One of the key trends over the couple of decades has been for learning professionals to get closer to their customers. So when we ask learning professionals and then managers about the most significant challenges those managers face and how they best learn to overcome them, we should get similar answers. Right?

Maybe not. According to two pieces of research conducted in the first quarter of this year highlighted an interesting disconnect between what learning professionals believed were effective ways of learning and what managers said were effective.

The CIPD’s 2010 Learning and Talent Development survey polled 724 learning and development professionals about a range of subjects including which practices they believed were most effective, and where their organisational gaps were in leadership skills.

GoodPractice, meanwhile, commissioned ComRes to contact 200 managers and identify how they learn to do their job, and what they see as their major challenges.

There were some areas of overlap between the two, but the most interesting aspects were the differences between the perceptions of managers and those of learning professionals.

What’s effective?

Learning professionals reported in the CIPD survey that the most effective learning and talent development practices were in-house development programmes. Managers, on the other hand, said in the GoodPractice survey that the most effective development activities were informal chats with colleagues and on-the-job instruction.

What accounts for this difference in perception? A simplistic interpretation would be to resort to cliché and claim that learning professionals were inward looking and obsessed with traditional learning methods. However, the truth is that a more complex and interesting story lies behind the the findings of the two surveys. In addition, it highlights the opportunity for learning departments to exert more influence on the performance of individuals in their organisation.

While similar, the two surveys asked slightly different kinds of questions. Managers were asked what they did when faced with an unfamiliar challenge. Learning professionals, on the other hand, were simply asked which approaches were more effective. Indeed, the CIPD survey doesn’t offer informal conversations as an option as a response for its question.

Even the concept of on-demand, or ‘fingertip’ learning isn’t really on the agenda of most learning professionals. The financial crisis means having to do more with less. Specifically, most learning departments are looking to spend less on expensive external programmes and replace them with more cost-effective internal programmes. It’s little wonder that the focus of learning professionals is on their internally developed interventions.

As it stands at the moment, informal learning is still a buzz word; a fad. It gets mentioned at conferences and in the blogs and articles of people working at the forefront of learning and development practice, but the truth is that it has yet to really find a place in the mainstream consciousness of the learning profession.

However, therein lies the danger. Managers are saying that they find informal methods more convenient and, crucially, often more useful than traditional learning methods. Organisations are always stressing the importance of listening to their customers. The same should also be true of the learning profession. Instead of asking ourselves what we think are more effective, we should be finding out from our customers what they think.

What are the challenges?

Another disconnect uncovered by these two surveys between the perceptions of learning professionals and managers is where the challenges facing the managers lie.

The CIPD survey asked learning professionals where they had identified gaps in leadership skills. The top four skills where there were identified gaps in were:

1. Performance management (71%)
2. Leading and managing change (68%)
3. Coaching/mentoring/developing staff (66%)
4. Leading people and people management (64%)

The GoodPractice survey asked managers to rate a series of activities as very challenging, fairly challenging, straightforward, or easy. The activities rated as most challenging in this survey were.

1. Managing change
2. Maintaining work-life balance
3. Influencing my peers and senior managers
4. Managing projects

Just about the only skill/challenge that matches up here is change management. We’re constantly bombarded with the message that the pace of change is the biggest challenge in today’s workplace so this is hardly surprising. What is surprising is that the biggest skills gap as far as learning professionals are concerned, performance management, only ranks is only number five on the list of managers’ concerns. Developing people, the third most important skills gap identified by learning professionals, is seen as a distant eighth most pressing by managers.

There are a number of different explanations for this disconnect but there are two that seem most likely.

The learning professionals are focusing on skills gaps based on a long term vision of where the organisation is going while managers are focused on the challenges of here and now.

This is definitely a possibility and the skill sets that are needed at any one point in time may not match up to the skill sets that are needed in the future. It’s fine for learning professionals to be future-focused as long as they are giving managers the support they need in the present as well.

The managers aren’t aware of their skills gaps because they’re not being highlighted to them by their managers or anyone else.

It’s simply not possible for someone to work on improving an aspect of their performance if they’re not aware that there is a gap there in the first place. So, 71% of learning professionals are saying there is an identified skills gap in how performance is managed in their organisation but managers don’t see that part of their job as a particular challenge. This might be because at a one-to-one level, between a manager and his or her line manager this isn’t being discussed as a skills gap (ironically highlighting the problem still further).

Learning professionals, along with their HR colleagues, are in a unique position to be able to see this issue objectively and highlight it to senior management. Whether this is being done, is in doubt because the perception of most managers is that this isn’t a particular challenge at the moment.

The age thing

Much has been made recently of the differences between the most recent generation to come into the workforce, the millennials, and those of older generations, generation x and the baby boomers. A great deal being discussed in the pages of the newspapers and at conferences is hyperbole and exaggeration. The newest generation to come to work aren’t cyborgs, living in symbiosis with their Facebook profiles. They’re just a bit more savvy with the technologies they grew up with and exhibit exactly the same learning needs as any previous generation new to work. This is especially true of those moving into management.

If anything, the GoodPractice survey highlighted more similarities than differences and the areas where differences did exist can be explained by the natural need of those with less experience for more support as they start on their chosen career path. Just as junior doctors require more support than experienced consultants, less experienced managers are more likely to need support as they work to overcome challenges they haven’t faced before.

According to the survey’s results, less experienced managers participated in learning activities more frequently than experienced managers. This makes sense since they are more likely to come across unfamiliar challenges more frequently than experienced mangers.

One area of difference that will not surprise many is the use of technology to help with workplace problems. Younger managers (in the 18-34 years age bracket) are more than twice as likely than older managers to use external or internal web resources to help them in their work. This trend is going to become more and more important as the demographic make up of the management population shifts.

The need for a more nuanced approach

The apparent discord between managers and learning professionals does not indicate that one group is right and the other group is wrong. Managers are likely to underestimate the impact of a course that they attended several months ago compared to a just-in-time intervention. Equally, learning professionals are likely to overestimate the impact of a course that they designed and possibly delivered, pouring weeks of their working life into. However, it is clear that overall the two viewpoints are not aligned and this is something that should be addressed.

The question is, what can be done to close the perception gap between the two groups in a way that balances their understandable biases?

A first step towards a better shared understanding is for learning professionals to simply work hard at getting to really know the managers in their organisation better. The survey conducted by ComRes on behalf of GoodPractice wasn’t difficult to construct and would be much easier to carry out within an organisation than it was externally.

At the same time as this broader, more quantitative approach, a more traditional method is to work closely with senior managers to gain insights into the organisation’s key priorities and where they see the gaps. A key caveat to doing this with senior management is to establish with them what their evidence is for highlighting those skills gaps and how well communicated what excellence looks like in that specific skill.

A second approach is to embrace informal learning, since it clearly works for managers, and help it to flourish. One of the difficulties about this approach for many learning professionals is the very nature of informal learning. There is no course, no pre-determined learning outcome and there is no way of controlling or quality assuring the activity. These elements have been the cornerstone of what learning professionals have done for decades so breaking out of that habit calls for a real and significant change.

However, a growing body of evidence shows that people learn how to do their jobs mostly through informal means. It therefore becomes important that learning professionals start to understand this emerging trend so they can best help their customer base by influencing it in a way that makes informal activities easier and more likely to be successful.

Accept the reality and make it work for you

On an intellectual level, it may be a cause for concern that managers are getting most of their know-how of how to do their job through informal methods. After all, what if those who are being sought out for their knowledge, whether in person or over the internet, aren’t necessarily the best people to be getting advice from?

In many ways, this doesn’t matter.

First of all, let’s examine a scenario to identify the potential positive and negative outcomes of a manager learning how to deal with a specific challenge through an informal chat with a colleague (the case equally applies to the manager using an online resource of some description).

Imagine that Tim is a relatively inexperienced manager charged with implementing part of a large change initiative. Unsure of exactly how to put his theoretical knowledge into practice he goes to Alexandra, a more experienced manager, for advice on how best to proceed. Alexandra gives Tim advice. So far, so straight forward. Here are the potential outcomes:

Outcome 1: Alexandra’s advice is good and Tim gets good results

Outcome 2: Alexandra’s advice is bad and Tim gets bad results

(We will, for the sake of convenience and lack of space, not deal with the exceptions where the advice is good and Tim gets bad results, and vice versa. If you think it  through though, you’ll see that these cases are dealt with in the long run)

Outcome 1 is obviously the optimum outcome, the very best of informal learning in action. What happens then in this scenario when Tim next has a problem? It’s more likely than not he would go to Alexandra for advice. What’s more, he becomes an advocate for Alexandra, suggesting her as a useful person to speak to when one of his peers has an issue they need help with.

What about Outcome 2? The next time Tim has an unfamiliar challenge he needs to deal with he’s much less likely to go to Alexandra and unlikely to recommend her as someone worth speaking to. He’ll seek out an alternative source of advice, likely on the back of a recommendation.

In this way the informal network system is self sustaining and will tend towards more positive outcomes as time goes on. We’ve all worked in organisations where the question ‘Who should I go to for help with this?’ has cropped up. And nine times out of ten, there’s someone who knows someone who’s regarded as an expert in that area.

This system operates completely without any intervention of a learning professional so it would be quite acceptable to ask ‘what on earth has this got to do with us’? That’s a powerful question that gets to the heart of where the profession is at the moment. Are we purely responsible for facilitating the formal learning that occurs in an organisation or do we have a bigger role to play?

Different organisations may choose to answer that questions in different ways but there’s no doubt that those learning departments that chose to play a bigger role will have more influence on the overall performance of the organisation.

Step one of getting ahead and making a bigger difference is realising that you are not in control, but you can have an influence.

Working with the grain

Not every survey tells the whole story. Indeed, not every survey is at all accurate. Several surveys saying the same thing, however, begin to paint an accurate picture and all the evidence of recent years tells us two things:

1) Managers, and other professionals, learn most of what they do on a day-to-day basis informally.

2) Learning functions are still mostly focused on delivering courses in classroom type environments.

That difference in viewpoints in itself is a signal that there’s an opportunity for learning professionals to do something different. We’ve all known for many years that ‘telling ain’t training’. Encouraging and environment where informal learning can flourish is the ultimate expression of facilitation.

Strategy Execution

I think it’s a great book, because Andrew doesn’t look for a simplistic model, but rather looks for evidence based solutions to provide guides for leaders in the execution of strategy. Given the staggeringly high failure rates of strategy execution this is an area where Learning can make a positive contribution to the performance of an organisation by developing the leadership capacity to successfully deliver the strategic intent of the organisation.

I interviewed Andrew about the inspiration for the book and the role that HR and Learning can play in successful strategy execution. As Andrew says in the interview strategy execution is complex and most of the barriers to success are people related issues that need to be considered in light of the unique circumstances of organisation. This means taking a wide organisational view of the elements required to delivery the strategic goal and not looking at individual components in isolation.

HR and Learning are therefore well placed to play a key role in helping the organisation think about the execution of strategy out with the normal organisational silos and keeping the organisation focussed on evidence based models and thinking.

Indeed finding the time to think about the right things is one of the conclusions Andrew draws at the end of the book. Have a listen to Andrew as he outlines the issues involved in Strategic Execution, the role for HR and Leadership and the conclusions he has drawn from his research.

Watch the video here.

My wife is an enormous fan of Air Crash Investigation, a TV programme from the National Geographic channel that does docu-drama recreations of emergency aircraft incidents. One such programme was on the other night and I got sucked in since it was about the original ash cloud incident that caused everyone to be cautious when the Icelandic volcano blew a few months back.

What most struck me from the programme was how much the flight crew relied upon training to get them through the experience. I don’t know how many times I heard the pilot or first officer speak about their hours in the flight simulators, or saw a dramatisation of them running through multiple checklists (a reminder of the power of job aids).

Piloting legend Chesley Sullenberger said pretty much the same thing after he successfully landed his Airbus A320 on the Hudson river. Training, discipline, experience and the all-important checklists were mentioned as vital elements in that emergency situation.

The importance of motivation

Learning in a flight simulator is an exciting experience. The trainee pilots carry out emergency actions in an environment almost identical to a real plane – it feels real. But what matters most about the training, what makes it effective, is that they care. They know that this kind of training has saved, and will save, lives. That is a powerful incentive to do the simulations over and over again.

It’s relatively easy to get motivated about saving lives, though. What does this mean for less emotionally charged learning interventions?

Nick Shackleton-Jones has a great video that supplements the blog post about his affective context learning model.

As he explains, in pull/informal learning the motivation is already there. The learner has a need. They look for something to help them, make a choice and then use what they’ve learned in a real life situation. They could be looking in a bespoke online resource, searching the internet, tapping into expert knowledge through a social network or simply turning round to their colleague at the next desk and asking them. It doesn’t matter; the motivation comes unprompted from the learner. It’s not about how flashy or impressive the source of information is, it’s all about what the learner needs there and then and that they apply it.

But pull learning only happens when someone cares enough to learn something new. They need to recognise that there is a performance gap and want to make an effort to close it.

If we were being totally honest, what proportion of the managers that we’ve worked with could we say cared enough about being great at their job that they sought out ways to do it better, unprompted?

Engaging the disengaged

Push learning is often seen to be the answer to this problem. Surely taking people out of their day-to-day work is a sign that something is important?

However, for most push learning, formal learning interventions such as workshops, elearning modules etc, the motivation is almost entirely at the organisational level. The organisation, through its senior managers and professional staff, deems the training important but often forgets to make it relevant to the people receiving the training.

Sometimes the motivation to learn is implicit. But the motivation of trainee pilots – “this training might save my life one day” – is very different to the motivation of someone on a performance management skills course – “this training might be relevant if I ever manage someone who’s a bit awkward (but I don’t have anyone like that at the moment and, anyway, I already get good/satisfactory ratings at my annual appraisals)”.

The motivation to learn is frequently considered to be dealt with by the WIIFM question – what’s in it for me? But this betrays a lack of understanding about our audience. It’s a common bias that we assume that what motivates us, motivates other people – if I care because of reason X, surely everyone else does too?

As a result, we don’t really deal with the question of what we can do to make people care. It’s so often taken as a given but it’s the most important question of all. Without the motivation to genuinely learn and apply something, it’s never going to happen.

As Nick explains in his video:

“… Sometimes people don’t care about things when we want them to. So the role of the educator is to encourage people to care by being passionate; by being credible and persuasive and finding ways to connect with people at a personal level. Educators inspire and motivate people, building their confidence and making things matter.

“…It means less time spent explaining to people why something is important and more time spent trying to figure out how to make something feel important.”

Looking at it from this perspective, finding ways to add affective context to a learning intervention becomes vital. How we can add stories, scenarios and emotional hooks to learning interventions is how we create meaning and therefore motivation.

Learning does not take place in a vacuum

People are motivated to learn for all sorts of different reasons and it’s often the organisational levers outside of the actual learning intervention that make the real difference. The performance management approaches, the internal communication style and modes, the organisational and management culture, the reward and incentive mechanisms – all of these need to be considered alongside the learning intervention because where there is an incongruence between any of these, the performance of managers and employees will be driven by what’s most important to them. That’s not often what they learned on a course. [2]

L&D skills for the future

There are quite a few lists out there outlining the key skills that a learning and development professional needs in order to function effectively in the coming decade or so. Three that I’d recommend reading would be from Charles Jennings, Donald Taylor and Nick Shackleton-Jones. Rather than create my own list (that’s maybe a post for the future), I’d like to suggest the following two areas in which L&D professionals need to develop expertise in in order to really make a difference to the performance of individuals and the organisation:

Expertise in influencing motivation, which involves having a true grasp on what motivates people far beyond simply knowing about Maslow and Herzberg (who, after all, did their work in the 40s, 50s and 60s when psychology was really just getting started). [3]

Expertise in the workplace performance ecology (the gestalt of human workplace performance influences), because only by understanding all the influences on performance outside learning can we expect to design effective learning interventions.

So we come back to my original point, partially inspired by Air Crash Investigations: motivation’s not an important factor in a learning intervention, it’s the important factor. Without motivation, learning will never happen.

[2] Of course, this means that in a work context, learning can’t possibly be an outcome in and of itself. It’s always part of a broader goal to improve performance. Finding what makes every individual care enough to learn and improve is as much, if not more, the responsibility of a manager as it is that of learning professionals.

[3] Where the concepts discussed in Drive by Dan Pink and The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely, are starting points for investigation and experimentation rather ideas that spark interest and discussion, but change nothing in real life.

Luckily, researchers have been looking at this for the last few decades and we do know quite a bit. K. Anders Ericsson wrote a great article in Harvard Business Review a few years back summarising what we know about what it takes to become an expert. It’s well worth a read (it’s called The Making of an Expert). To summarise his summary, becoming an expert takes:

Deliberate practice with feedback – it’s not good enough to just accrue experience; an expert deliberately seeks out feedback and applies their learning over and over again. [1] How often?

At least ten years or 10,000 hours – you’ll have heard this before perhaps. The research conducted by Ericsson and his peers is where Malcolm Galdwell got his thesis in Outliers from. This is the amount of practice it takes to develop expertise.

Coaching and mentoring from an expert coach – importantly, however, a good coach will know when to let the budding expert ‘leave the nest’ and coach themselves.

So all you need is to spend several hours a day for around ten years practising the thing you want to become an expert in with the supervision of an expert coach. Easy.

Blah, blah, blah, experts … so what?

Here’s the important part for learning and development professionals. After all that practice, all that time spent developing expertise, an expert no longer thinks like novice or even a journeyman. In fact, the way that experts store and retrieve knowledge is so different that it’s unlikely that they know how to pass that knowledge on in a way that’s easily digestible. So much of what an expert knows is encoded, tacit knowledge. [2]

This is, of course, where we come in. Learning professionals have long had the task of extracting key expert knowledge and producing a learning intervention that novices can then use in a practical way. We’re never going to move people from novice to expert in a condensed time period. However, we can get people from novice to competent and provide them with the support they need to reduce unnecessary mistakes. [3]

Organising information online

So, experts organise their knowledge according to different principles and in quite different ways from novices. Why then would we turn to an expert to design the layout or structure of an online resource? Who is the resource for? Not the expert; they have all the information they need either on hand in their memory, or in their extended professional network.

It’s the novice we should be designing for. And to do that, the best thing to do is find out how they would look for the information and how they would organise it. It’s what Amazon does when designing its online store, it’s what organisations with award-winning intranets do, it’s what we do when we design our online management portals. Of course some guidance is needed, but that’s only useful if the learner can get to the starting point.

The curse of the expert when it comes to online presentation is that they often decide they know better and produce a design that matches their own knowledge map – totally confusing the user. IT experts design the IT part of the intranet, HR experts design the HR part of the intranet, product experts design the product information parts of the intranet and all express surprise that users never seem to use them.

Ignoring the impulse to employ your expert knowledge and change something because it ‘just makes more sense’ from your expert point of view is a difficult skill to master, but it is important if you want to help people learn more effectively.

[1] See also The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, Ericsson et al.

[2] There’s a great chapter summarising much of the research in this area in How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, by the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. It’s only 19 pages and it’s absolutely fascinating (for a learning and performance obsessed geek like me).

[3] It’s worth noting that true experts don’t need our help in the domain that they have their expertise, and a good amount of research also shows that experts know better than most where they are lacking the requisite knowledge and skills to carry out a task in a domain that is not their own. The key is that not many people are really experts, and so most do need help. However, experts learn best through informal means: for them, formal learning is ‘background material’.

70% see inadequate staff skills as barrier to growth

40% see current employee skills risk becoming obsolete

55% claim L&D failing to deliver necessary training

46% doubt L&D can deliver

less than 18% agree that L&D aligned with business

This is somewhat at odds with the Learning Trends index we ran recently with learning professionals. The index will be published in August and repeated every six months to track the industry. The headlines in relation to the Capita findings are that 88% of Learning Managers believe that they have the ability to meet the learning needs of their organisation and 56% believe that their impact will increase. This is despite 66% believing that in the next 6 months they will have less resources.

Overall there is a very optimistic outlook from learning managers, but I question how realistic it is and my concern is that learning managers don’t understand how their departments are really perceived more widely or the challenges ahead. Certainly in my conversations with L&D professionals and senior executives I hear both sides of this debate and the perceived realities are strongly held by both.

As I’ve written many time before in this blog, learning needs to be about improving performance in-line with strategic objectives and there two points I’d like to make today.

Firstly if ‘the decision makers’ in organisations don’t think that learning is aligned (I’ve heard this gripe for over 20 plus years) why have we not done something to hold learning accountable before now. It seems to me that blaming everything on learning is not acceptable.

Secondly, I think this is a great opportunity for learning professionals to step up to the plate, help their organisation through a difficult period and change the perception of learning once and for all. As ‘Learning to change‘ says ‘a downturn brings change and transformation and to be successful requires people with the requisite skills, abilities and attitudes’. This can only be achieved with the strong input from learning, but the actual outcomes and accountability lie across the organisation.

We need to stop evaluating learning as a stand alone activity and see it as part of a more sophisticated solution. As such we should measure how well the organisation uses learning to get results. The responsibility for this belongs to the whole organisation. It cannot be delegated to the learning department.

This requires both decision makers and learning professionals to have a different conversation. If I was in a learning role, I know I’d want to start the conversation and show decision makers that I understood the strategic issues, demonstrate that together we can be successful and that learning is a confident and capable partner. Given the views expressed the survey and articulated by Donald (which are widely held) this will require a radical change for some learning professionals, but what is the alternative? The recession will force this change,  so much better to make a start now. As an unrelenting optimist I see this as a great opportunity to have those different conversations and transform learning into a performance focused division that is unquestionably strategically aligned. But then again as an optimist I’m also expecting the sun to shine for the next three weeks whilst on holiday in Scotland.

Something I have been considering recently is the working relationship between L&D and HR. As an L&D professional, my own experiences of this have varied considerably (and I’ll go into some of the reasons why below) but I keep coming back to the same conclusion that the benefits of collaborative working between the two functions are so clear that it’s in everyone’s (not least the organisation’s) interests to work at it.
It was rather timely, then, to receive this recent article from Training Zone advocating the integration of L&D into HR to deliver true value to organisations. While I broadly agree with this proposition, my experience is that this isn’t a ‘quick fix’. It has to be well thought out and reviewed on an ongoing basis if it is going work as well as it should.
So I now can’t help but wonder, what are the ‘essentials’ to ensure a positive working relationship between L&D and HR? I’ve listed some of my thoughts below, based on my own experiences. Some of these may seem ‘hit over the head’ obvious but it’s surprising how many of them get overlooked, particularly when people are pushed for time.

• Regular communication between the two functions. Screamingly obvious I know, but I have worked in organisations where the HR and L&D functions barely exchanged a word despite sitting a few feet away from one another! I have also experienced the two roles working separately on the same project, only to find that their ideas (and the work they put into them) clashed. The most straightforward way to counter this is to set up regular meetings between the HR and L&D staff where past, ongoing and upcoming projects are reviewed and discussed, and plans are put in place for joint and cohesive working.

• Collaborate to ensure business partnering is effective. While business partnering is traditionally seen as HR’s role, there is plenty L&D can do to support this. On one hand, I have helped HR specialists with great technical knowledge but lacking face-to-face skills put together presentations or facilitated sessions that really sold the benefits of what HR can do for departments. At the other end of the scale, I worked with HR on larger effectiveness and efficiency projects, helping to pinpoint areas where capability needed to be developed and implementing appropriate solutions.

• Shared responsibility for the performance management system. As highlighted in the Training Zone article, HR and L&D should have joint discussions to establish where performance issues (from a capability perspective) lie and to decide whether these are isolated instances or evidence of something more widespread. L&D would be well placed to put together learning solutions to react to this. Also, both functions can design a system that supports the work that they are trying to achieve. For example, as an L&D professional I would want input into the design of a Professional Development Plan that not only captured learning needs but also provoked the right kind of discussions between staff member and line manager, as well encouraging post-learning evaluation.

• Recognise the importance of both functions. A fear that I hear expressed again and again is that L&D will be seen the ‘poor relation’ to HR. This should not, and need not, be the case. Shared understanding of both functions’ job roles is key here, particularly drawing out how each can complement the work of the other.

This is, obviously, just a very small list and is just for starters. It would be great to hear others’ ideas regarding how the two functions could work well collaboratively. I must say, I can only speak in encouraging tones regarding fostering a good working relationship with my HR colleagues. Of course there have been differences of opinion and some debate about the best way to approach things, but the positives, not least a shared understanding between the two functions and the end benefits to the business, have been well worth any effort.

At the beginning of the year, we decided that the hundreds of Knowledge Bank customers who continued to rave about the quality of the content really deserved to have a dedicated team and that Knowledge Bank needed its own identity and focus. We asked Emily Bookless to take this on and along with James McLuckie and our team of Editors they’ve been working very hard on this project.

Today we relaunch Knowledge Bank as the Eden Tree with its own dedicated web site and a great new look interface for members. Its great to see the seed that Margaret planted all those years ago really maturing in it’s own right.

Eden Tree is all about the the quality of the 3000 resources and, if I say so myself, you won’t find better content anywhere.  It really is the one place where a busy trainer, learning and organisational development professional can save hours of time as it contains everything needed for the most common types of learning intervention, including self-assessments, exercises, case studies, workshops and handouts.

Have a look and let me know what you think. I’d love to know what else we can do to make Eden Tree the best place for you to find the content you need.

Listen to what Keith had to say:  http://content.goodpractice.net/BUPA%20Blog.mp3

Listen to my conversation with Mark

Investors in People (IiP) is the UK’s leading people management business improvement standard, designed to help organisations develop performance through their people. The Standard can be achieved through IiP assessment, which requires organisations to meet a range of performance and development-focussed evidence requirements. Organisations that go beyond the Standard to meet additional IiP requirements can be awarded with Bronze, Silver or Gold recognition.

[1] Visa Europe is part of the global Visa network, providing the brand, systems, services and rules that enable electronic payments between millions of European consumers, businesses and merchants.

But did we learn anything and what trends will impact in the UK?

My learning was on three levels, personal, things that will help GoodPractice continue to grow and industry insights and I’ve not finished learning yet. The conference is so big that you cannot hope to cover it yourself and as part of the UK delegation we made sure we covered all the sessions and events that people were interested in. We’ve still to have the full debrief, so the following is very much my personal view.

Social media and the use of it in learning was high on the agenda and with a number of authors having books about the subject just coming out it was perhaps no surprise. Tony Bingham’s, The New Social Learning and Charlene Li’s Open Leadership being two examples.

There was a strong feeling that the economy was picking up and the learning industry was going to benefit, but this was also countered by a lot of talk that organisations were not going back to the way things were done previously and an ongoing need to do more with less.

The biggest beneficiary of this was the drive towards virtual classroom delivery. This was recognised as needing very different design and delivery skills from face-to-face training. I certainly see this area growing globally and it will be interesting to see how it impacts in the UK given our smaller geography. There were some excellent presentations which clearly demonstrated how to make virtual work well.

I was interested to see if mobile learning was more prevalent in the US and slightly surprised that it was not. There was a lot of talk about being ready for mobile and waiting for the big demand. Would the iPad change the game and the development of learning apps? The general view I heard was that the providers were ready to support mobile, but didn’t feel that there was a solid demand. If and when it does arrive, the view was mobile would very quickly be a requirement for providers.

We saw some interesting new platforms and my favourite was Bloomfire which looks like a great social learning platform. Is the learning market ready for it? I’m not sure, but it is an exciting concept and I hope they succeed.

There was a lot of work on measurement with the Kirkpatrick clan doing a number of sessions at the conference and I found a couple of people starting to talk about working with organisations to guarantee performance results. They had methodologies which focussed on the business issue and established agreement of the role learning had to play in the delivery of results.

So my reflection after 10 days is that even as budgets return to learning, learning and development is still being asked to do more with less and recognising that there are new ways of achieving results. Social media is being talked about a lot, but it is still to move mainstream and be implemented in a big way. Learning how to get the best from new technologies such as social media and virtual learning are becoming key skills for learning professionals if you are going to make a significant difference to performance in your organisation.