioned at the end, something I think all learning professionals will be eager to keep tabs on!
On Stepping Up When Layoffs Hit
Generally speaking, I find the columns in each month's Chief Learning Officer magazine tend to be amongst the must-read content in our industry. The July issue's were all good, but I wanted to draw your attention to two in particular. First, Elliott Masie's column titled "Time to Step Up: Learning's Role During Layoffs," covered a topic I'd never really put much thought towards: What are the roles of the learning department during layoffs? No doubt having had an opportunity to reflect on this during the recent economic downturn, Elliott offers up lots of good advice grouped under three headings: skill documentation upon departure, internal reskilling, and decisions and reassignments.
On Avoiding Death by Slide Deck
On the other hand, Bob Mosher wrote his column "More Death by Slide Deck?," on a topic I have spent a lot of time reading and thinking about over the years: making the most of the virtual classroom. I've participated in many great webinar, virtual conference, and virtual classroom events — both as a presenter/instructor and as a student/attendee. But I've also experienced many less-than-great virtual events too. He covers admittedly obvious tips, best practices for session design, and recommendations for the time between the virtual classroom events.
An Outstanding New Blog: Social Media in Learning
Back in March I wrote a posting here titled "Top Learning Tools from the C4LPT" which highlighted the great work of Jane Hart in organizing a wealth of information and links in the Learning and Development industry. If you haven't checked out her site, I encourage you to read my description of it and then check out her work.
Recently, however, Jane has started writing a new blog named "Social Media In Learning Blog." Jane's tireless efforts to stay on top of the L&D industry, coupled with her expertise in this particular area, have immediately made this blog arguably the best of its kind. Get caught up on the posts you have missed so far, and then add this blog to your feed reader or check it out regularly to learn how social learning tools can and are being used in learning and development contexts.
Learning Apps in Facebook?
And speaking of social learning, Ryann Ellis wrote a good posting for ASTD's Learning Circuits titled "Tech Tool: Facebook Applications for Learning," which provides three lists of "applications that represent some of the ideal tools Facebook has to offer online learning." The lists are separated into tools for instructors and administrators, for learners, and for everyone. This is a good place to start when thinking about potential uses for Facebook in your learning programs.
Social Learning…and Instructional Design?
With social learning and informal learning being all the rage these days, Karl Kapp pauses to remind us of the many benefits of sound instructional design. See his blog posting titled "What are the Results of Following an Instructional Design Process?" where he provides a good starter list, one that could be handy if you ever need to defend why time and resources should be spent on sound instructional design (rather than simply pumping out PowerPoint slides and calling it e-Learning, for instance).
Even better than his original posting, however, is the exchange that took place in the comments at his blog, between Karl and Janet Clarey of Brandon Hall Research. Janet raised questions about what role instructional design (or any kind of formal design) has in the areas of informal and social learning. Karl gives good responses, including concrete examples of ways you can add some measure of design to work or learning uses of blogs, microsharing tools, and more. It's definitely worth reading this exchange, in addition to the original blog posting.
Updates from Element K
Lastly, I'm going to start ending these "roundup" postings by providing a link to our latest E-Learning Newsletter. This is a service we started in June, primarily for our customers, but available to anyone. 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, and August.
— Thomas Stone (Tom_Stone@elementk.com)
I will now continue where I left off in the previous Element K posting, "Increasing Discussion of Learning Evaluation and ROI, Part 1." In this part two of two, I will describe and link to the two most provocative articles I've seen on this general topic in the past few months.
In the June 2009 issue of Training magazine, industry book author Saul Carliner gets a bit more provocative with his article "Maybe ROI Really Is a Waste of Time." He notes that one hurdle with ROI for training is that often "senior management is not interested in the evaluation because training isn't a significant part of their portfolio." That is, the total cost of training might be so small, relatively speaking, that cutting its budget will not have a significant cost-reduction impact on the organization. But Carliner then notes "That doesn't mean organizations lack interest in seeing a return on their investment in training. But the effort of showing how each course returned ROI provides little ROI—and that's why senior organizational managers don't actively seek it as much as some of the trade press might have us believe. "
He then raises the importance of non-quantitative approaches to training evaluation: "As suggested by the C-level study mentioned earlier, perceptions play a significant role in assessing the training function. Indeed, the survey by my research team found that word of mouth was the most common measure of effectiveness that training managers felt was important to their sponsor, ranking higher than ROI and course evaluations. "
Carliner concludes his "soapbox" column in this issue with the following advice: "In short, perhaps trainers should stop trying to collect ROI on individual courses because information about the ROI of individual courses requires resources that are rarely available to collect; does not provide a credible measure; and, most significantly, senior managers are not asking for it. Furthermore, because perceptions of training seem to have more credibility—and are more challenged among senior managers—and because other financial data is both more credible and provides more established evidence of the actual return on training, perhaps trainers instead should focus efforts on tracking and managing perceptions and following the broader measures that provide insights into the effectiveness of an organization's total investment in training rather than investments in individual courses."
And finally, in the July 2009 issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine, Jay Cross and Jon Husband take the discussion of ROI in a truly path-breaking direction with their article "Productivity in a Networked Era: Not Your Father's ROI." The authors begin by setting up the discussion: "The network era now replacing the industrial age holds great promise. Networked organizations are reaping rewards for connecting people, know-how, and ideas at an ever-faster pace. Value creation has migrated from what we can see (physical assets) to intangibles (ideas). …Understandably, seasoned executives, chief learning officers among them, are having a devil of a time shifting from the industrial age mindset of logic, certainty, and bounded constraints to the network gestalt of interaction, self-organization, unpredictability, and fewer limits to potential. …We are shifting into an era in which knowledge work and learning occur where re-engineered business processes collide with a participative and interactive ecology of information flows."
Cross and Husband then introduce a new concept as follows: "In an environment of continuous flow and interaction, there’s a need to consider an emerging metric: return on investment in interaction (ROII). The working definition of ROII is the observable development of capacity and capability to create economic values out of intangibles."
In the rest of the article, the authors describe what traditional ROI was, persuasively convince the reader of the increasing value of intangibles, and note the inherent clash between this trend and the demand for ROI metrics. They describe the essential characteristics of business networks, and argue that ROI is simply not up to the task. They then give some assumptions for their analysis of ROII and describe some of the potential components that would be quantifiable. In doing so they include illuminating examples from such companies as Cisco, Ford, and Capgemini. In closing, they frame the challenge as being: "Network returns are asymmetric, so simplistic count-’em-up approaches are no longer viable. But how can one make a solid network-era case to an executive who is still playing by yesterday’s rules?" Read this entire article to learn their initial advice on how to answer that question, and to understand this ground-breaking conceptual proposal for the L&D industry.
— Thomas Stone (Tom_Stone@elementk.com)
With the current economy's impact on Learning and Development budgets, it makes sense that learning leaders would have an increased desire to prove their worth and the worth of the learning and training programs they provide to the organization. At the same time, standards such as the Kirkpatrick model, cost-benefit analysis (CBA), return on investment (ROI), and so on are often criticized by many in the industry. In fact, during a recent Twitter LearnChat, several learning leaders included "ROI for learning" as one of the most overhyped aspects of our industry (alongside the use of virtual worlds, the use of reusable learning objects, and other topics).
At the same time, I've noticed a flurry of recent magazine articles and other resources on this topic, ranging from introductory basics, to good overviews, to provocative, forward-looking challenges. This posting to Element K Blog brings these recent resources together for you in one place.
For starters, if you need a quick primer on the well-established Donald Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Evaluation, check out this website's useful slide presentation.
Another good place where newcomers to the subject can start might be the eLearning Guild's newly published Guild Research report with the title "Building the Business Case for e-Learning." They note that this report is the "first in a new series of Getting Started Guides to help ramp up your organization quickly and successfully in e-Learning." Written by Temple Smolen, the abstract is as follows: "E-Learning can feel like a bit of a minefield when first starting. It seems like there are countless decisions to be made, and mistakes can be costly. Overall, however, most organizations do meet their financial goals with e-Learning, and the majority yield positive returns. In an April 2009 survey of eLearning Guild members, 48% reported a positive return on investment (ROI) from e-Learning, while only 5% reported no return or a negative ROI. In fact, not only do most members generate a positive return, but 50% report a ROI greater than 15%. This report ... will focus on the evaluation phase of investing in e-Learning to determine whether e-Learning is the right delivery method for your organization or project. For most organizations, these decisions are subject to business considerations, so this report will tackle that evaluation from a business management and financial perspective. It will illustrate the early decisions needed, and demonstrate a high-level financial analysis with a detailed ROI calculation."
The May 2009 issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine included "Overcoming Analysis Paralysis," by IDC's program director of learning services Cushing Anderson. Cushing provides several results from the January IDC survey of Chief Learning Officer magazine's Business Intelligence Board (BIB) on the topic of learning measurement. Amongst the numerical survey results, he notes: "There is little disagreement among learning professionals about the value of measurement. When done properly, measurement can demonstrate training’s impact on the company’s top and bottom lines. Key metrics may include employee performance, speed to proficiency, customer satisfaction, improved sales numbers, and more. As the BIB survey shows, the challenge lies in gaining access to these key metrics and finding the time and resources to conduct measurement." He concludes by describing three steps that CLOs can take to "help break the chicken-and-egg tension between measurement and relevance": define success early, establish metrics at the project or business-unit level, and set expectations up front.
The June 2009 issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine included two articles on this general topic. The first was "The Real Reasons We Don't Evaluate," by Jack Phillips and Patti Phillips. The authors describe the following as being perceived barriers to "demonstrating the business contribution of learning and development:"
- It can't be done.
- It's too complicated.
- It's too costly.
- Evaluation takes too much time.
- It's not appropriate to evaluate learning and development.
- No one is asking for it.
In each case, they describe what they see as the reality as against these perceived barriers.
The second article in that issue is "CBA or ROI: That Is the Question," by Deanna Hartley. The author notes that while CBA and ROI are often used interchangeably, "people often denote benefit-to-cost as a ratio, while others in the HR and learning industries refer to ROI analysis as a percentage." Another difference is the perspective: is the endeavor being seen as a cost to be contained, or primarily as an investment? She then discusses the importance of aligning learning with business goals, and several key steps in conducting a cost-benefit analysis for a learning program.
In part two of this two-part blog posting, I'll describe and link to the two most provocative articles I've seen on this general topic in the past few months.
— Thomas Stone (Tom_Stone@elementk.com)
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)
The Masie Center conducted a survey recently that asked various questions regarding how learning budgets, resources, and activities are being impacted by the economic crisis. They gathered 532 responses in March of this year, including organizations large and small. Although they don't say explicitly, I believe the source might be the same as was used for their social learning survey (that I commented on recently as well) which was readers of his Learning TRENDS blog. They plan to repeat this survey periodically so that we can see the trends over time. But for now, they have made available a summary of the results, and I thought I'd share that with readers and provide a few highlights with my own comments:
- The percentage who indicate a decrease in their overall enterprise learning budget is 62% (41% moderately and 21% substantially). That is about five times as many who are increasing moderately or substantially (12%).
- The bigger decrease is in external spending, where 60% are decreasing moderately or substantially, compared with 36% who are decreasing the size of their internal learning department (and hence the cost of that department).
- Not surprising, while for many their overall spending is decreasing, the mix of that spending is also changing. 50% are indicating some level of decrease in ILT classes and seminars (31% moderately, 19% substantially). Part of the reason for this is that often costly travel is involved, and here we see a whopping 79% indicating some level of decrease.
- ILT is being replaced by e-learning, as identical percentages are indicating increased spending for both self-paced e-learning and virtual classroom e-learning (both at 51%). Those that are decreasing spending on e-learning are extremely low: only 8% for self-paced and 5% for virtual classroom.
- Two areas that aren't seeing huge changes in spending are authoring systems and gaming/simulations.
- Three areas that are seeing significant spending increases are social learning (communities and collaboration) with 30% of respondents indicating some level of increase, the related area of user-generated content at 29%, and the increasingly important area of competency management at 24%.
- In addition to increases or decreases in spending, many learning departments are being asked to become more efficient, to achieve great productivity with fewer resources (45%), or at least achieve the same level of output but with fewer resources (30%). Elliott has often remarked since this fall that he expects many organizations to actually focus on their essentials in this time of difficulty, and indeed 9% indicate they will achieve less with fewer resources available.
It will be very interesting to see any significant changes in these numbers when the Masie Center conducts this survey again in the future.
— Thomas Stone (Tom_Stone@elementk.com)
At this time last year, learning and development leaders already had plenty to think about:
o How do I deal with the coming talent shortage from the baby boomers retiring in large numbers?
o How do I train and grow the next generation of leaders at my organization?
o How do I get up to speed on Web 2.0 technologies and what are the best ways to integrate them with my existing learning programs?
o With the growing popularity of mobile devices in the workplace, how can I provide mobile users in my organization with "learning moments" when it is convenient for them?
Those were just a few of the most common areas of concern. Now layer on top of that a full-blown recession with all that it entails: layoffs, budget cuts, and the need to think more creatively than ever to get "more from less."
I've not seen much yet covering the impact of the recession on the learning and development field from the print magazines in our industry. But that is understandable since the official recession hit us rather abruptly in just the past couple of months and print publications have longer production cycles than purely online sources do. That said, the latest issue of CLO Magazine does have an article by Marc Sokol titled “Learning in a Tough Economy”, and a shorter item, “Downturn Dilemmas", that gives some insights from industry experts and CLO columnists Elliott Masie and Josh Bersin.
Online there has of course been much discussion in the past few months, including at Elliott Masie's LearningTown industry social networking site. See also this report from the recent Online Educa Berlin conference: Economic Crisis Boosts E-Learning. And I hope that ASTD's Learning Circuits Blog will tackle this area in a future "Big Question" posting—that would make for interesting reading I think, so keep an eye on it.
Previous downturns in the economy hastened the move from instructor-led training (ILT) to e-learning, given the obvious cost-reduction benefits this brings to an organization. I assume this recession will do much the same; however, there will be some differences. Organizations that have not yet made much of a shift from ILT to e-learning will feel increased pressure to cut travel and other costs and start getting the benefits available from the now mature e-learning industry. One great way to do this is with "blended learning" programs that provide flexibility: by using content that was developed using a single-source model for both modalities, you can still provide ILT to some of your learners, even while you shift an increasing number of them over to e-learning. Or the blend can literally be a combination of ILT and e-learning in one learning program, by using targeted e-learning to cover foundation topics before or advanced topics after the core—but now shortened—ILT session.
One difference from the last recession, however, will be that e-learning is expanding into far more than standard self-paced e-learning courses. We've long also had synchronous "virtual classrooms" as an alternate modality, but now there is an increased interest and emphasis on using Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, and forums to better enable informal learning and performance support in an organization. And in some cases, getting information to people when they need it might require reaching them where they are, which often is away from their desks: hence the rise of mobile learning. All of these trends are likely to intensify in a recessionary economy, because when implemented well, they can each be cost-lowering, productivity-raising changes in an organization.
For learning and development professionals, now is not the time to run and hide and just hope to ride it out. Now is the time to be courageous and set up your organization to flourish when the economy comes out of recession. What have you done to adjust your strategies and learning programs in light of the recession? Are you getting creative and seeking flexible solutions that use a broad range of learning assets and modalities? Has your overall learning and development budget been cut, or perhaps just your travel budget so far? What are you doing as a result: increasing the level of e-learning you use, making use of more blended programs, or exploring other approaches to developing talent in your organization, such as adding Web 2.0 to the mix? How will you accomplish your short-range must-haves, while not sacrificing what the organization will need to thrive down the road?
— Thomas Stone (Tom_Stone@elementk.com)
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