Marginalized

In the T+D article Learning Gets Social, Tony Bingham paraphrases something I said:

In the May issue of T+D, Tony Karrer, an e-learning technologist and CEO of TechEmpower, encouraged companies to start adapting to the current trend in informal learning because otherwise, they will find themselves marginalized in the business.

I thought it would be good for me to put some context around what I meant by this.  Especially given that there's been some push-back on the term "marginalized."

In the Business of Learning, I pointed out that there were some pretty significant questions facing the training industry.  Budgets have been hammered this year, and there's a question as to what spending levels will look like going forward.  During the Free Online Conference – Future of Learning we heard different perspectives. 

• Skill Building Still in Demand.  There was definitely the belief that there are continued need for skills development.  If anything, there is increased need.
• Catalogs / Courses Commoditization.  At the same time, the business of selling a catalog of courses is seen as being tough going forward.  Unless you do something to differentiate yourself in a real way, you will be more and more of a commodity.
• Many Ways to Differentiate.  We heard several people talking about focus on performance.  We heard about use of assessments.  There was discussion about a lot of the things that need to happen outside the training event.

While there are great content vendors out there, I really didn't hear anyone who was claiming that being a content vendor was a great business right now.  Instead, they talked about other kinds of things that would differentiate them in the marketplace.

I believe the same thing is true for internal learning and development organizations.  If you are seen as being the place you go for training / content production, there will still be need for your work, but it will be under greater pressure, just like external training suppliers.

There are some other big picture trends going on that have impact on this:

• Faster pace
• Greater focus and value on high end concept work 
• Job fragmentation – fewer people in any single job role
• Shorter job tenure

These pressures suggest that there are greatly increased learning needs within organizations.  However, less of these learning needs will be successfully met by traditional methods.  If you look at what makes a good situation for formal learning:

• Large Audience
• Similar Level / Needs
• Known, Stable Content
• Few Out of Bounds Cases

Of course, these are almost the opposite of the trends I mentioned.  So, while formal learning solutions will make a portion of how learning will occur, the increased demand for learning will be met through other forms.

This leaves us with the questions:

• What the role of learning and development relative to all of this?
• If L&D leadership chooses to focus primarily on traditional methods and less so on informal learning opportunities, will they be marginalized in the business.

Getting Started

During a recent presentation and workshop to eLearning leaders from across a large organization, it dawned on me that we were making Getting Started with eLearning 2.0 a lot harder than it really needed to be.

This organization was not unlike many other large organizations.  It was clear that there was significant opportunity in this organization for getting started with a broader mix of learning solutions.  Their situation sounded incredibly similar to what I have heard in many different organizations.  Some of the specifics that made me think they could make progress:

• Significant IT support for SharePoint
• Innovators in Knowledge Management and IT who would be great allies
• Support of senior L&D leaders
• Some early adopters of social learning solutions within particular regional learning and development departments

Because I was talking to people with widely varying levels of experience, interest and comfort around web 2.0 tools, it was clear that many of the people would leave the room and not do anything different.  I am hopeful that a few will take on a self-directed learning task around some of the things I talked about in Tool Set to develop their own knowledge and proficiency, but certainly they would not be spearheading any broader learning mix initiatives anytime soon. 

Barrier at the Individual Level

Why is that?  Well, it was expressed pretty well by one of the participants and I think it captures the challenge pretty well that individual L&D practitioners face (paraphrased):

Tony, while I'd like to use some of these approaches, this represents a whole host of new challenges for me in terms of getting agreement within the organization to use this approach (internal clients, L&D leadership, IT, etc.).  I'm already way too busy trying to get my stuff done.  Even if I think this makes a lot of sense, I don't need the headaches.

That's a really great point.  The organization was making it hard and not really supporting individual change agents who wanted to make this stuff happen. 

Role of Senior L&D Leaders

When I say "the organization" was making this hard on individuals - really this rests back on the senior L&D leadership.  They are lucky enough to have some change agents: early adopters who are willing to work to help move this forward.  Their job is to help identify those change agents, identify opportunities, and give support needed to make sure those early adopters can be successful in their project.

I've been finding my advice to L&D leaders almost always turns into the same basic message:

• Choose a few places where it makes sense
• Use existing tools as much as possible
• Give it the support it needs
• Allow for experimentation (and possible "failure")

Is this really that hard?  It takes work, but I don't believe it's hard.

This is much the same Learning 2.0 Strategy that I discussed a year ago.

Avoiding Two Early Traps

While I'm claiming this isn't hard, there are a few common traps that seems to bog down organizations. 

Trap 1 - Leading with Strategy

Even though the title of the post Learning 2.0 Strategy makes it seem like there will be a big picture social learning strategy, the reality is that the strategy is a bottom up strategy.

You do need to look across the organization to see the kinds of business, performance and learning needs where learning 2.0 will apply.  But, trying to jump too far along Dion Hinchcliffe's adoption curve is a problem.  

Plus, jumping too far leads you right into the next challenge.

Trap 2 - Language

While I use the terms "eLearning 2.0", "social learning", etc. and it's fine to use that amongst ourselves, don't use it in mixed company.  Consider the same message with:

We are going to use eLearning 2.0.

- or -

We are going to set up ways for people to exchange ideas and experiences.

I wouldn't really say the second thing, without a lot more context.  The point is that the terms blog, wiki, social network, etc. will likely raise barriers that are not needed.

Bottom Line

The bottom line here is that I believe we often make these things much harder than they need to be.

Yes, there are all sorts of barriers that you have to work through.  And there's work to be done to get through those barriers.  But, I believe the bottom line is that most organizations should be well into the experimentation / ad hoc use of social apps phase.

I welcome your thoughts and feedback.

Second Calendar Curator Joins to Help with List of Free Webinars

I've received very positive feedback and lots of good ideas on the concept of having a combined calendar of Free Webinars. The really nice thing about the way Jon Udell has set up his elmcity project (the system we are using) is that it acts a lot like social curation on RSS sources as provided by Browse My Stuff, but brings together designated calendars instead of blogs or other RSS sources.

In English, that means that we can have many different people each own their separate calendar and we can bring it together.

The initial list of calendar entries, we added ourselves. But I'm pleased to announce that we've just signed up our second calendar curator - Coaching Ourselves. Their events are now appearing in the listings:

Free eLearning Webinars

For now you won't be able to necessarily distinguish the source, but we will work on exposing that in the future. One of the recommendations we've already received.

It is exactly because we can distribute the load of keeping this list current that makes me think this will work really well in the long run.

If you are doing webinars that would be of interest to workplace learning professionals, please contact me: akarrer@techempower.com.

Outsource Training to Customers

The Business of Learning (see Free Online Conference – Future of Learning with Recordings Here) event went really well. One of the really interesting ideas came from Allessandria Polizzi who is Group Manager for Accountant Training & Relations at Intuit. Her role is to make sure that accountants are trained on the Quickbook products.

You can see Allessandria at 21:30 of the following video:

If you have problem seeing the video you can view them here as well.

Intuit used to produce the content themselves, but they have transitioned to hiring their Accountants (their customers) to produce the training content for them. This includes a varied mix of solutions - webinars, seminars, self-paced eLearning. One of the examples of how they did this was to give the Accountants camcorders and software (along with training) so that they could produce small training pieces. One example that she mentions is a video piece on mobile access showing how they can access client information from the beach via a mobile device.

There are 100 accountants who produce training for them as compared to 12 in her organization. These accountants are experts in using their software. They add legitimacy to the content. Many of these accountants already provided training to their end customers, so providing training to other accountants was an easy extension.

It's an interesting idea and something that can be applied in many other domains. While this is similar to having SMEs produce the content - I think that Intuit takes it a bit further with how they are engaging and paying them. They also audition/test their customers. They spread the work pretty wide.

Free Webinars

Have you ever wanted to have a single list of the various free webinars brought together in a single place?   In conjunction with eLearning Learning, we are working with Jon Udell (thanks Jon) to use his calendar aggregation technology to bring together a list of free webinars that we believe will be of interest to learning professionals.

Free eLearning Webinars

Let me know if you think this will be valuable. 

Integrated with Best of eLearning Learning

We are planning to include events that are coming up in the Best of eLearning Learning each week.  We just did exactly that for the post:

Learning Management Systems Flash Technology - Best of eLearning Learning

where we listed three upcoming webinars.  Hopefully another reason to subscribe to the best of eLearning Learning.

Get the Word Out

Hopefully this can grow to address both sides of this need – consumers and producers. 

As a consumer, I seem to randomly run into webinars like you probably did when I just announced: Free Webinar - Models for Learning in a New World.  Because they hit me somewhat randomly, I most often don't schedule it into my calendar at that time.  I know that I'll make a decision later about the event.

As a producer, I know that getting the word out on a webinar can be very difficult.  I will publish the information about the webinar I just mentioned on my blog, but that hits exactly the same audience.  I will tweet about it.  Hopefully a few people will Retweet.  But it doesn't reach all that wide.  I'm hoping that this will become a good way for producers to get the word out.  By the way, if you are producing events that will be of interest to a learning professionals audience, then drop me an email.

Thoughts and Ideas

We are just beginning this process.  We have some ideas on where this will go and how to make it better, but I would really like to get your input.

Is this a good idea?

What can we do to make this better?