You know your organization needs to go beyond the ordinary. Things are moving faster, and organizations need to become agile. The ability to adapt is the only real advantage. And you wonder what the role of L&D is or could be.
How do you make sense of the many terms thrown around: informal, mobile, social, portals, 70:20:10 and more? You’ve heard them, but have you sufficiently integrated them? How do you incorporate the elements in a strategic, and not haphazard, way?
These are the signs that you’re in need of an updated L&D technology strategy:
- Taking orders for courses instead of having conversations about performance gaps
- Doing rapid elearning
- Measuring efficiency, e.g. cost/seat/hour, not impact
- Using only level 1 smile sheets as course evaluations
- Only offering courses, not job aids or networks
You need a Performance & Development Strategy
You need to understand and apply the power of technology to help your people perform in the moment and develop over time. Organizations need to couple optimal execution with continual innovation. Teams need to perform and keep developing. And courses, face-to-face or online, are only one part of full L&D strategy. An organization that has innovation in its DNA has a learning culture.
In this Internet age, if you’re not leveraging technology for more than putting courses online, you’re missing the bigger picture. Technology now provides the opportunity to customize information to be delivered to the right person at the right time and the right place on the right device in the right way. Are you fully meeting the needs of your people?
The alternative is irrelevance. With the advent of mobile technologies, people are beginning to meet their own needs, and so are business units. They may not know how best to go about it, and the solutions they provide are likely to be somewhat ineffective at best, but they can’t wait. If you’re not stepping up your game by effectively leveraging technology in appropriate ways, you’ll get left behind.
An LMS is not an eLearning Strategy!
The full spectrum of a performance ecosystem goes well beyond what your Learning Management System can do. Full support is a suite of tools that helps people as they think, work, and learn, developing themselves and each other, together. The important work for the organization, going forward, is going to be knowledge work, and there’s much known about how to support this work. Yes, courses are a part of it, but the full spectrum of support goes far beyond.
Top organizations have recognized that learning is about more than courses. An LMS is really a course management tool, so fundamentally it can’t be your whole answer. A full solution is meeting needs in the moment and over time, helping people communicate and collaborate in ways that support developing the new ideas that will keep the organization moving forward. This is the opportunity.
L&D has a real role to play
L&D is (or should be) central to this new way to work. To optimize the ability of individuals to perform, and facilitate the ongoing development of people over time, takes a deep understanding of how people actually perform and learn. This knowledge then gets applied in making sure the knowledge tools are to hand, and that people are working in ways that are effective.
What’s important now is knowing how to work and learn, creating an environment where people are working smarter, not harder. Facilitation of the core competitive advantage, of the work that will most advance the mission of the organization, is as fundamental a contribution as any aspect of the work. This is a valuable, and strategic, role that provides the opportunity for L&D to come to the executive table with real value.
You need to Quinnovate!
I’m Clark Quinn, Executive Director of Quinnovation, and I help organizations understand and take advantage of technology in ways that align with how our brains work. Too much of what is done in the name of L&D doesn’t reflect what cognitive science has revealed about the true nature of how we act in the world. Persistent myths include that we keep everything in our head, the individual innovator, and that learning happens from information dump and knowledge test. And there are clear ways to reflect the new understandings.
You need to know the rich models that provide the basis for a comprehensive L&D model. Too often we follow the comfortable well-trod path, but most existing L&D models are holdovers from an industrial era, and we’re now in an information era. I’ve been working with organizations to revise their eLearning, their use of social, their use of mobile, and their strategic approaches. I have the experience and ability to coach you and your team through the process, educating, co-developing, and supporting implementation of a comprehensive solution based upon your status and goals.
Clark Quinn (the Quinnovator) draws upon 35+ years of advanced learning technology experience, a Ph.D. in applied cognitive science, and extensive work with organizations to develop effective and engaging elearning. He’s an award-winning expert, and has quite literally written the book on the new L&D strategy. With success across Internet, mobile, adaptive, and content systems, developing solutions and strategies, Dr. Quinn works with you to:
- Educate you about the fundamentals of a performance ecosystem
- Review your audience and desired performance outcomes
- Examine your infrastructure, policies, and processes
- Develop your strategy to get from where you are to the full ecosystem
You can and should create a learning ecosystem
It’s not easy, but it can be done. The truly successful companies are the ones that have successfully integrated the ability to support people in performing and developed their ability to innovate. The mechanisms are known, the pathway forward is systematic, but what works for one company won’t necessarily work for the next. Despite the label, you don’t want best practices; the way forward is to abstract the best principles and recontextualize them for your situation. (And that’s what I do.)
We’ve done this before, successfully
We’ve worked with organizations to help them create learning technology strategies. We’ve helped them understand the opportunities, develop a plan, and facilitated their execution. And we’re ready to do it with you. Our clients have included:
- a major hospital system with an initiative to advance mobile learning
- a not-for-profit in health education looking for strategic guidance in using technology
- a scientific equipment manufacturer looking to move to a customer experience approach
- a university looking to get advanced in elearning
When we work with organizations committed to upping the effectiveness of their eLearning, it goes something like this:
- Assess your existing learning goals, infrastructure, and offerings to know where you stand
- Work to understand your organizational context and objectives, to know where you need to go
- Brainstorm goals that will develop your ecosystem
- Prioritize those goals into a strategic plan that systematically builds capability
- Support you though the transition of making the necessary changes within your organization
In short, the process for making meaningful changes in your L&D strategy is doable. You will emerge with an ecosystem that ultimately result in the changes your needs.
If you care about your role in the organization…
If you’re ready to go beyond just courses. If you want to deliver the full range of support for your organizational outcomes, that support people throughout their work role, you need to change.. It’s not immediate, nor effortless, but it is real.
If you actually want to impact your organization. Your organization has real performance needs, and you have an important duty. Now you have the option to truly deliver.
If you want to talk more about how you can capitalize on this opportunity, contact Quinnovation. In our first complimentary meeting we’ll discuss your current situation, challenges and objectives and answer any questions about how we work. If you have a current learning strategy you are not satisfied with, we’ll take a look and give you some on-the-spot insights.