Work and Learning: New Synergies
October 14, 2009
The days of orchestrating corporate learning through special "events," such as classroom training and seminars, have given way to learning on-the-job. Indeed, working and learning are becoming so tightly integrated that it's often difficult to differentiate between them.
Motorola University, and indeed corporate universities and training departments in general, have undergone or are undergoing quite a transition in the wake of Web 2.0 technologies. System work tools and learning tools are becoming synonymous.
Employee Learning
Let's look at an example. A software engineer encounters a major roadblock while developing a module. To find a solution (and to learn at the same time), he may take the following steps, and not necessarily in the order listed:
1) He searches his online learning management system for a course dealing with the given technical roadblock. Upon launching the course, he navigates directly to the module covering the content. That module contains a partial solution, but also sites a resource URL with further Q&As. The engineer visits that URL.
2) The resource URL, which could have also been found through a corporate system search engine-like query, contains blog listings that also help. Furthermore, the site provides access to a corporate chat room, where he poses additional questions and receives more answers and references. One of the references is a subject matter expert, whom the engineer contacts and, through virtual meeting software, is able to show the roadblock and obtain additional help. The subject matter expert suggests several texts and papers to further help solve the problem.
3) The engineer searches his e-library software for the texts and papers suggested and is able to further narrow the search to just those portions dealing with the roadblock. The authors of the material found are on Twitter, and the engineer gains additional insights by searching their respective tweets.
Note that none of the steps involved traditional learning environments. Even the online "course" that the engineer initially accessed in this example was not really a traditional training vehicle, but rather a series of searchable segments that contained numerous references. If anything, it was more of an e-resource than computer-based training (CBT).
Traditional CBT, in many ways, suffers from the same deficiencies as instructor-led training, especially in technology training. Technology is simply changing too rapidly for these vehicles. The effort involved to keep a well-designed CBT in the technology domain up to date is very often either impossible or economically impractical. What we still call CBT is increasingly becoming e-presentation, quickly reproduced to YouTube-like videos of subject matter experts with a lot of references that can be just as quickly re-made as their content evolves.
Similarly, the effort involved to keep an instructor up to date in a wide range of increasingly changing technologies is becoming unfeasible. To limit the instructor to a highly specialized area, and have him stay current and teach and only teach in that area, greatly restricts his value to the corporation. Web 2.0 allows him to teach others "just in time," worldwide, while doing important development work (and growing) in his area as well.
Rather than being "taught" by a single (and typically somewhat limited) instructor, the engineer in our example had access to numerous resources: e-presentations, blogs, chats, Twitter users, virtual meetings, and e-libraries. And to be sure, the example case included but a small subset of the many tools that are available and increasing exponentially.
Corporate Learning Teams
The job of the corporate learning team has obviously changed. Instead of coordinating "events" and maintaining brick-and-mortar learning facilities and formal teaching staff, in-business educators are now tasked with making online resources readily available, easy to use, relevant, and state of the art.
To do so, there is increasing synergy between IT staff members in exploring and deploying these solutions. Moreover, there is also increasing dependency on the learner population.
Previously, learners were passive recipients of a program. To be sure, they had typically been surveyed, like patrons in a restaurant, to determine what on the learning menu they wanted to order. Now, however, they are the sources of the learning experience, as Web 2.0 allows them to easily contribute to as well as take from the "information highway. They must take ownership of that experience.
In short, just as work and learning are happily melding, and as work tools and learning tools become inseparable, so the IT team and the employee-learners at large are becoming important partners to the learning professional. Perhaps someday (and maybe sooner than later) all three roles will become indistinguishable.
About the Author
Tom Barr previously managed the technology learning portfolio, which includes both engineering and IT, for Motorola University. He had been with Motorola for nearly 27 years and most recently has moved to Enablon as North America Knowledge Manager, headquartered in Chicago.
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