The Impact of Recent Trends in Learning and Development

Brian talked about creative ways as learning professionals we can all stay focused on 3 core goals, who you are, what you want to do and where are you going. In good and bad economies we all have choices, sometimes we need to make difficult choices for better times ahead, the key is staying focused in these times of uncertainty.

The next segment of the presentation was a group exercise with some reasons training is not perceived as a higher value within organizations. Many of the groups came up with learning isn’t a revenue generator, lower skilled workers being hired and can’t justify specific skill based training, to C level decision makers not part of the overall training strategy.

Brian presented three major trends of how trainers, and learning professionals can deliver meaningful results throughout their organization.

1. Learning relevancy, 4 barriers that can be disastrous, such as caring about the wrong things , executives don’t care about pedagogy of learning as we might as practitioners but care about how increased sales will improve market share, the next barrier is lack business skills to make critical decisions, the third barrier is not in alignment of the CEO’s world or senior management strategy. The last barrier is “bad conversations” not speaking the language, Brian used the analogy of a French person speaking to a Germany person, both need to be in partnership of the core corporate mission.
2. Becoming a leader, having the business acumen to justify return on equity and quantify top line growth, learning professionals need to wear both hats.
3. Can you see yourself as a business partner? 4 steps of: Identify, who you are, Purpose why you do what you do, Choices you make impact your future and Action-how I will implement my goals.

We participated in a second group exercise to apply all 4 steps in part 3.
The final segment involved analysis of all three major circles of Business Skills or Acumen, Alignment of Strategy and delivering Results. Becoming a leader is the central intersection point of all three pervasive circles.

In addition to knowing your company culture and corporate mission, we as learning professionals need to understand at a deep and abstract operational level of what our companies do and how we server our customers. Brian explained companies essentially do three things, sell things, count things and make things. All hope to accomplish this, with saving time and money. Think about your customer’s customers when you link learning and your training curriculum. We all have to think differently, to break the traditional chains in human behavior to show our value in aligning informal learning tools and resources with traditional learning was another example of how recent trends are changing how we develop training content.

Brian introduced the concept of the “Free Economy” where people want to contribute to keep their skills and talents current, we’ve seen examples in the proliferation of social networking being used commercially with blogging, community user groups to share knowledge and information.

The following quote by Douglas MacArthur sums up this fantastic event. “There is no security on this earth, only opportunity” Find your own self journey, keep asking questions, be passionate and your learning relevancy and leadership will flourish.