October 14, 2004

Old Post for Training 2004

During the last session we took some time to kind of revisit our understanding of workflow learning and try to come up with an elevator pitch and some basic ideas. During that discussion we talked about where learning is aligned within the organization. Many executives and managers can look at you and say, "Hey, we met the delivery date and no one went to training." Good point, but even the executives know that it is a competitive world and if we don't get better as an organization we will die.

This led to the discussion of learning actually being part of the companies or organizations DNA. Pretty cool. It's just integrated into the "culture" of the organization. Great. OK, who's budget does it come out of? "Not mine. That's what HR is for." Right. But as we discussed yesterday HR is a support organization. They really aren't positioning themselves to align with organizational goals. While I'm sure some HR organizations are totally integrated into corporate strategy, they probably aren't working on a daily basis with engineers, or agents, or programmers, or whoever makes up the core competency of the organization.

OK and maybe someone can make a better argument then me for training being housed in HR, but that just doesn't seem to be right to me.

Really, we want training to support new business development (increase revenues) and increase productivity (lower costs).

To accomplish this we must be so integrated into the process and tasks of the organization that we understand what is being done, where the deficiencies are, and how we might be able to correct them. This reminds me of my earlier comments....

I think that workflow learning is being conceived on the premise that a dynamic solution (dynamic in that it can in some manner support itself and morph into a useful tool with as little human intervention as possible) that can be integrated into the work environment in such a way that the access to knowledge resources in whatever format needed is available to the employee (learner, performer, dude).

In my way of thinking, this seems very reasonable.

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