Who moved my corporate training cheese?

Technology and the demands of digital natives are disrupting the corporate training market as never before.  I had this belief further crystallized this morning upon reading this article in the HBR blog network. I highly recommend if you are in the learning and development field, you devote a few minutes today to reading it.  Kinda reminded me of that oldie but goodie Spencer Johnson book for some reason, maybe because- "if you do not change, you will become extinct!"

Though the piece mentions massive, open, online courses (or, MOOCs) as the technology driving the disruption in the educational market, it’s not just MOOCs that are disrupting the corporate training sector.  The advancement in cloud technologies, collaboration software, and the advent of easily available social networking and learning management tools are all changing the business of corporate training.  Technology is fundamentally altering the way we receive information.  Everything from how we receive information, who or what delivers it, and how we measure and track what information was exchanged is changing.  With the release of the Tin Can API, you could even argue that “big data” is finally coming to corporate training.  Think about it, integrated with your HR and talent management systems, you can build a pretty complete picture of all of the learning and development experiences of your best performers.

Speaking of your best performers, many of them are what Marc Prensky described as digital natives.  These new workers and their demands are having a huge impact not just in HR, but throughout your organization.  They are servicing your clients via social networking channels – maybe even collaborating with them after hours, driving your IT department to open up your network to their devices, and altering how your HR people attract, recruit, hire, train and develop them.  The nerve!  You must get a grip on this one fact- your workers are networked, connected, and mobile. 

If you’re a corporate training executive, this is a curve you want to get ahead of before you find yourself unemployed and with a skill set that could best be described as “expired”.  What can you do, you ask?  Start by taking an online course; there are literally thousands available for free that you can take at your own leisure.  Don’t know her start, visit the Khan  Academy, Lynda.com, or Coursera.  Take this revolution out for a spin.  You’ll be surprised at how much you can learn.   

The idea of ‘digital mentors’ has been used successfully by many organizations, if not within the confines of your own organization – reach out to other training professionals via local chapters of organizations such as the e-Learning Guild, the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD),  the Society for Applied Learning Technology (SALT), and the International Society for Performance Improvement ( ISPI) and discuss with your peers how these technologies are being used in their corporate environments. 

Ready to talk about e-learning? 

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

Who’s going to pay for your Learning Record Store?

Jane Hart recently released interim results for her Learning in the Workplace Survey and though it is still open, has found evidence that show how workers continue to organize and manage their own learning in the workplace. 

Interestingly enough, shortly after I was reading Jane's interim results I bumped into this great infographic by Catalin Zorzini (scroll down to the Testimonials section) on how web designers get educated.  What struck me the most about this infographic were the testimonials from web designers and the bottom of the page.  Look at how many of these designers consider the skills they have self-taught themselves through experimentation and the tutorials of others priceless- and in many instances superior to those skills acquired in a formal education. 

The interim results from Jane’s survey as well as the infographic and other anecdotal data we continue to receive from our clients point to a growing trend in the learning and development field.  Ownership and control of learning and development activities is shifting from the L&D department to individual learners.  One technology that is sure to move this trend further along was the release last week of the new Tin Can API. 

Click on image for slides from presentation of The Experience API by Nik Hruska at Defense Game Tech Users’ Conference 2013.

The new Tin Can API brings with it the portability of “experience” data will allow learners to take their learning records (which will be stored in the cloud) with them when moving from one organization to the next.  Learning records are no longer locked into one organization’s LMS and left to rot there once an employee leaves.  This has some pretty massive implications for the fields of human resources, organizational development as well as training and development.

There are still some kinks left to be worked out with this API, for example – when an employee leaves a company and is in between jobs, who pays for that cloud-based learning record store?  Traditionally speaking, companies have paid for some learning management system to keep these records. When employees ask to take their learning records with them so that they don’t have to retake that compliance or sexual harassment prevention course again upon starting employment with another organization, will companies download these records from their learning record cloud and hand them over to the employee in a USB stick?  Better yet, will organizations feel comfortable handing over this data on behalf of a departing employee to a competitor?

Many of these issues will get worked out in the months and years ahead.  In the meantime, if you are one of those learners whose already taken responsibility for your own learning and development- would you pay for a personal and portable cloud-based learning record store?

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

E-learning for Nuclear Newcomers

As a designer, I maintain a pretty robust collection of e-learning samples to which I will gladly add this one that I found today. It's been developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency and has a very clean look. I found the navigation quite intuitive (albeit not very attractive), and several features of the course such as the glossary and the search bar are easy to find and use.  

The IAEA created the interactive e-learning series explaining the IAEA’s Milestones Approach to introducing a nuclear power program. This approach is based on three phases and covers the 19 infrastructure issues that need to be addressed, and brings decades of expertise to life.  If you're like me and enjoy collecting sample e-learning projects for future reference this isn't a bad one to add to your stash.

Click on the image below to take you to the samples, and enjoy! 

Sample ​IAEA E-learning modules.

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

Here's one way you can prioritize requests for "training"

Every time I talk to the manager of a Training or L&D department, the one thing I can always count on hearing is how extremely busy they are. I remember well being in this role, and having to find a solution to the barrage of training requests that came into the department in a way that was transparent, objective, and somewhat inclusive. These three characteristics mirror my leadership style pretty well, and I feel it's important for the team to be able to clearly articulate why we are tackling some projects with haste, while allowing others to simmer on the back burner for a little while. I thought I'd share one of the tools we came up with, in the hopes that you can find some benefit in this "weighted scoring" methodology.

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I gathered the troops one Monday morning and announced that going forward every training request that came into the department would be scored and given the priority it deserved.  After all, we were only seven, and were being stretched way too thin by all the competing demands that were being placed on the team.  It took a couple of hours but we developed the matrix you see here. It's a very simple tool to use, and I'm providing you with a link to the Excel spreadsheet that we created and you are more than welcome to modify it according to your needs. In this meeting we developed nine criteria that we were going to use to rank projects, and gave them a weight from ten being our most important to two being the least important criteria for us in evaluating a project.  Secondly we identified three priority levels with one having the lowest priority and three the most.  WE gave each priority level a description we could all objectively agree on.

Once you've got this training prioritization matrix developed, take the list of projects on your plate and simply score them.  For each criteria on your scale multiply the weight by the priority level and add up the total (or have Excel added up for you) to "score" the projects. The projects with the higher scores are what your team should be focusing on with vigor, while projects with a lower score should be on your back burner.  The next time someone comes running in through your door with a request for a new training initiative gather your troops, grab this matrix, and objectively ask yourselves– where does this request belong on our list of priorities?

I hope this tool can help some of you training or project managers out there, and by no means is it perfect. In fact, if you've got a different method for prioritizing your training projects I'd love to hear it!  Feel free to grab the spreadsheet from my Google Drive by clicking on the icon below.  How do you prioritize training requests that come across your desk?  Leave a comment below, I'd love to hear from you.

Click to download the training priorities spreadsheet here.

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Instructional Designers

Developing the best performance intervention, rather than jumping through hoops to fill every training request requires a different breed of instructional designer (ID).  These IDs are well schooled in Performance Consulting, a bedrock book for the human resources, learning and organizational development fields introduced by Dana and Jim Robinson.  But beyond that, effective IDs share some very distinct habits.  Stephen Covey’s book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, presents us with a fairly good framework for highlighting these.

1.       Laser-focused on the business goal and wields it to drive every decision.  Too many corporate training initiatives are nothing more than information dumps chock full of facts and bullet-points.  And no, a quiz or a survey at the end of an information dump does not make it interactive or useful.  Effective instructional designers know that if their interventions are going to succeed, they are going to have to eliminate the mentality of many clients and subject-matter experts to toss in every bit of information that is available- the “everything including the kitchen sink” mentality.  Instead, the great ones are OCD about the business goal behind the training need and exercise Habit #2.

2.       Educate up, down, and sideways.  Subject-matter experts need their expertise focused on the business goals, and on the learners’ performance.  Project managers need to be educated on our methodologies to the extent that they will understand the project’s milestones and time and budgetary requirements.  Client’s need to be educated on why the focus needs to be sharpened, on what works with the population of learners we are targeting, and on why we select the methodologies and interventions that we do-they are paying for it.  With all of this educating that needs to take place, effective instructional designers are first and foremost excellent teachers.  In order to educate all of the stakeholders in a project, effective designers must be at the “top of their game” and knowledgeable on the latest in educational technology, the best ones proactively keep up with the latest developments in the field. 

3.       Stays on top of their “game”.  Clients want to hire the best and brightest, and the best IDs are constantly developing and growing their skill set and knowledge of their craft.  It is imperative that you stay abreast of developments in the fields of instructional design, education, psychology (especially if your work revolves around a specific target population), and issues affecting today’s business climate.  Become disciplined in setting aside time every day to learn something new about your craft, or participate in learning something via a new delivery platform.

4.       Stays Organized.  Instructional design requires the development of objectives, assessments, strategies, graphic design assets, audio & video assets, storyboards, guides, manuals, job aids, and other tools of the trade. Used correctly these tools have the potential to transform performance and drive organizational behavior. And all of these assets must be stored in a way that they can be referenced in the future, and the organization can access them at the time of need.  Performers must be able to find the learning assets they need, when they need them, how they need them, and wherever they need them.

5.       First things first.  Effective IDs prioritize work that matters.  This is the difference between spending your time on a PowerPoint file riddled with bullet points, versus analyzing the performance of a star employee who is outperforming his peers by leaps and bounds. Focus on urgent and important business needs- not just urgent, and especially not on urgent and unimportant. Too many IDs spend their valuable time performing menial tasks rather than honing and flexing their performance consulting skillset.  Effective IDs rank and rate requests for their expertise by proximity to the organization’s business and strategic goals. They realize what belongs on the back burner, and what should be handled immediately.

6.       Advocates for the learner.  ID’s have an ethical responsibility to not bore learners with “training materials” that are ineffective and worthless. The ID is an advocate for the learner or performer who will utilize the material.  Instructions must be clear, multimedia assets should be relevant and professionally produced, test questions and distractors should objectively measure newly acquired knowledge, skills, and abilities and be well written. Time and budgetary constraints will always place limits on the instructional strategies you are able to pursue, but the best ID’s will achieve a greater “return on learning” given a project’s constraints.

7.       Collaborate.  The best instructional designers work with their clients, not for their clients.  This is really important and takes years to master.  When an ID works with a company or client, they are a partner in their success. The difference lies in in the control a client can exert over the design of any intervention when the ID is perceived as an employee whose duty is to merely follow instructions.  Working for a company or client, it becomes too easy for them to dictate the instructional strategy the designer can follow. Effective IDs know they must be on equal footing in order to drive forward with solutions that will meet real needs, and not perceived wants.

As the economy continues to improve and the hiring market picks up steam, effective instructional designers will leverage these habits to bring new hires up to speed quicker, and to develop the existing talent pool to grow into roles that will be vacated by departing staff.  It’s time to up your game, following the seven habits is a great starting point.

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.