Service Providers - How Do You Find Good Ones

Within a few hours of each other, I received two requests for referral to service providers. One request was for eLearning development providers from fairly large 5,000+ employees based in the US.

We've looked at a few eLearning vendors and haven’t been thrilled. We found the three US vendors expensive and/or light on good ID and the India-based vendors (Tata and Brainvisa) are priced really well, but would require more extensive project, quality and ID management. So the 50K question is do you have any really high quality referrals – that might also be able to come in at reasonable prices and would be able to to turn a 2 or 3-hour ILT into a simple yet sophisticated CBT all the way up to eventual simulations and online custom leadership content?

Likely they would want to have a provider who is fairly local, but not sure about it. They are fairly new to eLearning design and development.

The other request is for providers of new-hire orientation outsourcing companies:

My boss wants me to look up the three (or so) best-in-industry new-hire orientation outsourcing companies. Does anyone have experience in this area to help me out, or at least direct me where to search? That would be MUCH appreciated!

I have a few thoughts on where you might go to search for this, but I would be curious how people who read this blog would go about finding service providers for themselves, or how they would advise these two people to go about it?

For thoughts about this, but from the service providers perspective (especially service professionals such as accountants, attorneys, consultants, etc.) take a look at Social Media for Service Professionals and Social Media to Build Reputation and Reach Prospects – More Ideas.

Leading Learning and New Skills

This month on the Learning Circuits Blog - I asked some very leading questions

If we have responsibility for informal learning, social learning, eLearning 2.0, long tail learning, etc. then ...

• Don't we have to conclude that learning professionals must be literate in these things?
• If so, then what should learning professionals do to become literate?
• Should workplace learning professionals be leading the charge around these new work literacies?
• Shouldn't they be starting with themselves and helping to develop it throughout the organizations?
• And then shouldn't the learning organization become a driver for the organization?
• And like in the world of libraries don't we need to market ourselves in this capacity?
  

If we really care about improving performance, then we need to recognize the scope of our Learning Responsibility and to broaden ourselves to go from Learning Objectives to Performance Objectives and Business Needs.

Kimberly McCollum in The networked nature of information fairly calls me out for asking such leading questions -

They are more like a rhetorical rallying cry to the already converted. “Yes! We should!”

However, in defense, I would point that there's a disconnect between saying "Yes" and the level of understanding and adoption among people in the profession. Go to an ASTD conference and ask about this stuff. You won't find many who even are aware of any of this. I'm personally out to change this, but we are a long way from being in a position to lead.

And let me back up the need with some thoughts from other bloggers on these questions...

The Learning Revolution: Where have all the leaders gone?

It's not necessary to use all the new online tools that are out there but it is necessary to know about them and understand them if for no other reason than it gives you options, and may improve personal and organisational performance.

I don't believe that a learning professional could call themselves as such without being aware of all the latest developments in learning methods /approaches.

Harold Jarche - Skills 2.0

Enabling learning is no longer about just disseminating good content, if it ever was. Enabling learning is about being a learner yourself, sharing your knowledge and enthusiasm and then taking a back seat. In a flattened learning system there are fewer experts and more fellow learners on paths that may cross. With practice, one can become a guide who has already walked a path. As fields of practice and bodies of knowledge expand, a challenge for learning professionals will be to change their tool sets from prescriptive to supportive.

Gina Minks: Adventures in Corporate Education What Competencies do Knowledge Workers Need?

How can you design with these new tools if you don’t understand them? How can you apply them to your existing systematic learning system if you don’t know what the heck wiki even means? So, yes, learning professionals must learn and use these tools, and then apply the tools to their existing framework.

Clark Quinn - Learnlets: Lead the Charge?

The point being that to truly help an organization you have to move to a performance focus, moving people from novice, through practitioner, to expert, and giving them a coherent support environment. To do this, you need to know what’s available. And, consequently, the learning organization has to experiment with new technologies for it’s own internal workings to determine how and when to deploy them to organizational benefit.

Stephen Lahanas - Welcome to The Revolution

We are indeed at a cross-roads in our perception of what learning can or should be be. It is definitely a revolution, one that can be equally applied to both the personal and organizational level.

Those educators who truly believe that the learners come first and that learning is a continual process should not feel intimidated by whatever new technologies emerge that might be applied to education. This is not a threat - it is enhancement that enriches both learners and educators.

Shilpa Patwardhan: Would you trust a firefighter who did not know how to fight fire?

How in the world can we kid ourselves that not keeping up is okay? Would you trust a firefighter who did not know how to fight fire? Would you trust a lifeguard who did not know the latest life-saving techniques? Would you trust a surgeon who did know the latest surgical procedures? Then why should anyone trust learning professionals who wonder whether they need to be familiar with latest technology?

Catherine Lombardozzi - The short answer is yes

If a learning professional wants to be a thought leader in his or her organization around how to support learning in the workplace, he or she cannot be illiterate in these new technologies.

As learning professionals, not only do we have to come up to speed on the technologies, we have to develop a clearer understanding of how these 2.0 technologies can be used to support learning. Otherwise, our organizations will stumble, and we’ll wind up behind instead of ahead.

Kevin Shadix - There's no "I" in "We."

A big mistake made by way too many folks is to preach the good word without having gone through the transformation themselves. Web 2.0 represents a whole mind shift, not just a set of tools. It is the power of “we” not “I”. It is about people creating content together, not the lone, brave hero leading the pack. The only way to “get it” is to try it.

Deb Gallo - Lead the charge?

As L&D professionals it’s up to us to be innovative and introduce the business to tools and methods that will ultimately improve business performance.

We need to develop our competencies, skills and comfort levels with these new tools. Unless you try it you won’t really get your mind around the possibilities they bring or how you might use them in the workplace.

Taruna Goel - New Work Literacies - Leading the Way

I don’t want to be a learning professional who is sitting on the fence and talking about new tools and technologies and hasn’t used any!

Several people suggested that we should use caution when considering any leadership role ...

Kevin Shadix - There's no "I" in "We."

2.0 has implications beyond the learning function, and we need to let other groups discover and figure out for themselves how they want to use them.

Clive Shepherd

The application of web 2.0 to organisations is not exclusively a learning issue - it permeates all aspects of the way in which people network and collaborate. First of all, the web 2.0 concept must be appropriate to the organisation, and this is open to question when you're looking beyond knowledge workers. Assuming it is appropriate, champions can come from many quarters. If learning professionals have really bought into the idea and can demonstrate how they are applying it productively, then they are in a good position to lead the charge. If not, someone else from another business function will step in.

Jay Cross - No, no, no, no.

It’s presumptuous to assume learning professionals are going to be “leading the charge.” This is not some independent effort. Organizational stakeholders better be taking the lead. And we’d better be supporting their vision.

Of course we must use network technologies ourselves. Understanding how to apply social networks to improve organizational performance is a prerequisite for shaping learning and development from here on out. People who are illiterate in network technology need not apply.

Some good specific suggestions:

Kerry McGuire - Live and Learn: What's the real question?

• Find two or three people with wide networks and help them solve a workplace issue using these tools.
• Recruit other people that are passionate to start sending out the same message.

Christy Tucker - Experiencing E-Learning: Leading by Example

If I had to focus on one single skill, it would be lifelong learning. Perhaps this isn’t a skill so much as an attitude.

Peter Isackson - Phoning it in

I would put my effort into making it work from the bottom up and demonstrate how it can achieve other things than self-promotion.

Blogs, Social Networks and LinkedIn Answers

I received a great question from someone relative to my last post - Required Reading for Training Managers where I continue to suggest the benefits of blogging (see Blogging - I'm Pushing Harder Now and Top Ten Reasons To Blog and Top Ten Not to Blog for recaps of much of this). The question was:

What is your assessment of the relative benefits of pure blogging vs LinkedIn Answers and other social networking platform-based discussion venues?

I consider LinkedIn Answers to be quite a different animal. The way I use LinkedIn Answers is to ask specific questions (never open ended or partially thought out the way I do in a blog) that I want to get specific answers or find people with expertise who I can't seem to find by searching LinkedIn normally. This question goes only to my network and then also out to the rest of the world who look at Answers. It's a great way to get help on specific inquiries. But, it's just that.

For example, the question above would probably be okay in LinkedIn Answers, but you might want to change it a bit to be more specific.

LinkedIn Answers is limited in time and does not create any kind of sustained conversation. But it does work across both your own and your indirect network.

Social Network based discussions (for example a Ning network) act like communities. I've had several posts talking about the differences of conversation in communities and those via blogs (network-based discussion). I'd look at:

• Blogs vs. Discussion Groups or Mis-Understanding Blog Reading and Blog Communities
• Blogs vs. Discussion Groups
• More on Blogging and Community Issues

There's a fair amount to consider around the differences. To me blogging is a great engine for network-based conversation and continuous learning. You likely can use a community the same way, but most people don't.

Likely looking at how to Learn and Network with a Blog ways to promote Blog Discussion
and Types of Blog Discussions are also good pieces.

It still comes down to a personal style, commitment level (to sustained learning).

But Wendy and Karyn will tell you it has high value for them. Of course, we all know they are both pretty weird.

Required Reading for Training Managers

Great post from Karyn Romeis -Either it matters or it doesn't. It discusses the all too common issue that learning professionals receive assignments to create learning solutions only to find out that the client doesn't really know what they want/need, and worse yet, really don't care, or the audience isn't willing to give time / attention to it, or you lack SME attention, etc.

There is often the perception on the part of the client that they should be able to say "We want an elearning about health and safety in the workplace" and we will go away for a few days, only to return with an all-singing, all-dancing piece of elearning that covers exactly what they wanted to cover and includes all sorts of sexy graphics and clever interactions.

Later in the post ... she raises a great question.

So when they say the same things of the management development programme they have asked me to develop, but getting access to SMEs and stakeholders is like pulling teeth, well then I have a hard time believing them. When words and actions are mismatched, the true message is in the actions.

Wouldn't you say?

I've discussed similar kinds of issues in What Clients Really Want : eLearning Technology.

But what really struck me as I read this and also took a look back at some of the discussion between Karyn and Wendy (see Please Stop Throwing Stuff at Me!!!!) ...

This is fantastic stuff that should be required reading for all Training Managers.

It's a great example of the value of blogging. It offers Wendy and Karyn fantastic opportunities to help each other out ... sometimes they are the only two leaving comments. But, it is also quite a treasure trove of information on what works or doesn't work in their worlds.

As I'm thinking about it - likely it's a treasure trove for anyone starting out being an eLearning developer / designer. This is what life is really like. This is what you face. This is how they handle it.

This represents some of the best of what blogging is all about!

Brain 2.0

I had a nice six hour drive today with my wife, Margaret, who is an ex high school counselor and teacher along with all the normal credentials and masters degrees, etc. Part of our conversation was in my changing belief about the importance of learning a bunch of facts that someone can look up at a later time. Does a student really need to know all the state capitals? I argued that it was more important for my kids to know:

a. when they might care about a capital in their life (when they might want to know about a capital) and how to look up a capital (and possibly how to check the accuracy if they are just using google).

than it was for them to know

b. the 50 capitals, states and the locations of the states.

Granted, I am sometimes amazed that people have no clue where a state is and I'm certainly happy that my kids have done well on the capitals/states tests in their lives, but I'm still pretty adamant that we should be looking at aiming at creativity, synthesis, composition, etc. more than memorization. We need to create students who are knowledge-able rather than knowledgeable.

I also had to vent on my poor wife about a question asked by a history professor in college. The class cost me my 4.0 GPA (and I only had to take it because of a weird rule that I couldn't count my AP US History Units against college world history so those AP Units did me no good ... the horror of the situation). In any case, the question was two parts multiple choice. (1) "What was the population in England in 1800?" (2) "What percentage worked in agriculture?". I actually knew the first part, because I believe that fully 10% of the population had moved to London which had grown to 1M people. (Now these facts could be completely wrong some 25 years later, but that's besides the point.) I got part 1 correct. The second part I had to guess between 25% and 35% or some such thing and still don't remember.

I could have told the professor about the move towards more urban and away from agriculture, but he didn't ask that. He didn't know if I knew the important concepts that he stressed in the class. No he had to ask a ridiculous memorization question. I vowed never to ask such a thing or at least to have all open book tests so that such questions were useless. And, I'm pretty sure I stuck to that pledge. But the rest of the world still asks these questions all the time.

And my wife certainly would. She feels it's still important to teach memorization and I don't disagree. You still need memory to be able to pull up how to look up the capitals and when it might apply. But my guess is that your brain would be organized significantly different if you were taught around concepts, and were taught when and how to look-up as opposed to all the little bits.

I get back from the trip and I see a post from Brent - There is no Brain2.0...so why Learning2.0? and I have to jump in and say that I'm not so sure that there's not something along the lines of a Brain 2.0 emerging. I'm not claiming that the brain itself has changed, but instead what's changing is:

• metacognition
• metamemory
• access to information
• access to other people
• access to smart systems

all of this changes what the brain needs to do. A look inside the processing of problems by the brain of someone born today when they reach 40 vs. the brain of someone who is 40 today, I would guess is going to be quite different.