Many organizations have implemented formal learning programs, processes and technologies, but few have fully leveraged the benefits of social learning that provide employees with just-in-time access to tidbits of learning that enable more engaging and immersive learning, chance interactions and collaborative teamwork.
Organizations must expand their view and definition of learning and invest in people, processes and technologies, including all types of learning, from formal to social to serendipitous. To achieve this blended and multifaceted approach to learning, organizations should follow three guidelines:
1. Everyone learns in different ways.
Some people learn best by being guided through topics step by step, some learn by experimentation, and others seek and find information on-demand as needed to perform tasks. This variation in learner styles has been heightened by communication and technology advancements in our consumer lives, such as social software, which can greatly complement learning by facilitating conversations, enabling information sharing, and open lines of communication and foster greater organizational transparency.
2. Expand methods to encompass the way people really learn.
According to authors such as Jay Cross, up to 80 percent of the most valuable employee development occurs informally. That means only about 20 percent of the knowledge employees acquire on the job comes from formal learning programs such as online courses, events and workshops that organizations invest time and energy to create and manage.
That 20 percent is absolutely relevant, as it provides a means to educate teams and customers on topics critical to business goals, such as compliance and certification, and measuring the results. But relying on formal learning does not address everyone’s need to experience career growth, and this creates a delta between the learning that organizations need for business initiatives and the learning employees want and need to meet their goals.
According to an industry study by IDC, the difficulty of finding information costs organizations about $3,300 per employee each year. That is a tangible lost opportunity cost, but it’s also an opportunity for learning professionals to impact the bottom line by facilitating knowledge sharing and putting that information at the fingertips of employees, customers and partners.
3. Make continuous social learning a reality.
Using social learning, companies can capture knowledge and expertise from all levels of the organization and foster a learning culture by:
a) Providing access to new-hire information, training resources and subject-matter expertise from across the company.
b) Creating mentoring relationships and enabling peer-to-peer discussion and support.
c) Providing a mechanism to submit questions and share ideas, including the ability to comment on content inaccuracies.
d) Identifying skill gaps by reviewing and assessing posted content and comments.
e) Collecting learner feedback on the training they need most and targeting social and formal learning programs to those areas.
By embracing alternative learning delivery approaches, organizations can move from a model that only allows for one-on-one training – a mass training model where targeted learning is delivered only to targeted groups – to a collaborative, interactive model that leverages many-to-many learning. The many-to-many model benefits from social technologies to expand the flow of communication and allows all participants to contribute content and ideas for others to learn from, such as tutorials, multimedia, questions and answers, documents and virtual collaborative team sessions.
Becoming learner-centric rather than organization-centric uses time and money more efficiently and produces more readily accessible content. In an informal social world, learners become both the teacher and the student. Organizations gain the benefit of having more content produced in a faster time frame and at a lower cost.
By involving a diverse group of employees using today’s social technologies along with formal learning techniques, organizations have a better chance of being successful.
