In this farsighted and engaging presentation session, two total learning experts from Brightwave look at the future of the L&D function and the new skills and roles required by its rapid evolution.
First, Brightwave's Head of Learning Design Caroline Freeman explores the trends and changes affecting L&D's evolution, with a focus on three specific new competencies:
• Curation
• Coaching
• Organisational change management
• Community management for social learning
Community Engagement Coordinator Steph Bright then takes over for a further brief presentation aimed at developing knowledge and skills in the emerging field of community management, including:
• Establishing common bonds
• Setting group rituals and expectations
• Tactics for driving learner engagement
This presentation was originally delivered at Capita Knowledge Pool's Learning Discoveries Club social learning day, on Monday May 11th 2015.
6. Learners have a digital life-
they expect instant access
to relevant information
7. Most of the learning that occurs in the
workplace can’t be ‘managed’ by anyone
other than the person who is learning.
L&D professionals need to re-think their role
if they’re to help extend and improve the
learning that’s already happening outside
their world.
70:20:10
- Charles Jennings internettimealliance.com
8. L&D’s role is moving from
delivering training to
supporting performance
…but that performance still needs to
be aligned with organisational
objectives
9. The opportunity
Technology can now leverage and
support informal learning through
mobile access, platforms for
sharing content and the xAPI
14. The value of curation
In today’s world of content abundance, the
skill of how to find, make sense, and share
content that we need to be effective in our
work is critical.
Beth Kanter
15. Tools for learning content curation
o Bespoke tools like Scoop.it
o Social media platforms like Twitter and Linked in
o Social learning platforms, like Brightwave’s tessello
16. How do you make it work?
o Understand your audience and what matters to them
o Become a trusted source – ‘pull’ not ‘push’
o Keep it fresh
o Build a community
17. Find out more:
Beth Kanter
http://www.bethkanter.org/content-curation-101/
Harold Jarche
Jarche.com
Robin Good
http://curation.masternewmedia.org/
21. How does it work?
o Coaching assumes the person being coached has the
answers
o The coach asks open-ended questions
o It encourages awareness and responsibility
o It can create ‘resonance’ in the brain of the person being
coached
22. How can you implement it
organisation wide?
o Train managers as coaches
o Make it part of job descriptions
o Educate the business about the value of
coaches
o Create a peer support network
23. How can technology help?
o Online interactions can augment face to face
o Allow ‘anytime’ interactions
o Record of progress
24. Individual and team coaching
were top two L&D tools for
2014
Growth of coaching
-Corporate Learning Priorities Survey - Henley Business School
26. Social learning
“With the rise and rise of social media, it’s
almost inevitable that the ‘20’ will become
more important as a channel for learning.”
-Charles Jennings
27. o External social networking platforms
o Internal networking –Yammer
o The Social LMS
Social learning tools
28. o Ability to support geographically dispersed
communities
o Increased knowledge sharing – less time
knowledge searching
o Reduced time spent administering formal
training
o Accessible anywhere
o Self-directed not dictated
o Content sourced by community
The benefits
29. The challenge
How do we as L&D professionals:
o Harness the power of social,
o Provide the tools to support it,
o Help implement it successfully within the
workplace and,
o Identify, assign and upskill people in the
roles needed to do so?
31. o Brands adopting social media recognised
need for someone to manage and develop
new social communities
o Umbrella of Marketing
o Recent surge in field of community
management
Background
35. Phase 1: Considerations
o How will social learning help meet your
business needs and reach your learning
objectives?
o Will social learning fit with your existing
culture?
o Do you already have a social platform?
o Do you have the resources to implement a
social learning strategy?
36. Phase 2: Choosing a tool
o Integrating all social and collaborative
initiatives into one common platform
o Functionality over design
o Analytics –quantifiable data to measure your
objectives
37. Phase 3: Defining roles
o Who will support each aspect of the
framework?
o Do you have the internal resource as an
L&D team or does your L&D provider?
38. Phase 4: Launching
o Initial roll out and engagement
o Pushing out relevant content
o Supporting individuals as they adopt new
way of learning and working
o Modelling behaviours of use
o Developing ongoing programme of activities
and events
39. Phase 5: Developing the community
o Not reacting
o Managing all aspects of the framework via a
community management calendar plan
40. Phase 6: Proving ROI
o Measuring the success of the community in
terms of business performance not just in
terms of social activity
41. o Pick one of the roles that you perform in some way in your
job
o Get into groups with people of the same role – no more
than 5 in a group
o Discuss your experiences in that role – what have been
the successes and challenges
o As a group, decide what you think the top two challenge s
are
o Choose a spokesperson
o Share
Social learning exercise – stage 1
42. o Form new groups of 3 people, try to get a mix of roles
o Choose one of the challenges – can you suggest
solutions that have worked for you? Or completely new
solutions?
o Share
Social learning exercise stage 2
As we work through each of the sections, I’d like you to think about the ways you are already employing the skills of Curation, coaching and community management within your organisations and what lessons you’ve learnt doing this. If you aren’t using any of these skills, I’d like you to think about how you might be able to use them and what the barriers would be.
LD roles is changing from a focus on the 10% to exploring how we can support the other 90%. Its moving towards supporting performance when and where the learners need it. Its about recognizing that if most of our leanring is happening as we are working, then, as much as possible, learning support has to occur within the flow of that learning.
IN theory at least employees and information to be connected anywhere, anytime, and on any device. This doesn’t mean that the LD function is no longer needed, it has just changed. If workplace leanring is to be effective it still has to be aligned with the organization's objectives.
But current technology can help – it does give us the opportunity to leverage and support informal learning through things like mobile access, platforms for sharing and the experience XPI.
So how does the L&D profession take advantage of this opportunity.
Some new skills are needed. These from Jane Hart’s blog on workplace learning. The skills in delivering formal learning are still there, but alongside those are the new ones – the ways of supporting individuals and teams to self manage
We’re all familiar with the idea of curation from museums. The curator chooses a theme and gathers together objects that represent that theme or deepen your understanding of the theme. The curator will usually provide the context for the objects, annotating them, explaining why they have chosen them and what they add to the wider story of the them.
In recent years, online marketing has made great use of curation to gather resources and information from the web that will be useful to their audiences and therefore enhance a brand. And from the marketing world it has also become a topic of interest for L&D professionals, who have realised that they can benefit from the overabundance of information, that perhaps they don’t always have to create something from scratch
What does curation mena in the context of L&D?
Remember the example of the museum. it should be more than aggregation. Effective curation is more than just finding something and sharing it.
This is a useful diagram from Beth Kanters very useful blog. It shows you the steps you need to go through if your curation is going to add value. You start with you goal or objective, which may be to increase brand knowledge, for example, then decide on your topics. The sources part is the researching the resources, which may be internal to your org or external via the web. Then you add your own contribution in the ‘sense making’ - in this stage you filter out the best, the most relevant, you verify the source, so that your audience knows they can trust you, you reposition the content,spot patterns, create new links and new understanding.
Because of the overabundance of information YouIdeally in good curation you are bringing the infromation that people need into the flow of their work, when and where they need it. It also means you don’t have to create every performance support tool yourself
It’s true that everyone can be a curator, but without some level of strategy or elevation for organizational curating, the individual curations justbecome a new type of noise at an organizational level.
At the heart of coaching is the idea that the most effective way for people to acquire knowledge and skills is through their own exploration and that the role of the coach is to help them on that journey, rather than telling them where to go. Its about encourgaing them to learn for themselves rather than instructing them. It’s a very old idea and has a direct line back to Socrates who used sets of questions to help his pupils think more deeply than they could do on their own
The mind isnt an empty vessel that needs to be filled – it’s a source of potential. The coach is there to help you realize that potential, to unravel the blocks to you achieving better performance. This quote is from one of the key books on coaching in a business context. Coaching for Performance by John Whitmore
Coaching works on the theory that the person being coached has the answers, not the coach – you just help them find the answers.
Creating resonance is something that is being widely discussed in leadership theory and coaching as well as sport. It's the positive emotional affect the coach wants to trigger in the brain of the athlete when they give feedback. By asking the athlete questions about their performance, rather than just commenting on the performance, the coach encourages the athlete to go back inside the experience and focus positively on what they did well and problem solve in areas where they want to do things differently. If you can fire the neural pathways associated with a particular performance with positive emotion it strengthens them and makes them easier to use in the future. This helps the athlete repeat and build on skills. In the business context, resonant leadership styles have been identified by many researchers as the most likely to motivate teams and create positive change.
Train managers as coaches
Putting in place formal coaching and mentoring schemes
Educating the whole business about changes in L&D trends and the value of coaching and mentoring
Make it part of their job descriptions and reward those who are doing it well
There are many organizations that would like to implement coaching, but it remains an aspiration. Lack of budget and time. How can technology help?
Coaching has become popular because it enables people to not only identify their own development needs but also come up with their own solutions, developing skills nad knowledge without having to send them on trainign courses
When its done effectively it should create a more self-reliant workforce, which frees up more time for managers to focus on other things. –
Image snip taken from FeverBee’s online community strategy template
Pick one of the roles that you perform in some way in your job - why did you pick this role give an example biggest benefit – 5 minutes
Get into groups of roles – no more than 5 in a group – 5 minutes
Discuss your experiences in that role – successes and challenges - 10 minutes
Top challenge from each group – 10 minutes
Relate those challenges to everyone – 5 mins
Form groups of 3 people, with a mix of roles – 5 mins
Choose a challenge and develop solutions – 10 mins
Share - 10 mins