Learning professionals have long recognized that the majority of learning takes place outside the classroom, primarily because effective learning takes place contextually. An employee will naturally seek a learning opportunity at his or her time of need, often seeking help from the ‘expert employee’ over the cubicle wall, or by reaching out to them over the phone, email or instant messaging. It goes like this: “I’ve never had a situation like this! What would Michael or Kelly do? I’ll go ask!”
Much of this activity is a direct result of the fact that formal training tends to focus on policies and procedures, and doesn’t often capture best practices which are constantly evolving through day-to-day business interactions. The people that are creating the best practices are usually not the people designing the training courses. This explains both the gap and the opportunity that can be addressed through social learning. And while it’s almost cliché to speak of the “fast pace of today’s business environment” and “the increased need for collaboration and knowledge sharing”, it could not be more true. An organization’s ability to compete locally, nationally, or globally is very much tied to its ability to foster and enable collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Then along comes the explosive rise of social media which have led to many learning professionals and learning technology vendors looking to capitalize on the opportunity to support social learning in the workplace. As with any major paradigm shift, we have seen a number of different approaches – not all successful. Software vendors and corporations with entrenched, legacy systems typically either wait and do nothing, or create “bolt on” solutions. These approaches are often clunky and limited by the workflow and design goals of the “top down” systems upon which they are built. In many cases long term user adoption is a complete failure as the bolt on systems are by their nature limited by constrained governance models, firewall issues, and un-evolved corporate policy, which means that employees may not find the learning delivery to be fast enough, relevant enough, easily used and consumed, and available at the most opportune time. Thus, there is an increasing risk of leaving employees who are hip to today’s web 2.0 and mobile technologies disengaged and bored (more on this in a future post!).
Fortunately, social learning has evolved to the extent that some best practices are emerging. Learning technologies are now available that enable organizations to adopt powerful social learning solutions cost-effectively and quickly. Stay tuned for our next post as we dig into some of the practical considerations for social learning.