Monday, December 11, 2006

December's BIG QUESTION! Part II



What are the biggest challenges for you/us as head into 2007?



Without a doubt, heading into 2007 learning industry practitioners need to focus on change management in their organizations. All of the tools of Web2.0 applied in Learning2.0 Ecosystems will fail if we do not SHOW the benefit to our clients/customers.



This may be stretching it a bit, however I believe in many cases we are challenged with reinventing ourselves or becoming extinct. As many savvy content experts begin realizing that they don't have to "wait in the training department's cue of projects". We will begin to find more and more professionals avoiding the training department all together and "doing it themselves" (good enough is good enough, screw the pedagogy). After all, true professionals take pride in their work and their knowledge and they will begin to take pride in creating the media that shows off the skills and knowledge of their trade in the form of training and mentoring others as a part of their own career growth.



As a matter of fact...yes...the sky IS falling ;-)



The silver lining comes in Part III...stay tuned!

3 comments:

Tony Karrer said...

Brent - don't forget to post this back on the LCB blog. I was going through your first one and realized I hadn't seen this one yet!

Anonymous said...

How can we convince leadership that's slow to change? Someone needs to send me a workerbee-manager translator that helps me translate the benefits to leaders. I'm finding sometimes that many leaders build off of past/known experience rather than going with their gut and trying something new. Then also with the small and experimental eco-systems we're setting up I think we need to set up measurable learning goals and properly evaluate the success met. If it can be done.

bschlenker said...

Thanks for commenting on this Natalie! Its perfect timing because its something I've been thinking about quite heavily over the last few months. CHANGE is a difficult thing. And Changemanagement is a difficult part of our jobs that I think we too often overlook. Why is Change Management something different than what we do as Learning Professionals? Is it really THAT different? I don't think so. More often than not when change is occuring in the org we are asked to facilitate that change with "training". And so there is already a change strategy in place and we are simply a small part of a much bigger plan that we cannot control. However, there are many times that training departments are asked to develop training and no change management is in place. Huh? Isn't change REALLY what we are all about? Changing behaviors. Changing thinking. Changing skills. Every single thing we do, and every solution we create, no matter how small, is for the purpose of change. I think one of the problems is that we are not the change agents, but simply part of the solution after the need for a change has been "discovered" by someone higher up with more influence.
Measurable learning goals? Don't get me started on that one. Here's the goal: CAN THEY DO THE JOB? Yes. No. If its Yes we're done. If its No we help. It shouldn't be any harder than connecting ourselves with the business and ITS goals...not the ludacris arbatrary goals we make up because they are easier to measure for us with or without our fancy LMS.