From Chief Learning Officer. Originally published June, 2009 by Josh Bersin.

During the past quarter century, corporate training has gone through several major shifts.

The 1980s and early 1990s were the era of the corporate university. Companies created centralized training functions to develop employee skills in a wide range of professional and leadership areas. The economy was growing, so companies could invest in these learning organizations and support a long-term focus on employee development.

Then came the Internet and a decade of focus on e-learning. Companies purchased complex, employee-facing learning management systems and thousands of online courses. Corporate universities drifted into federated learning organizations with teams scattered around the enterprise.

We are now beginning a third era: the formalization of informal learning.

This shift is a result of a tremendous need to reduce costs, the proliferation of networking and mobile devices, young and always-connected employees and the ability to store and search massive amounts of content easily. Added to this is the investment many companies recently have made in integrated talent management and an emphasis on managing four generations of workers.

In this new era, corporate learning is employee-directed, continuous, person-to-person and requires Read more…

Don Research, Syndicated Post

From The Rapid E-Learning Blog. Originally published May 19, 2009 by Tom Kuhlmann.

Here’s the challenge for many of us.  We want to make our courses engaging and interactive, yet sometimes the content or the time pressures of work don’t make that easy.

The default position for many elearning courses is to merely push the information out to the learners.  The end result is that the course is heavy on information and light on interaction.  By changing the way you structure the information, you can quickly build the framework for more engaging and interactive courses.  It’s just a matter of rethinking how you approach the course design.

Let’s assume you do all of the front end analysis and you’re ready to build the course.  You have clear learning objectives and all of the information you need to meet Read more…

Don Best Practices, Design Tools, Syndicated Post

From Talent Management Magazine. Originally published April 2009 by David Piltz.

Organizations use training to build skills and cause behavior change in individuals. But to be most effective, training and development should be connected to the organization’s strategic goals. A March 2007 Harvard Business Review article clarifies the sentiment: “Companies that fail to invest in employees jeopardize their own success and even survival.”

Unfortunately, even for companies that do invest, a lot of training is reactive, not proactive, and is developed and delivered in a vacuum without answering questions such as:

• Is training the appropriate solution?
• What competencies are important for success on the job?
• How will we ensure training is applicable to the audience?
• How will we design and deliver training to ensure it sticks?

To provide training that builds skills, increases knowledge and changes behavior, talent managers need to remember the characteristics that make training stick and integrate the components of assessment, awareness, skill building, application and implementation into the training strategy. Doing this creates a path to ensure training is interactive and provides participants with a better experience that will increase learner retention and behavior change.

Assessment

Effective training begins with the end in mind. An effective program clearly answers what should be achieved. Answering this important question takes time, which most trainers and organizations today don’t have. But not making the time to assess current and future skills gaps is a liability to creating training with impact.

There are many ways to assess and collect data. A SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis can reveal a number of potential goals. The process also builds organizational awareness about the effect training Read more…

Don Best Practices, Research, Syndicated Post

From Chief Learning Officer Magazine. Originally published May 2009 by Cushing Anderson.

Measurement remains a significant challenge for learning executives, but companies that can incorporate key practices into their assessment methodologies stand a good chance to see improvement in their measurement initiatives.

With economic conditions unclear, CLOs are in a dilemma regarding measurement of their learning initiatives. They must demonstrate impact on business, but in order to command, or even request, resources to document impact, CLOs must have documented relevance. Even with this constant pressure, research shows there has been positive movement in the use of metrics and measurement.

Every other month, IDC surveys Chief Learning Officer magazine’s Business Intelligence Board (BIB) on an array of topics to gauge the issues, opportunities and attitudes that make up the role of a senior learning executive. This article examines CLOs’ thoughts on the topic of learning measurement.

The Economic Crisis Response
When the survey was fielded in January, the economic crisis was acute. Five months had passed since the credit crisis caused bank failures. The new president was about to be sworn in and the economic stimulus plan was still being drafted. Even so, nearly 25 percent of respondents felt their companies were performing better than they had expected. More importantly, about 25 percent felt the learning organization had a significant role in helping execute their enterprises’ response to the crisis.

Unfortunately, that means nearly 75 percent of learning organizations had something less than a significant role. Read more…

Don Evaluation Tools, Research, Syndicated Post

From The Rapid E-Learning Blog. Originally published May 5, 2009 by Tom Kuhlmann.

Don Best Practices, Development Tools, Free Stuff, Research, Software, Syndicated Post