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.

Tony Karrer’s big question this month is “So what can, should, or will, we offer the digital generation by 2015? http://bit.ly/9YwLnB. Whilst the reality for knowledge workers in 2015 is that learning will not be downloaded into their brains in an instant I think we can see that the arrival of technology like the iPad is going to continue to drive expectations of easy to access knowledge where and when you need it. Indeed one of the things that the iPhone and iPad are so good at is making the technology invisible and something that just works.

iPad

I only have to look across the living room in the evening to see my wife, Carolyn on my old iPhone using the Facebook app to see what the kids are up to or playing a game to see how this type of computing is changing user expectations. Carolyn would never  consider doing this on a lap top. A laptop is a complex machine she does not want to engage with.

I wonder where all this will take the type of device(s) that people want to use at work to communicate, interact and find knowledge in 2015.

I think the biggest change coming in terms of workplace learning is going to be better and better tools to provide continuous learning depending on your context. The right learning in the right context. Context is crucial to performance and learning exists to improve performance.

Josh Bersin presented the following slide at Learning Technologies this year.

The model we need to consider

My hope is that by 2015 this is so well accepted that it is seen as old hat by the industry. This will mean that it is the starting point for developing a learning strategy rather than seen as an add on to traditional training.  I also think that the LMS will have finally been dumped as learning professionals realise that it doesn’t support this type of learning and a more flexible model based on less control and increased social media is adopted.  Jay Cross had a great post on the future of the LMS recently http://bit.ly/dxvxfR.

So quick summary for 2015:

1. Very different expectations from people about how they want to to access knowledge
2. A far better ability to provide the right learning for the performance context
3. An accepted model of continuous learning focussed on improving performance.

I’m off for a helicopter lesson.

Listen to the Podcast:  Neville Pritchard Podcast

So, we’ve got our beautiful new design backed up by a healthy dose of user testing and feedback. What’s next? Well, for most people it’s the boring part. For the developers and designers, it’s where the work really begins.

GoodPractice is built on the enthusiasm and experience of our people, but behind the scenes there’s a hidden partner that helps us in much of what we do. Helix is our technology platform, which runs all our sites from a secret location in London. Together with our development partners at Storm ID, we use Helix to create all our client solutions and manage our products. In order to revamp our toolkits whilst still maintaining the existing ones, we needed to give Helix a shot in the arm to make it bigger, faster and stronger.

Development work started in September and was initially carried out in the administration section of the platform. New classes were defined, objects created and properties tweaked. Over the course of the last few months there have been dozens of staging deployments, and the teams at Storm ID and at GoodPractice have been building, testing, feeding back and iterating up until the point where we were all happy that it was ready to be released into the wild.

Our existing clients won’t see any difference yet, but behind the scenes there’s a new, improved server set up along with the software improvements that will enable us to deliver our improved toolkits.

The journey never ends

We’re delighted to be unveiling our new look toolkits at the CIPD HRD Exhibition tomorrow, but we’re keen to also highlight that this is just the continuation of the journey that we’ve been on ever since GoodPractice was founded. We’ve already got a list of improvements that we’re going to make to our platform to make it even better, and we’re open to any and all ideas that our clients have for what they’d like to see next.

We’re planning to carry out some additional usability testing in the next few months so we can keep polishing the final product, so watch this space!

We hope to see you on the 21st or 22nd at Stand 471 at HRD 2010, Olympia London.

Other posts in this series

This is the fourth and final post in a series describing how we approached the redesign of our online toolkits for managers and leaders. The previous posts were:

1: Re-inventing the GoodPractice User Experience

2: User Experience: Planning and Requirements

3: User Experience: Design

• the information architecture review, and
• prototyping

Both of these terms, I think, are deliberately constructed to give an impression of mystery behind the process. Information architecture is simply the way that content is organised, most often into various levels of categories. The prototyping process is a series of activities aimed at producing a mock-up of how the finished product will look.

We spent quite a bit of time in the design phase making sure that we were getting things right before embarking on the technical development work. This was especially important to us since the end result is a departure from our previous toolkit designs.

Redefining the information architecture

GoodPractice have been in business for almost ten years now and during that time we’ve gone from having a single product, aimed at HR and learning professionals, to a range of different client solutions aimed at a range of different audiences with different needs. Over that time we’ve learned some interesting lessons about how certain ways of categorising our content can lead to a better user experience.

This time around, we decided to get two reviews of our content. One by an expert information designer from our partners at Storm ID, and another by the users themselves in a card sorting exercise.

Card sorting is used by content providers all the time to find new and better ways of presenting their offering to their users. From Amazon categorising its products, to the major news sites categorising their features and articles, it’s a well established method of getting a valuable insight into how users think about content and look for it.

From these two exercises we got a few very clear recommendations for reorganising our content:

• clearer, more direct labelling
• smaller chunks
• better ways of filtering the content
• easier ways to find similar content

Since then, our Editorial team have reviewed every single piece of content we have and restructured our products  to accommodate the feedback we received. Even after we introduce our new look toolkits, we’ll be constantly reviewing the feedback we receive to improve on this vital part of our users’ experience.

Low fidelity prototyping

My favourite phrase of the whole process: low-fidelity prototyping. Which was just Craig and Shelagh’s (our wonderful designers from Storm ID) fancy way of saying drawing pictures on flip charts.

We knew what features and functions we wanted, but we now needed to get a clearer idea of how these would work. Craig and Shelagh drew pictures. Lots and lots of pictures.

Following the low fidelity prototypes, we very quickly settled on a design that seemed to work best from all our user personas’ perspectives. We could see Algie, Harry and Bertha all using the site in ways that suited their own personal internet habits. Craig and Shelagh then worked up the sketches into wireframes, basic visual guides to the whole interface design of the product.

The wireframe is a very basic conceptualisation of the finished product. Its main purpose is to check that all the navigation and supplementary elements of the page are in the right place and named properly. No images are used, and no colour is present so that designers can get an idea of how colour needs to be used to draw the users’ eye. As an example, our wireframe for the homepage looked like this:

The next step was to find out exactly what our users would think about the new designs.

User testing and eye-tracking

The ultimate test of a new design is to put it in front of the people that use your products and find out what they think. Our web designer, Rob, had created an online, interactive version of the designs that Craig and Shelagh produced. It wasn’t a fully functioning prototype, but it was a functioning website with some content placed inside example toolkits. The idea was to get a feel for what people thought about the new look, how they used the site, and whether the new information architecture made sense.

We carried out usability testing with 10 people: some were regular users of our toolkits, while others had never seen them before; some were ‘Algie’ type users, while some were ‘Harry’ type users. They were greeted by an independent consultant and given a series of tasks on the prototype website. We got their feedback through their comments but also through eye-tracking so we could tell exactly what they were looking at.

The results were fascinating and we were certainly glad that we carried out the testing. Despite it being a regular feature of many sites, we found that having any navigation on the right hand side of the screen was almost completely ignored by our users. We also got great feedback about some of the language used on the site for certain features, especially where it was ambiguous or overly ‘web 2.0′. Finally, and most importantly, we got some very useful insights into how to best use colour on the sites to highlight certain navigation and search elements which we will now be able to pass onto our clients when designing their sites.

The polishing

With all the feedback we had, Craig and Shelagh were able to polish up the designs with choices of colour, typography, icons and other graphical and UI devices. When they were finished, we had something that looked like this.

All that had to be done now was turn the design into a fully functioning web application, a process I’ll cover in a post tomorrow ahead of our official launch at the CIPD HRD conference on Wednesday.

Other posts in this series

This is the third in a series of posts describing how we approached the redesign of our online toolkits for managers and leaders. The other posts in the series are:

1: Re-inventing the GoodPractice User Experience

2: User Experience: Planning and Requirements

4: User Experience: Implementation, Testing and Measurement