It's now official. After surveying our entire research membership and having more than 30 conversations with leading HR and learning leaders (including with Xerox, Accenture, British Telecom, Edward Jones, Department of Defense, and Network Appliance), I am now 100% convinced that "informal learning" has become "formal. " That is, if you want to build a high-impact, cost-effective, modern training organization you must "formally adopt" informal learning. So what does this all mean? A few statistics: 78% of corporate managers believe that "rapid rate of information change" is one of their top learning challenges (800+ HR and L&D managers surveyed in 2008). 80% of all corporate learning takes place through on-the-job interactions with peers, experts, and managers (estimated data collected from over 1,100 L&D managers late in 2008).
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 The Training Measurement Book is on Amazon's Top 10 Business Books for 2008!   This week we published the Corporate Learning Factbook® for 2008 and sure enough, corporate learning and development budgets are being cut everywhere. The Factbook shows spending reduction of 11%, and our Winter TalentWatch research, which isolates spending changes by industry, is also showing a significant drop. Two of our research members mentioned it in briefings this week, so I thought I'd post some important topics to consider: 1. Cut Travel and Implement Rapid E-Learning. The most obvious and simple way to reduce training expenses is cancel classroom programs and replace them with rapid e-learning.
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This week Barack Obama appointed a Chief Performance Officer for the Federal Government, focused on assessing the performance of government programs and finding opportunities to reduce waste and eliminate low-performing investments.   So who is the Chief Performance Officer in a business? We have been studying this issue and I wrote about this topic several years ago in CLO Magazine, so lets revisit this issue in today's economy.  My thesis is that that strong Human Resources and L&D leaders have the opportunity to play this role in a highly strategic way.   Let us look at the three "owners" of performance in a business: 1.  Business Leaders own operational business performance.
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