Although there have been well over 100 responses to the survey, once again, as with my previous survey a pattern to the responses appeared quite early on. So to make it easier to read the data, I took a snapshot of the results once 100 responses had been received.

Although there are probably few surprises in the responses to the four main questions themselves, it is when you view the amalgamated results that you  can see the bigger picture. But, here first, are the responses to the four main questions. Click on the images for the full-size versions.

	Question 1: How frequently do you use the following ways to keep up to date with what is happening OUTSIDE your organisation – in your industry or profession?
	Question 2: How regularly do you use the following ways to keep up to date with what is happening INSIDE your organisation?
	Question 3: How regularly do you use the following ways to try and solve a learning or performance problem (e.g how to use a software feature, carry out an job task or professional activity)?
	Question 4: How regularly do you use the following formal approaches of acquiring a new skill or knowledge?

I used a weighted scoring system to create a ranked list of all the items in the four questions, which shows the most frequent way respondents learn, down to the least frequent ways. It also shows in bold red type, the most selected option. (Note: KUPTD = Keeping up-to-date)

Looking at this ranked list, what stands out for me is the fact that people are taking formal training as infrequently as going to a conference – near the bottom of the list. But it also shows me that they are learning much more regularly — in fact continuously — in many more informal ways.

Taken together with the results  from my previous survey, which showed that training was considered to be the least important way of learning in the workplace, I think this provides useful evidence for those trying to bring about change in their L&D departments, and might help them to see where they should be focusing  their activities to have more impact in the business.

However, it is also clear that for many organisations, moving forward is not as easy it might sound, as it requires surmounting a number of mindset obstacles to do so. I’ll talk  about that in a subsequent post.

Topic :  Social Business takes Social Learning 

Date: Wednesday 23 May 18.30-19.30 pm GMT, 13.30-14.30 pm ET, 10.30-11.30 am PT

Jay Cross is “the Johnny Appleseed of informal learning”. Jay has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix. A champion of informal learning and systems thinking, He was the first person to use the term eLearning on the web. He literally wrote the book on Informal Learning. Jay works from the  Internet Time Lab in Berkeley, high in the hills a dozen miles east of the Golden Gate Bridge and a mile and a half from the University. Jay is the CEO of the Internet TIme Alliance

Reserve your seat for the webinar

There are 100 seats available: reserve your place here : https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/581929910

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join the webinar.

System Requirements

• PC-based attendees: Required: Windows® 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server
• Macintosh®-based attendees: Required: Mac OS® X 10.5 or newer

Twitter backchannel

We will use #slcwebinar to create the backchannel at the event

Leave your questions for Jay Cross

Join the In Conversation with Jay Cross group at the Social Learning Centre to leave your own questions for Jay, as well as continue the dicussions after the webinar has finished. (If you are not already a member of the Social Learning Centre you will need to register first)

• keeping up to date with what is happening outside the organisation – in your industry or profession
• keeping up to date with what is happening inside the organisation – in your work team or organisation, as well as
• solving ad hoc learning and performance problems – as you do your jobs.

It is clear we now use many different approaches, sources and systems to do all this – but just how regularly are we doing  it?

Please help me find out by taking my latest Learning in the Workplace survey – just click on the “take our survey” link below to open it.

Once again I’ll report on my findings shortly.

These take place over a 2-week period and involve 5-6 web-based assignments, some individual activities, as well as conversations and discussions with other participants. Your time commitment is about 1 hour per day.

Here are brief details of what we are offering, together with some  feedback from previous participants. To find out more about each workshop and how to sign up, click through the relevant link.

14-25 May
Setting up and sustaining an online community
Guidance and tips on how to build and maintain an online community
Led by Jane Hart

“Thank you very much for offering the programme and putting so much thoughtfulness and guidance into it. It has helped in substantially getting my thoughts together for a new community and for helping me reflect on the existing community and how that came into being.” 

11-22 June
Personal Knowledge Management
Tips and techniques how to connect with the digital reality of the connected economy
Led by Harold Jarche

“Without any coherent strategy I often was not persistent in my undertakings. This course gave me an excellent opportunity to evaluate my position and to work out an appropriate approach.”

18-29 June
Using social media in formal learning
Ideas how to use social media in a formal training programme - classroom, workshop and/or online.
Led by Jane Hart

“One of the most useful aspects of both this and the previous course was learning how to organise and manage an online course. I have found your delivery model to be excellent – enough assignments to make me carve an hour out of my diary every other day but not so much as to be overwhelming.”

Please note, that we also offer these workshops on a private basis for learning teams, so please get in touch  with me Jane@SocialLearningCentre.co.uk - if you’d like more information about this.

For an overview of all the other activities we offer at the Social Learning Centre, visit the About page. We now have over 1100 members,

1 - Social networking in online education: It is time to revisit the pedagogy - Sachin Dua, 25 April – the quote in bold for me says it all!

“Current educational practices that have a set curriculum, norm or standards based assessments and prescribed lesson agendas are often misaligned with an orientation that celebrates difference in learners and learning (Mentis, Quinn, & Ryba, 2005, as cited in Mentis, 2007). If the diversity is valued, then the pedagogy must do away from its ‘one size fits all’ approach, and accept that the twenty first century of globalisation demands a different understanding of knowledge use and that this has implications for the use of technology. Mentis (2007) states that if education is to be relevant for today’s learners, it needs to break from the constraints of conformity and allow for differentiation by focusing on individual identity development within each individual’s own context, culture and ability.”

2 - To learn, we must do – Harold Jarche, 23 April – included the image on the left in this post, which demonstrates to me we shouldn’t be focusing on the technology, nor on how we “get people to collaborate, but rather on helping them develop their . Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) skills.

3 – In a series of posts: Informal Learning Revisited,  Informal learning is business, and  Controversy over informal learning, Jay Cross looks at why there has been a lot of talk about informal learning, but very little action

“Learning is active and most schooling is passive. What’s taught in school is often superficial, boring, and irrelevant. Since school learning isn’t reinforced in real life, most of what’s learned is forgotten before it can be put to use. Could you pass your college’s final exams? Grades that once seemed so important turn out to be meaningless outside of school systems.

Nonetheless, most corporate training departments are modeled on schools. They deal with learners who are enrolled. They provide top-down classes and rigid content. They take attendance, administer tests, and certify participation. They let non-training learning fall between the cracks.”

4 - Learning is not something to get – Harold Jarche , writes we still think learning is something you do to people – we train them but we don’t help them (to) learn – that is a big difference.

“In too many cases we view learning as something that is done to people. It’s almost as if we are goin’ to get some learnin’! We think we can “get” an education or “get people trained”. This is absurd.”

5 - After School: 5 Apps Your Students Are Using When You’re Not Looking - Susan Lucille Davis – shows that even in schools, students are bringing their own “learning” into the classroom – we need to encourage this both in education and the workplace – not try and ban it or prevent it.

“Students these days are discovering their own applications and tools to enhance their learning online. I’ve learned about some of these tools from my students themselves, as well as through the teenager grapevine. Not only do these applications reveal to us that students are discovering ways to use social media and web tools for more than entertainment, but they tell us something about our kids’ needs in an online environment.”

6 - How To Learn A New Skill Systematically With Collaborative Learning Playlist, MakeUseOf.com, 15 April – introduces MentorMob and the collaborative learning playlist concept ..

 ”… playlists are an organizational tool that help you personalize your listening or viewing experience. It is because you choose what to keep and what to shed on a playlist. Wouldn’t learning benefit from such an arrangement? It could be a neat way to make sense of all the knowledge out there, by keeping the best learning bytes on a collaborative learning playlist. We can progress step by step through the playlist and pick up a new skill gradually.”

7 - The Napkin Academy – learn to solve any problem with a single picture – from Dan Roam, the author of “The Back of the Napkin” – a simple, clever idea!

8 - Crash Course: Entertaining YouTube “Courses” On History & Biology, MakeUseOf – it seems to me that most of the really interesting “learning stuff is happening outside of education and training.

“Let’s go over the history course first. Here’s the idea: 15,000 years of human history is going to be summarized in a collection of YouTube videos. Each week John focuses on a different topic, starting with the dawn of history as we know it – the agricultural revolution.”

9 - Changing how we learn: 10 disruptive tools for every generation, The Next Web, 1 April

“As the web rapidly transforms the way we consume knowledge, here’s a quick look at innovative tools, programs, and startups that are rapidly changing how we learn.”

10 - The history of learning tools  – edudemic – a nice little infographic

“I thought I had made a sound business case for investing more in informal learning, but few organizations changed their ways. They continued to put almost all of the training budget into schooling novices. They acted as if the natural way of informal learning didn’t exist. Or was someone else’s responsibility. They squandered the opportunity to increase their effectiveness by becoming networked learning organizations.”

Jay asks for help in identifying examples and stories of organizations that are taking advantage of informal learning.

I have to say, I have seen very few organisations that have actually done so! Most have simply tried to manage informal learning – in an LMS or other learning platform – usually as part of a blended learning solution – believing it is simply about providing training in the form of informational rather than instructional resources.

For me, however, the key to informal learning is where the locus of control lies; so if someone plans, organises and manages what you learn, then this is not informal learning. With informal learning, it is you, the individual, who are in control.  Jay puts it like this:

“Informal learning is the unofficial, unscheduled, impromptu way most people learn to do their jobs. Informal learning is like riding a bicycle: the rider chooses the destination and the route. The cyclist can take a detour at a moment’s notice to admire the scenery or help a fellow rider.”

It is clear that smart knowledge workers are primarily autonomous, informal learners, so, as I see it, if organisations want to take advantage of informal learning, they first need to stop trying to plan and organize everything people learn, and start to support and encourage individuals developing their own personal learning strategies – perhaps by adopting a BYOL (Bring Your Own Learning) Strategy. In other words, instead of focusing on designing, delivering and managing one-size-fits-all training solutions, they need to direct their attentions to helping individuals build their PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) techniques so they become efficient and effective informal learners in a networked organisation.

For me this is spot on. Whereas most people are concerning themselves with the new social and collaboration technologies, or how to get people to collaborate, for me the key to successful social learning is how the individual engages in his/her networks and contributes what s/he has learned or is learning along the way.  PKM is therefore the key to successful social learning.

PKM is also a key skill of being an effective autonomous learner – as we can see from the many individuals who are already organizing and managing their own personal learning strategies in the organization – and consequently a key aspect of BYOL (Bring Your Own Learning).

Furthermore, PKM is as much a life skill as a work skill – and actually one that needs to be acquired in schools, colleges and universities – to prepare students not just for the workplace but to help them make sense of all their online activities.

So how can we help students as well as workers develop the new PKM skills? Well this is not something you tell others to do, but something you show others how to do; it therefore requires you to have good PKM skills yourselves.

Harold  and I have been connecting, communicating and collaborating online for over fifteen years, and we now run a number of PKM online workshops at the Social Learning Centre, that includes the following elements:

1. Getting started with PKM: How to create your own Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) framework that enables you to seek information and people; make sense of the online world and share with others in communities of practice. The PKM framework is based on eight years of practical research and use.
2. Taking control of your professional development: How to integrate your learning and work through narration and online transparency.
3. Selecting media and tools: Deciding where and how to start, whether it be with blogs, activity-streaming, podcasts, video, etc.
4. Finding your voice: Using a probe-sense-respond approach, participants can test out a new medium within our community of practice.
5. Network weaving: How to maintain, shape and cull your online networks and becoming a powerful, contributing node.
6. Connecting the nodes: A synchronous (real time) session to ask questions and discuss issues raised during the workshop as well as connect with other participants.

The next public workshop will run 11-22 June 2012, but we also offer private workshops for organizational teams on request. Just contact harold@jarche.com or me, Jane, at jane.hart@c4lpt.co.uk for further information.

A number of comments focused on how we now need to make training/e-learning more “engaging” or “effective” to recapture the interest of these people. But I think this is rather like shutting  the stable door after  the horse has bolted; it’s just too late. An increasing number of the workforce –  smart, social, autonomous workers – are already doing their own thing and solving their own learning and performance problems much more quickly and more easily by using their own tools and devices. (In April 2011 Forrester Research estimated that 47% of users were self-provisioning technology and expected the number to rise to 60% by end 2011, and Jensen & Kline (around the same time) estimated that between 1/3 and 2/3 of employees were meeting their needs by working around L&D)

So just as some IT departments have realised the futility of banning personal devices in the workplace and are now beginning to adopt BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) strategies, L&D departments might also want to adopt a BYOL (Bring Your Own Learning) strategy and embrace all the learning that is taking place outside of training. As it is, they will never again be able to keep up with the fast speed of business and provide everything everyone needs to know in a timely fashion, so it makes good commonsense to do so. Furthermore, as Dan Pink has shown us in Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us, autonomy is a highly motivating factor within an organization:

“Control leads to compliance, autonomy leads to engagement.”

Adopting a BYOL strategy will however require a different approach to learning and development.  It will not be about designing personalised training nor managing people’s learning for them, but rather supporting their own personal learning strategies. For some people, this may simply mean getting out of their way; for others it may involve providing some guidance and assistance on how to be an effective BYOLearner.

Let me also add at this point, that adopting a BYOL strategy does not mean that these people will be excluded from essential company training, but rather it offers them the flexibility to “fill in the gaps” in the best way possible for them - and to be recognized for doing so.  In other words, just like a BYOD strategy it is a complementary not a replacement strategy. Of course, there will be workers who will not feel comfortable or able to do this, because they have been conditioned to believe learning only takes place when it is “spoonfed” to them in a training room or online course, and need to be told what to learn, when and how. So they should not be forced to adopt this approach – only gently encouraged to see the value in it over time.

In this post I therefore want to look at what adopting a BYOL strategy means in terms of supporting the BYOLearner’s personal learning strategies:

Firstly, a definition of Personal Learning Strategies:

• Personal = independent | autonomous | self-directed
• Learning = acquisition of new knowledge and skills in many different ways (NOT just through study)| continuously and one off events | online and f2f | internal and external | formal and informal | content and people (e.g.  self-directed study of online courses, job aids, professional networks, conferences, mentoring, blog and news feeds, working collaboratively with team, conversations and meeting, resources on the Web, etc )
• Strategies = selecting the most appropriate ways/approaches/sources that suit the individual’s job role/profession and preferences

There are 7 key elements to being a BYOLearner – and my thanks go to my Internet Time Alliance colleague Harold Jarche  for helping to create this list. For an individual it means they:

1. Take responsibility and control
   Take responsibility for their own learning personal/professional development in the organisation
2. Reflect and review
   Continuously review their strategies in the light of a changing world – as Harold says “life is in perpetual beta“.
3. Seek-Sense-Share
   Use Personal Knowledge Management  (PKM) techniques as a continuous process of seeking, sense-making and sharing
4. Contribute and share
   Become a valued contributing node in the networks to which they belong
5. Get organized
   Use a variety of personal and organisational tools including social media tools and networks to organise and manage their own personal learning – but this certainly doesn’t mean being forced to record everything in an organizational LMS or learning platform
6. Get things done
   Performance is key; it’s not about the learning per se but what they can do as a result of all their learning activities. Success of learning is therefore measured in terms of their new or improved performance
7. Narrate and converse
   Narrating their learning is an integral part of narrating their work – i e.  regularly recording activity, achievements and reflections  (in a personal blog or in an activity stream)  in the workflow for others to read and learn from.
   

What does it require to support a BYOL Strategy in the organisation

It  won’t be about “do as I say”, but “do as I do”. That is,  it will be about modelling not shaping (as Harold puts it). It will  require people who can set the example, by modelling these behaviours and sharing their experience with others.  In other words it will require people who are themselves  confident, autonomous workers who are BYOLearners themselves.

So how can WE help you support a BYOL Strategy in the organisation?

Harold and I offer a range of opportunities to help both BYOLearners as well as organisations adopting a BYOL strategy.  We focus on understanding the importance of these new skills and developing them using “modelling” not “training” techniques.

1 – We run a two-week public online PKM workshop on Personal Knowledge Management techniques for individuals. It looks at how to create your own PKM framework that enables you to seek information and people; make sense of the online world and share with others in communities of practice. The PKM framework is based on eight years of practical research and use.

2 – We offer a set of (online and onsite) services for organizations on How to adopt a BYOL Strategy to help them that understand the relevance and importance of this strategy, and what it takes to support BYOLearners in their organization. Contact Harold harold@jarche.com  or me jane.hart@c4lpt.co.k  to discuss how we can help your organisation.

3 – We have also just set up a brand new website – BYOL (Bring Your Own Learning) - where we will be  aggregating many of our existing resources around this topic as well as providing new ones – to support both the BYOLearner as well as organizations who are adopting a BYOL strategy.

The survey’s main question asked respondents to rate the importance of 10 different ways of learning in the workplace  - as “Not important”, “Somewhat important”, “Very Important” or “Essential”.  Here are the responses in the form of a heat map –  from 131 people from 28 different countries – although the survey is still open and further responses are still coming in. Click on the image for a larger version.

Here are some of the things I picked up on:

1 – Just under half of the respondents think Company Training (that includes face-to-face workshops as well as e-learning) is only “somewhat important”, and nearly 20% find it “not important at all”; that’s nearly 70% of the respondents. Although a lot has been written about the ineffectiveness of training, I was surprised that training was rated so low, so I looked further into the data.

Firstly, this same pattern of results was visible across all functions. So who said it was essential? Well, although there were responses from across the board, they came mainly and notably from a number of e-learning and training providers, trainers as well as some academics and L&D people. And who said it was “not important” – was it just those who worked in small organisations without a training department? Well, there were a few in this category, but in fact most of the respondents who said it was unimportant came from organisations with sizes between 100 and 9,999.  It also included some academics and trainers. In fact one respondent pointed out the irony.

“My function is primarily driven by the need to help others learn (classroom training – computer and professional development skills). My own quest to learn is very much self directed … to serve the needs of my customer better”

2 – Interestingly, around the same number of respondents rate self-directed study of external courses more highly than company training – i.e. as “very important”. From additional comments  made by a couple of respondents, it seems that some even go so far as to fund their own professional development so that they can study what they really need to know.

3 – Just like company training, the use of company job aids and company documents are also only seen as “somewhat important”. I found this quite surprising, I thought more people would value job aids, but maybe this is due to the dearth of good quality job aids available.

4 – 90% of respondents, however,  think that learning from collaborative working within your team is “essential” or “very important”, whilst conversations, feeds,  personal and professional networking, curated content and using Google to search the Web are also rated very highly. Very few people in fact considered these items as “not important”.

5 – There were no significant differences in this pattern of results across any of the areas surveyed: age, sex, job role, organizational size and type, although there were clearly differences in individual responses – and that is clearly something we need to keep sight of.

Ranking

By using a weighted scoring system I then ranked the 10 different items in order of importance (see below) and then classified them in three areas: as internal documentation and training, social and collaborative working, and/or personal learning strategies.

And it becomes quite apparent now (if it wasn’t before), that for this sample of respondents, internal documentation and training initiatives are the least important ways of learning for them, and that their involvement in social and collaborative activities, as well as organising their own learning initiatives are the main ways they learn. In other words they are largely social, autonomous workers.

Summary

Although the sample size is far too small to make generalisations about how L&D practices should change, if this were an organizational survey, on the basis of these results I would be recommending that the organisation (1) focus less on top-down content creation and delivery (including organised and managed “one-size fits all” training) and (2) focus more on supporting the social and collaborative practices taking place in teams, projects and across the enterprise, but also (3) make a major shift towards supporting autonomous workers and their own personal learning strategies.

But of course it is essential to understand what is important to the workers in your own organisation and how they learn best, and use this to identify where your own L&D efforts should be focused, so I would recommend you run your own learner survey to inform yourself about how people are really learning in your organisation.

My small survey here was a rough and ready exercise, but I am currently working with a core team to support the creation of a new Towards Maturity Learner benchmark to complement their existing L&D benchmarks. The new confidential study will investigate different staff perspectives on technology-enabled  development opportunities to help organisations better align their offerings for individual and business need. The TM team are looking for a number of companies who would like to be the first to get involved and shape this over the next couple of months– please contact me at jane.hart@C4lpt.co.uk or Laura Overton (at TM) laura@towardsmaturity.org if you would like more information.

In the meantime, in my next post I want to pick up on the topic of personal learning strategies for workplace learning, and how we can help and support the emerging autonomous workforce.

Hosted by Jane Hart and facilitated by Harold Jarche at the Social Learning Centre.

This online workshop on adapting to the networked world of work includes tools, tips and techniques from two facilitators who have been connecting, communicating and collaborating online for over fifteen years. The workshop is for anyone looking to  understand the digital reality of the connected economy. Whether you are a freelancer, work  in an organisation, or want to connect beyond the corporate walls, this is designed to give you a head start in developing a personal sense-making framework.

Here are some comments from our previous workshop:

“There is a saying that “when the student is ready the master (teacher) shows up” and that is how I see this course.”

“Without any coherent strategy I often was not persistent in my undertakings. This course gave me an excellent opportunity to evaluate my position and to work out an appropriate approach.”

“I used a time tracking tool to get a feeling for how much time I spend on seeking, sensing and sharing … So reducing my seeking and spending more time sensing (converting things into high quality content) is my most important goal for the next few months.”

Over the two-week period there will be 5 (web-based) assignments that provide an introduction to the topic with links to additional reading as well as individual activities and group discussions. You can complete the assignments whenever it is convenient for you. There will be one synchronous activity at the end. Your total time commitment should be about one hour per day, though there is the potential to do more optional assignments should you desire.

For the full Agenda and details how to sign up for the Workshop, visit the PKM Online Workshop page at the Social Learning Centre.