In the second of a series of blog posts on helping L&D move forward, I look at how we need to help workers gain immediate access to “learning” that solves their performance problems.
Jeff Bullas pointed out in How the iPad is changing our lives, that
“The “Now” generation wants their news, entertainment, information and access to online stores instantly whether that is on the bus, bedroom or even on the beach.”
In the same way employees want solutions to their performance or learning problems, NOW, and in a mouse-click.
And, what is more, as a tweet in recent live Twitter #realwplearn chat on performance support, points out:
“People don’t want to study a problem, they want to solve it”
When I talk to groups of learning professionals about where they go to find out about something or how to do something; the answer is unanimously “Google”! Exactly because they can gain one-click access to a range of resources that will give them an immediate solution they need – on the Internet.
And they certainly never mention the LMS!
So, why then do we think that workers do anything differently?
Although the LMS has in recent years become the de facto place to store learning content in the form of courses, it is not the first port of call for a worker when they need to solve a problem – since an LMS is generally a separate, password-protected system, which is not easily searchable and the content within in it is not available in a usable format.
And that’s a shame, because a lot of time, effort and money has gone into creating those materials in the first place.
So, why not do what some organizations have already done, which is liberating their (non-regulatory) courses from the LMS, and placing them on their intranet (or learning portal). They are seeing far more use of the materials by doing that, and they can do some (light-touching) track of numbers of users too.
But of course, the material does need to be available in a usable format; no-one is going to wade through an hour long course to find out if the answer to the problem is on some slide or screen or audio bite or video sequence somewhere within it; the materials will need to be provided in a more easily accessible and searchable format, so that users can get immediate access to the bit that they need.
Providing resources in a format that workers will find of ongoing use, means re-thinking about how they can be designed and created in more appropriate ways – and that will be the subject of my next posting in this series.
But once this is in place it is then an easy next step to provide Google search facilities on the company intranet - which will mean that workers now get the familiar experience they know and understand to find solutions to their problems – using YOUR solutions.
UPDATE!!
This series of posts has now become part of a major new resource called NEW Workplace Learning: Meeting the needs of today's Smart Workers and preparing for those of tomorrow. Visit this page to read more.
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