The Training Department (aka the L&D dept) has traditionally focused on designing, developing, delivering and managing instruction – in the form of courses, workshops, e-learning and other training events. In fact “a course” in some form or other has now become the de facto solution to any performance problem in an organisation – despite the fact that many of my Internet Time Alliance colleagues (and others) have spoken about its inadequacies in today’s world, and that courses have little impact on performance.
What is more, although Jay Cross and others have brought to the attention of the learning profession the fact that most learning in the workplace occurs outside any formal learning intervention – informally, in the workflow – the only way that most training departments have been able to deal with this is by trying to “manage” it and build it in to the training blend. But blend it as much as they like – it won’t change the fact people will still learn informally and continuously – outside of training events – and L&D will never be able to manage it all!
But now, the emergence of social media has given individuals and teams the tools to support their own learning and performance needs much more easily and powerfully themselves. And by doing so many are already circumventing the L&D function – and citing a number of reasons for doing this:
- L&D is too slow to respond to their needs
- courses are not the most appropriate way to solve their problems
- they don’t want to have to leave the workflow for the solution
- e-learning frequently annoys adult learners as it treats them like idiots
- and they don’t want to have Big Brother breathing down their necks monitoring and tracking their every move.
What is needed quite urgently is a new approach to helping those in the workplace do their jobs, or do them better – in more effective, efficient and relevant ways in the modern workplace. An approach that is NOT about designing and delivering courses, but is about working with individuals and teams at the grass roots to both encourage and support continuous learning practices as well as to identify more appropriate solutions to business and performance problems through non-training interventions.
I have written a lot about this in my posts over the last few months. I am therefore going to be spending some time working on The Non-Training Approach to Workplace Learning – a new resource and community site for resources, ideas and examples of how to support continuous learning and performance improvement in the workflow – using non-training initiatives. If this is something that interests you and you want to get involved, you’ll be very welcome.
Connect!