The Problem:  Expectations of Speed and Accessibility

For better or worse, Google and the rest have taught all of us that content should never be more than a keyword and a click away.  And if found content does not prove engaging or useful within a short period of time, searchers will abandon the source at hand and move on to another.

The internal structure of the content and the packaging in which it comes wrapped are equally as important.

Think back to last week.  How often did you use an internet search engine to fill some gap in your own knowledge for a business purpose?  Now, how often did you attend a training workshop or take an e-learning course?  I think you get the idea. 

If you have been following our research, you know that most learning that happens in organizations is not formal.  Formal learning has it place.  For some learning needs it’s the right and best answer, but those needs are specific and few.  Formal training does not match how we naturally seek and share knowledge.  Most examples of it demand the commitment of too much dedicated time; require leaving the work environment to engage, and force the assimilation of too much other content besides what we are most motivated to learn in the moment.

As it turns out, we hear from our conversations with training departments that there likely never was sufficient patience or appetite on the part of learners for long form e-learning courseware (courses measured in hours versus minutes).  Learners can only focus their attention for so long, and the principle of knowledge chunking has always been a best practice.  That said, attention spans for content do seem to be shrinking – likely a defense against the overwhelming content saturation in the world around us.

And, unfortunately, our recent research on modern learning organizations shows that most training departments are poorly prepared to meet these changing expectations for content accessibility.  Their organization structures and content development processes are built for creating formal content in which the instructional scaffolding is baked-in, making it inflexible and difficult to consume outside of formal learning contexts.  And, similarly, their learning systems (the LMS being the biggest culprit) are most often designed to support the university model of catalogs, registrations, and transcripts - adding overhead to an already unwieldy user experience.  Training departments are finding it increasingly difficult to meet the learning needs of their audiences fast enough or to support learning in all of the ways that it naturally takes place in the organization.

Perhaps most problematic of all, our data finds that most employees do not have access at work to effective tools to find and sort through corporate information, tools like Google which have become such an indispensible part of dealing with content everywhere else.

Solutions:

How can a training department solve for this challenge?  Here a few ideas:

1. Corporate Search
   The first solution is pretty straightforward.  Our personal use of the internet has made us trained searchers.  Businesses should explicitly leverage and develop this personal competency in the workplace.  To that end, internal search tools are quickly becoming must-have requirements even for smaller organizations. 
   
2. Folksonomies & Content Based Community
   Knowledge Management as a discipline still has its place in many organizations; however for most organizations the employee population itself will be the best and most efficient source of categorization and prioritization.  Tags, ratings, and comments help to make the sea of content more manageable and accessible and do so in a manner that is naturally customized for the corporate community’s unique needs and conditions.
   
3. Social Learning
   Finally, and perhaps of most interest to L&D departments, there are a growing number of providers of purpose-built platforms for leveraging the natural social learning behaviors of employees as a corporate learning strategy. 
    
   Examples include both dedicated systems such as: OutStart Participate, Q2Learning eCampus, and Sun Learning Exchange, platforms built onto your existing learning or talent system such as Saba Social, Plateau Talent Gateway, or Cornerstone Connect, or platforms that extend you corporate intranet technology such as Tomoye Communities (SharePoint) or Lotus Connections (IBM).
   
   Look for a research report from us later this month on how to select such a platform.
   

Check back next week for the next post, Challenge #2: The Democratization of Authorship.