And so we continue - here's the next question (and answers) from our Generate crowdsourcing wall at Learning Technologies 2015. Once again, some really good ideas up there, but as with many crowdsourcing initiatives, some ideas are more fully formed than others, and there was a definite tech/people split as you will see beneath. Plus a real kicker at the end from Andrew Jacobs, talent management and organisational learning manager from London borough of Lewisham. We take your point Andrew, it's a good one.
How can I best embed learning in the workplace?
- Talk to people. What do they want (or think they want)?
- Listen to your learners and what they need
- Listen to your staff
- Identify L&D influencers
- Show the CEO the benefits
- ‘Kick start’, rather than owning the full learning journey
- Get ‘buy in’ from line managers to understand the potential impact (on them, their people, their customers and our business)
- Conduct peer reviews after training
- Make it relevant and ensure everyone benefits from it
- Sell the benefit to the learner and reward learning culture
- Sell the benefits
- Use case studies of benefits
- Show business benefits (smarter, connected workforce)
- Create online tools and case studies - live issues can be used out of class
- Build a MOOC
- Exploit natural communities
- Take down firewalls
- Use existing social networks
- Don’t be afraid of social
- Develop learning to be device-agnostic
- Make your LMS the ‘go-to’ rather than the ‘have to’
- Prove learning = profit
- Create performance support and base training on how/when to use it
- Recruit managers who are passionate about learning
- We’re always learning, we just need to encourage knowledge sharing
- Use an open rather than closed curriculum
- Encourage and reward collaboration
- Match channel of delivery to audience preference
- A three-stage model: engage, participate, activate
- Make learning integrated to the work and workplace
and finally…
- This is the wrong question: we should be asking how to embed performance improvement in the workplace. To focus on learning makes the learning the output not the performance outcome.