It is becoming clear that more and more people are using a variety of ways – not just training – to help them (a) acquire new skills and knowledge as well as (b) learn continuously in their jobs. (You can read more about this in my Learning in the Social Workplace article.)

Here are just ten key ways that people find of value to help them (learn to) do their jobs: …

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Here is an updated version (V3) of the WSD Framework with more charts and descriptions, and now available as a PDF  to download under a Creative Commons Licence.

Social tools are changing not only the way that professionals are working and learning but also the way that organisations are transforming into social businesses. In the new connected workplace, current training, e-learning or blended learning services, which take a top-down, ”command and control” approach to organising and managing “learning” will not be appropriate to support these new ways of working and learning. What will be required is a completely new range of services – which we might call non-training services – that are focused on supporting continuous performance improvement and learning in the workflow as people do their jobs...

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OK, these skills are not actually “new” –  they’ve always been present – but perhaps they have not always been as visible as they should have been, as Oscar Berg explains in The collaboration pyramid (or iceberg). But  as businesses transform into social businesses, the social workplace is going to become more and more reliant on these skills.

I’ve been working with a number of organisations recently as they’ve been making the move “into social”, and one thing was clear, that “helping” their people didn’t require old-school training.  Of course, helping them how to use the technology could be partly approached in this way – but even that wasn’t quite.…

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“A revolution is a  fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time.”(Wikipedia)

 

I’ve been preparing some extended notes for some presentations about The Social Learning Revolution – in particular how social media is impacting all our working and learning lives, and what this means for the Learning & Development department.   I’ve been looking at the following:

How we have traditionally understood “learning” in the workplace and ...

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As you will know I finalised the 5th Annual survey of  Top 100 Tools for Learning in the middle of November 2011, and at that time placed the presentation on Slideshare. I’ve just noticed that in the subsequent two months it has been viewed over 200,000 times!

You will also know, Twitter topped the list again for the 3rd year running, although in 2008 it was only ranked 11th and in 2007 it was 43rd on the list.

This made me wonder what the best performing tools were... Read the article

 

Predictions for an upcoming new year are inevitably based on the “flow” from the current year, so if you have taken a look at my Top 100 articles of 2011 (or even my complete 2011 Reading List), you will not be surprised to hear that many predict that 2012 will be the “Year of Social Business“.

Up to now, for many organisations, Social Business has been about social media marketing and engaging customers, but as IBM explains …

“A Social Business isn’t just a company that has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. A Social Business is one that embraces and cultivates a spirit of collaboration and community throughout its organization—both internally and externally.”

And as Amin points out in Thriving as an HR professional in a social business era, ...

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Following my recent post on the case for a non-training approach (NTA) to workplace learning and the launch of my NTA website, I’ve received quite a bit feedback and read a number of blog posts and comments about it. So I thought I would plot all these reactions on the learning technology adoption curve that my Internet Time Alliance (ITA) colleague, Harold Jarche and I produced last year (which is an adaptation of the one originally produced by Geoffrey Moore).

Firstly, just in case it is not clear, this chart plots organizations along the curve in terms of their use of learning technologies but ...

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The Training Department (aka the L&D dept) has traditionally focused on designing, developing, delivering and managing instruction – in the form of courses, workshops, e-learning and other training events.  In  fact “a course” in some form or other has now become  the de facto solution to any performance problem in an organisation – despite the fact that many of my Internet Time Alliance colleagues (and others) have spoken about its inadequacies in today’s world, and that courses have little impact on performance.

What is more, although Jay Cross and others have ...

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We are hearing a lot about new social learning tools and platforms that are becoming available – but do you really need them in the workplace?

As business is becoming more social and we are using new social tools to work collaboratively with one another as we work, do we really need another set of social tools specifically for learning?

First of all I think I need to be very clear what I mean by “learning”. I don’t just mean studying a topic formally on a course but also about acquiring skills and knowledge in other (less formal) ways. The terms...

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Steve Jobs died yesterday, 5 October, and the blogosphere is full of tributes today to him. For me one of the most influential things he did was his commencement speech to Stanford University in 2005. I’ve forwarded the link to many people over the years, and I know it has impacted many others too. In fact it’s been viewed on YouTube over 6 million times.  But if you haven’t seen it before I’ve embedded it below.

If you just want to read the text version, it’s here on the Stanford University News.

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