I was pleasantly surprised to find newly published research conducted by Bersin & Associates (which included companies like Xerox, Accenture, British Telecom, and Edwards Jones just to name a few) confirming that “formalizing” informal learning is one of the top priorities of many companies. If you have not yet read this study, you need to (please see the link at the bottom of this post).
Over the course of the past year, we have worked with numerous HR & Training Executives and Corporate Coaches from around North America on better measuring and improving training ROI, effectively bringing informal and formal learning together under the same roof, capturing and quantifying the “brain trust” held by their employees, and finding affordable ways to measurably increase the impact of training on reduced budgets. As a software provider, we have learned much during this time pertaining to software design and platform functionality required to meet the above goals.
For all of those looking to go down this path, we would like to add lessons from our experience:
1. What parts of informal learning do you really need to capture? In simplest terms, informal learning is the dialog and transfer of knowledge between employees – typically occurring between cubicles, in the lunchroom, or outside the training room. It can be broken into different elements:
a. Ideas and Lessons Learned: Many of your staff have learned from mistakes and have come up with some rather ingenious ways to do things better, faster, or less expensively.
b. Open Dialog and Debate: Simply sharing ideas however is not enough. Ideas are polished through open dialog and debate. Open dialog resulting from experience creates deeper understanding and uncovers idea weaknesses and pitfalls.
c. Finding Subject Matter Experts. It’s one thing to listen to someone share their ideas on a podcast or PowerPoint – it’s entirely another to find an expert on the subject who may be located across the world – and begin a dialog with that person.
2. In order to make measureable improvements, informal learning MUST be accompanied by formal learning. You cannot have two isolated events and expect one to support the other. Both must be interwoven to make this work. Don’t take our word for it, the Education Development Center came to the same conclusion: http://www.knowledgejump.com/learning/informal.html
3. Choosing the right technology: There are a number of tools that can help you capture informal learning. In order to be useful, the tool you choose should offer the following functionality:
a. Security: Be careful because most open source and piecemeal tools do not offer sufficient security. Do in-depth research about the security offered by whatever tool you use. You don’t want your proprietary or confidential information to end up on You Tube!
b. Ability to Post Content: Both your trainers AND employees need the ability to post content. That may come in the form of an online video, a podcast, a PowerPoint, a document, picture or diagram, and comments.
c. Catalyst for Discussion and Debate: Be careful, many mistakenly think they have created an “informal learning system” by using wiki’s, You Tube, etc. Unless your system provides a catalyst for and can accommodate debate and discussion, you will not foster nor capture informal learning.
d. Voting: Allowing your employees to vote on answers, comments, and content contributed by others will make your life much easier. Let’s face it, not everything everyone has to say is useful to the organization. A voting mechanism quickly separates great ideas and content from irrelevant, less helpful, or inaccurate contributions.
e. Search Tool: An often-overlooked component is search ability. If a brilliant conversation took place a year ago between your best engineer and a new hire – the only way someone today would even know about it was to read back through a year’s worth of comments on the forum. Ain’t going to happen. A search tool allows people to find conversations and content relevant to their questions, regardless when that content was made.
f. Friend Finder: Similar to that found of Facebook or LinkedIn, this functionality allows employees to quickly find and connect with some of your brightest employees regardless of location, position, or department.
g. Don’t forget the database back end. A great deal of information will be collected and contained in your system. You need a way to capture all of it so you can run reports, analysis, etc.
4. Informal Online Learning = Online Communities. This may not seem so obvious at first. But remember that true informal learning is more than merely watching a podcast or PowerPoint of another person’s ideas. It also requires engaging others in conversation., asking and answering questions, putting things into context and sharing documents. The only social media tool we have found comprehensive enough to help us accomplish all of the above is the online community (which in reality includes forums, blogs, podcasts, wikis, etc.)
In conclusion, there is a great deal of knowledge and thought required to create an effective online learning tool that interweaves formal with informal learning. Merely folding social media into your LMS will not give you the results you expect. It took us over a year of trial, error, and 3rd party research to develop a reliably effective platform that generates tangible results. But the results are well worth the effort.
References:
1. Bersin & Associates: Informal Learning Becomes Formal (January 21, 2009). (link: http://joshbersin.com/2009/01/21/informal-learning-becomes-formal/comment-page-1/#comment-133).
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