High Impact Learning

Demand for social and mobile collaboration within the enterprise is growing, according to a recent study by ABI Research. A new wave of cloud-based, enterprise-caliber social tools and platforms are emerging as alternatives to email and other “legacy” collaboration platforms in the eyes of workers, the study found.

Workplace learning and development professionals need to be cautious when embarking on cross-cultural assignments.

It’s time to make learning central to organizational management. For this to work the culture within the tribe needs to focus on core values as the determiner for action.

Sherry Turkle's essay in Sunday's New York Times, "The Flight From Conversation," raised several critical questions about how our desire to be connected via technology can also be a powerful mechanism for avoiding significant human contact. Turkle, a psychologist and professor at MIT, is no technophobe. 

The magic of an effective learning solution is in the blend of formal and informal learning strategies.

Follow these eight steps to better instill continuous improvement in individuals and teams.
 

The best methods and the best of intentions can easily fail unless we take into account how adults learn in our organizations. During World War II a process that has become known as Training Within Industry (TWI) and its component Job Instruction (JI) were developed and then adopted by Toyota as it developed its system of production.

 
I ran across an interesting Blog post this past weekend from Daniel Newman, on a site called MillennialCEO.com, entitled, “Death of Distance – Social Media & Collaboration.”
The post was a well-written piece on how ubiquitous social media and collaboration has become in our lives, and that distance is no longer defining the intimacy of relationships (at least from a knowledge-sharing perspective).

Tom Kelly, general manager of IDEO, the world-renowned design firm, likes to quote French novelist Marcel Proust, who famously said, "The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes." What goes for novelists goes for leaders searching to craft a novel strategy for their company, a new product for their customers, or a better way to organize their employees. In a world that never stops changing, great leaders never stop learning.

 
Millennials will form 50% of the workforce in 2020, and the majority value training and development and a healthy work/life balance over salary.
This is according to a major survey of 4,000 graduates from PwC, which found that nearly a quarter (22%) of respondents rated training and development as their number one benefit. Flexible working followed with 19% claiming it was most important, while cash bonuses ranked third (14%).
The report Millennials at work, reshaping the workplace also showed that 72% of those born between 1980 and 2000 have also had to make some sort of compromise in terms of location, salary or industry to get into work.
Jon Andrews, Partner, PwC says: “Millennials want more than ‘just a job’. They expect rapid progression, a varied and interesting career, and constant feedback.

 
Running learning like a business requires a focus on three things: right outcomes, effectiveness and efficiency. You must make sure you are focused on the right organizational outcomes and that you can develop and execute programs to produce the desired results. But you also must do this efficiently, meaning at lowest cost.  This is where advances in learning delivery, especially all the possibilities offered by e-learning technologies, can really have an impact. Emerging e-learning technologies offer incredible opportunities to reduce costs while still effectively producing the desired outcomes.
Synchronous learning stands out in this category. 

Companies Take to Training Staff, New Hires to Make Up for Low-Skilled Workers

• Faced with a dearth of skilled labor, more companies are taking employee education into their own hands.
  Unemployment figures are high, but finding workers with the right skills for the job—especially for highly specialized roles such as power plant technicians or laboratory chemists—remains a big challenge, many firms say. In a survey from Lloyd's, the British insurance concern, U.S. executives considered lack of skilled workers one of the greatest risks their companies faced in 2012, second only to loss of customers.
  So rather than wait for the perfect candidates to walk through the door, companies have decided to school their in-house staff or train new hires who may lack the exact skills they were looking for

Author and education prognosticator Tom Vander Ark on making education more more valuable and more relevant (even in search terms).
Tom Vander Ark is an edu-futurist par excellence. He's chair of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, author of the new Getting Smart: How Personal Digital Learning is Changing the World, and an investor in startup technology and entrepreneurship school General Assembly (see this month's Life in Beta) through his education-focused venture fund Learn Capital. Here, he shares some of his views on the importance of "just-in-time learning" and the "plummeting" value of traditional education.

Training and career development is seen as the most popular alternative to pay rise for generation y, according to a survey by training company People 1st and ICM Research.

Their survey with ICM of more than 2,000 employees, found 69% feel more valued by company when offered training.