Saturday, January 23, 2010

What Strategic Value Does the Central Learning Function Provide?

In Tony O'Driscol and Karl Kapp's Learning in 3D book, they state the following.
"Most of what a person needs to know to do his or her job is actually learned on the job....many organizations report 85 to 95 percent of a person's job knowledge is learned on the job."

I agree with this completely and would also say that this is true for any learner. High school students shouldn't be lectured to, they should be engaged in well designed projects and given all the information, tools, and resources that budgets allow. They should learn through reflective practice.

Well then, what is the value of a centralized learning organization?

I could write on this forever, but it's Saturday and I need to focus on other things. Here are a few thoughts off the top of my head.

Role of the Central Learning Organization

1. Build an innovation team that focuses on piloting emerging learning technologies. Require that team to research, test, and write guidelines for mobile learning, 2D/3D synchronous online learning, using games for learning, and so forth. Ask this team to consult with all teams in the enterprise on how to use these technologies, not just consult with those building learning within the enterprise. It's a learning technology Center of Excellence.

2. Design, organize, and distribute templates for information design, processes for learning development/deployment, and simply focus on work products that help decentralized teams be more efficient and effective.

3. Provide consulting services for the enterprise leading to recommendations for performance improvement. I didn't say leading to "training" in any form...whatever that "t" word means to you. I said consult to provide performance improvement. Example: add industrial engineers to provide input on software user interface design. Be willing to hire engineers and performance improvement consultants. Don't just hire hundreds of instructional designers.

Why is this difficult?
When companies centralize their learning organization, they bring in all head count from the decentralized learning teams. Usually, the team members that make up the central group do not have the skills and talent needed to do the three things I described above. It's a tough transition so it would be much easier to build this central learning group I describe from scratch rather than start with an "inherited" group of employees.

A well designed central learning group can do amazing things. We just have to consider what the definition of the word "learning" is.

1 comment:

Paul said...

Nice post, especially considering it's Saturday. :-)