This afternoon's post is from Tracey Webb, a 25-year business veteran with a depth of experience in high-tech, health care, software, and financial services segments. Having worked for global enterprises like Xerox, IBM, as well as some of the largest international learning and development organizations, Tracey has a long track record of producing success for her clients. Currently, she serves as the Director of Consulting Services for Cox eLearning Consultants
I can remember the first formal training session that I attended at Xerox over 20 years ago. Xerox was and still is a big proponent of training its people. There was a huge complex in Leesburg, Virginia which rested like a monolith hidden in the woods, which included a veritable army of people in Xerox's training division. The firm poured untold resources into sending its people to the training mecca for an in-person deep dive into various forms of skill and knowledge transfer.
The trek to Leesburg began from all over the country. There were personnel involved in scheduling at the local branch level and at the training center in Leesburg. Room assignments, airplane tickets, ground transportation, and of course the famous cafeteria! The gravy budget alone must have been in the thousands of dollars. It was northern Virginia and they put gravy on everything! The cafeteria was huge, the selection large and varied. The logistics and the budget to train the employees was a very large endeavor to manage and to fund.
Now it would be hard to imagine an organization flying all of its huge salesforce to one central location to train twice per year. Training has evolved to the point where employees would probably balk at a learning and development solution that only centered on classroom training. Today, employees expect to be fully engaged by at least a blend of modern technology and some version of classroom training.
The technology employed had best reflect the tone, look, and feel of modern social networks with a beguiling user interface. The days of participants sitting enthralled in classrooms by the dynamic instructor are over. In fact, they probably never happened. This is not to say that there aren't some fabulous instructors and facilitators out there, but the expectation of adult learners has changed. Also, research has shown that repetitive learning in targeted doses after a training event reinforces and accelerates learning.
So what do adult learners in a more tech savvy environment expect now from training? Well, given the scrutiny over budgets, bailouts, and layoffs, any firm that spends the kinds of funds in both human capital and actual training dollars that most of the major corporations did 20 years ago would be considered a pariah, even by its own employees. Especially if those costs were associated with travel, given the myriad of distributed learning technologies available today.
Additionally, today's training populations expects to be given material to digest in "bytes." This requirement is all about time and performance pressure: the need is to be able to translate the skills and/or knowledge into useful information almost immediately. Even the reinforcement must be easily digestible and applicable instantaneously.
So how do we develop the collective brain of the organization in a manner that has a reasonable return on investment in terms of time expended, dollars expended, and knowledge applied that results in concrete improvements? We create a blended learning platform that includes classroom training only where necessary and cost-efficient (all of the targeted employees in one location with corporate real estate readily available for training sites).
The e-learning portion of the platform must be carefully constructed and integrated with the brick and mortar learning methods. The electronic methodologies must be easy to use without excessive links that must be clicked on and activated. The user interface must have that sleek and modern appeal so common to the social media market now.
Many of the modern electronic platforms have interfaces that replicate live human interaction in an on-line environment. While one of the benefits of e-learning is the mobility of self-pace lessons and learning individually, there is also the crucial element of group on-line learning which provides a virtual classroom and encourages collaboration and additive learning between all students in the on-line session simultaneously.
Technology now allows for student polls, chats, and hand-raising to facilitate discussion. Instructional designers need to carefully consider how this technology can be leveraged in the integrated learning engagement to accelerate adoption of new skills and behaviors that produce business results.
The organizational training landscape has morphed tremendously in the last few decades, but even more so in the last five years with the advent and adoption of social media. Participants don't quite expect to be entertained, but they certainly expect to be engaged. They also expect that their organizations will optimize resource allocation, given the concerns about financial stability. Integrated and blended e-learning solutions can help ensure that the organizational training metamorphosis continues on a positive trajectory that engages the learners and produces targeted results.
How has technology changed the way you learn in the past couple of years?
Photo Credit: Sir Watkyn
I can remember the first formal training session that I attended at Xerox over 20 years ago. Xerox was and still is a big proponent of training its people. There was a huge complex in Leesburg, Virginia which rested like a monolith hidden in the woods, which included a veritable army of people in Xerox's training division. The firm poured untold resources into sending its people to the training mecca for an in-person deep dive into various forms of skill and knowledge transfer.The trek to Leesburg began from all over the country. There were personnel involved in scheduling at the local branch level and at the training center in Leesburg. Room assignments, airplane tickets, ground transportation, and of course the famous cafeteria! The gravy budget alone must have been in the thousands of dollars. It was northern Virginia and they put gravy on everything! The cafeteria was huge, the selection large and varied. The logistics and the budget to train the employees was a very large endeavor to manage and to fund.
Now it would be hard to imagine an organization flying all of its huge salesforce to one central location to train twice per year. Training has evolved to the point where employees would probably balk at a learning and development solution that only centered on classroom training. Today, employees expect to be fully engaged by at least a blend of modern technology and some version of classroom training.
The technology employed had best reflect the tone, look, and feel of modern social networks with a beguiling user interface. The days of participants sitting enthralled in classrooms by the dynamic instructor are over. In fact, they probably never happened. This is not to say that there aren't some fabulous instructors and facilitators out there, but the expectation of adult learners has changed. Also, research has shown that repetitive learning in targeted doses after a training event reinforces and accelerates learning.
So what do adult learners in a more tech savvy environment expect now from training? Well, given the scrutiny over budgets, bailouts, and layoffs, any firm that spends the kinds of funds in both human capital and actual training dollars that most of the major corporations did 20 years ago would be considered a pariah, even by its own employees. Especially if those costs were associated with travel, given the myriad of distributed learning technologies available today.
Additionally, today's training populations expects to be given material to digest in "bytes." This requirement is all about time and performance pressure: the need is to be able to translate the skills and/or knowledge into useful information almost immediately. Even the reinforcement must be easily digestible and applicable instantaneously.
So how do we develop the collective brain of the organization in a manner that has a reasonable return on investment in terms of time expended, dollars expended, and knowledge applied that results in concrete improvements? We create a blended learning platform that includes classroom training only where necessary and cost-efficient (all of the targeted employees in one location with corporate real estate readily available for training sites).
The e-learning portion of the platform must be carefully constructed and integrated with the brick and mortar learning methods. The electronic methodologies must be easy to use without excessive links that must be clicked on and activated. The user interface must have that sleek and modern appeal so common to the social media market now.
Many of the modern electronic platforms have interfaces that replicate live human interaction in an on-line environment. While one of the benefits of e-learning is the mobility of self-pace lessons and learning individually, there is also the crucial element of group on-line learning which provides a virtual classroom and encourages collaboration and additive learning between all students in the on-line session simultaneously.
Technology now allows for student polls, chats, and hand-raising to facilitate discussion. Instructional designers need to carefully consider how this technology can be leveraged in the integrated learning engagement to accelerate adoption of new skills and behaviors that produce business results.
The organizational training landscape has morphed tremendously in the last few decades, but even more so in the last five years with the advent and adoption of social media. Participants don't quite expect to be entertained, but they certainly expect to be engaged. They also expect that their organizations will optimize resource allocation, given the concerns about financial stability. Integrated and blended e-learning solutions can help ensure that the organizational training metamorphosis continues on a positive trajectory that engages the learners and produces targeted results.
How has technology changed the way you learn in the past couple of years?
Photo Credit: Sir Watkyn
