Elearning blog: Learning re-imagined

Blending Formal and Informal Learning

Over 80% of learning that happens in organizations is informal, with just 20% occurring via formal methods. Claire Schooley, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research explains how organizations with the best learning cultures blend both for optimal results. Watch the short video.

7 Requirements for Excellence in Patient Care

Conversations in Leadership is a Skillsoft webinar series featuring business experts and best-selling authors from the Skillsoft®  Leadership Development Channel™ and  50 Lessons collection.

Join us for a complimentary webinar featuring Nicole Bendaly
Tuesday, June 4, 12-1 p.m. EDT

Considered the perfect companion to your leadership training program, Improving Healthcare Team Performance is a practical handbook that provides the knowledge, tools and techniques required to develop a single team, or to develop an organization-wide, team-based culture from which exceptional patient care emerges.

In this webinar, Bendaly shows you:

• How to define what constitutes a high-performing, patient-focused team
• Guidance on the common healthcare leadership challenges of low morale, poor communication and interpersonal conflict
• Examples of targeted solutions you may be able to start deploying
• Recommendations for how you can affect change at every level of the organization

Register today!

About the speaker

Nicole Bendaly is co-author of The High Performance Healthcare Team: The 7 Requirements for Excellence in Patient Care and has 15 years of experience in organizational behavior.

About the host

Shawn Hunter is author of Out•Think: How Innovative Leaders Drive Exceptional Outcomes (August, 2013) and is Executive Producer and VP of Skillsoft Leadership Development Channel^® and 50 Lessons^®.

Environmental, Safety and Health Employee Training

By Donna McEntee, Practice Manager, ES&H solutions, Skillsoft

Nearly every industry needs to conduct specific training because of mandates by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation (DOT). To remain compliant, elearning is an effective way to reach broad audiences, provide multiple delivery methods and track completions—all in a consistent manner.

Whether it is new employee training or annual topic refreshers, Skillsoft’s learning resources are designed for a range of needs, from workers requiring rigorous training, to business professionals that might only need general awareness or periodic training on special topics. Through our Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) library, courses are available to your learners at their convenience through our cloud-based solution. This means that learners may access their training 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days per year through the Internet connection. The training is very interactive and includes review exercises, case studies and graphical representations. Organizations can utilize our LMS to assign courseware and track training efforts and ensure compliance with regulations.

Watch Skillsoft client, Kleinfelder, to learn how the organization uses elearning to keep their employees safe. 

Donna McEntee is a Practice Manager for Skillsoft’s Environmental, Safety and Health Solution Area. With more than 15 years of experience in online learning, she supports the development of new compliance courses and provides product expertise for our customers using our library of ESH courses and Learning Management Systems. She has worked as a safety training professional in hazardous waste operations, as a corporate compliance training manager and training consultant to government and commercial clients for more than 25 years. 

2013 Global Skillsoft Perspectives Recap

We’re pleased to bring you a guest post by a Skillsoft Regional Account Executive, Sabrina Smith. Sabrina traditionally recaps Skillsoft Perspectives within her team—this year we’re sharing her point of view on the blog.

By Sabrina Smith, Regional Account Executive, Skillsoft

Greetings to those of you that attended Skillsoft Perspectives— and to those of you that did not!

As I sat on the plane ride home, reflecting on our week together, I jotted down a few highlights to share.  It was interesting to me that many of the sessions shared the same key themes:

• This is the era of learner engagement.
• The business isn’t going to care about learning until learning cares about the business.
• Some measurement is better than no measurement.
• Don’t be afraid of failure; it’s how we learn.

My recap to you is a little tradition I like to call the Post-Perspectives Dénouement, sort of a “Perspectives-in-120-seconds.”  My hope is to continue the conversation we started this week and that you’ll share with me your highlights as well….and for those of you unable to attend, this is my way of bringing Perspectives back home to you.   

Measurement panel discussion

I loved this panel discussion!  It was lively, rich with content, and had the “movie stars” of measurement thought leadership.  The time for viewing L&D as a cost or an activity has passed. We need to view L&D as a business driver and not wait to be asked for results.  Data is just numbers— it’s the metrics that matter.  So if you’re not delivering the “So what?” to your executives, what do you need to do differently?  Kieran’s rally cry to us was “this is no time to think,” but to act and act now, as some measurement is better than no measurement.  Try and “get over being perfect,” as it’s not going to happen, and, after all, you learn from failure.  Laurie Bassi shared with us “Let not the perfect become the enemy of the good.”  We were urged by the panelists to stop using measurement as a defensive crouch but rather as a tool for continuous improvement, and to deliver this news with confidence.

Seth Godin

Seth’s keynote, broadcast live via the Skillsoft® Leadership Development Channel™ and Skillsoft® Leadership Advantage™ (and now available in its recorded format) was a
huge highlight for me.  He shared his thoughts with us on the arrival of the “connection economy,” based on coordination, trust, permission and exchange of ideas.  That it’s the experience we pay for now.  And again a repeated theme of not being afraid of failure. We need to have a willingness to fall and skin our knees.  Seth shared that really all innovation is failing and failing and failing until something works.  Also, what resonated with me was Seth’s assertion that often urgent gets in the way of what’s important.

Professor Peter Cappelli

Professor Cappelli shared his thoughts on how to plan for talent needs and how to think about the fundamental choice between "making" talent from within, "buying" talent from the outside market, or "borrowing" it from staffing firms and other vendors. He also shared the more thoughtful approaches some organizations have adopted to develop people from within by nurturing a culture of continuous development and embedding learning opportunities in-line with work activities.  Clear from his keynote, the real opportunity for talent management is all from within the walls of your organization.

Harry Potter

And of course, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal did not disappoint!  Roller coaster rides galore, no lines, and a great time to relax and have some fun!

In closing, I hope you were also able to take advantage of the tremendous networking opportunities! I left Orlando with a slightly larger circle of connections and business cards.

So, now what?  Seth Godin talked about the crippling effect of inaction and urged us to decide before you go to bed at night which fork in the road you are going to take.  To “dare to fly close to the sun.”  Human capital is a top concern of your CEO today, and learning is at the heart of talent management transformation.  How will you seize this opportunity and embrace your business impact responsibility?  How will “learning transformed” look in your organization?

What will you start doing today? Stop doing today?

Keys to High Performing, Swift-Starting Teams

By Shawn Hunter

Next time you’re standing at the gate waiting to get on a flight and the crew shows up, watch how they interact with each other. It will tell you a lot about how effective as a team they are going to be up in the sky shortly.

Mary Waller, a researcher at York University in Toronto, has been studying swift-starting teams – and flight crews in particular. Swift-starting teams of experts are everywhere – TV news crews comprised of journalists, camera, lighting, audio and transmission engineers who come together to cover a media event. The doctors, nurses, technicians in hospitals who assemble for an ER shift to work together…or the engineers that may run a nuclear power plant. In many cases these teams are comprised of highly-specialized professionals who assemble as a team for a specific job or task, and sometimes have little or no prior interaction with each other.

Specifically, members of swift-forming expert teams are:

• Competent and familiar with their complex work environments.
• Working quickly under situations of very evident time pressure.
• Have a stable role on the team but ad hoc team membership.
• Have complex, interdependent tasks that rely on interactions with team mates during the performance to yield coordinated execution of well-trained skills.

It turns out that how they interact with one another during just the first 15-20 minutes is highly predictive of how they will perform as a team for the duration of the job. The reason is that interaction patterns are established early in these relationships, and those patterns usually persist throughout the job.

Key #1: simple and consistent communication

Waller and her colleagues tracked each piece of dialogue uttered and identified the patterns in which they develop. For example, “Input the coordinates” is a command. “We have good weather today” is an observation. “Maybe we should ask tower control” is a suggestion and “What should our heading be?” is an inquiry…and so on to include disagreement, humor, anger or small-talk, etc. What they discovered is that patterns of interaction often emerge quickly and persist throughout the relationship. And the highest-performing teams established those patterns early, keep them simple, consistent, and reciprocal and balanced with one another. The lowest-performing teams had greater variety of conversational patterns, more unique communication patterns, and members who showed lack of reliance on other team members.

Key #2: short and targeted communication

While big locker room pep-talks or command-center speeches look good on television (think Ed Harris playing flight director Gene Kranz in Apollo 13), they aren’t terribly effective in driving team excellence. The most effective teams kept their communication short, precise and targeted to a specific task or job sequence.

Key #3: balanced communication

In the study, the researchers measured what they called “reciprocity.” That is, to what extent the team members relied on each other and balanced the participation of communication, as well as the reliance on one another for information and expertise. For example, if a team member showed “mono-actor” behavior of asking and answering their own questions, they showed less reliance, and less reciprocity on other team members. As a result, their study showed an overall decreased team performance when team members showed a lack of reliance on others and lack of reciprocity of expertise.

Here’s an interesting twist in the study. The researchers hypothesized that any “mono-acting” behavior (when someone asks and answers their own questions) would be on that part of the pilot currently in control. They thought that the person with command of the airplane would be the one offering the least reciprocity. Nope, it was the PNF (pilot not flying), who lacked control of the plane who exhibited the greatest amount of mono-acting behavior – in other words, was the least team player.

The best swift-forming teams of experts keep their communication simple, targeted and balanced.

Check out our New Look!

Skillsoft is excited to announce the launch of a newly designed and re-architected website.

The site’s homepage features an inviting color palette, a clean, uncluttered design, simplified navigation and sample learning content. To help our clients and prospects find what they’re looking for, the new site is organized primarily around the three brand pillars—Content, Service and Experience—and secondarily around Business Solutions, Products and Resources. A login menu conveniently allows our customers to find the Skillsoft® Books24x7® login page or support for their Skillport login URL.

Resources such as white pages, case studies, webinars on demand and demos are all readily available and relevant to each page. This saves our visitors from sifting through the site to locate what’s of interest to them. To support visitors on-the-go, our website features a responsive design, ensuring they have an optimal experience whether they’re on a tablet, smartphone or a desktop.

To celebrate this milestone, employees in the corporate headquarters enjoyed a special, festive cake.  

2013 Global Skillsoft Perspectives is Around the Corner

Skillsoft Perspectives is next week in Orlando, Florida! Learn why Lynda Cribari, Executive Director of Performance Excellence, Davenport University, rates Perspectives as “top notch.”

Davenport University Rates Perspectives as "Top-Notch" from Skillsoft on Vimeo.

Is Your Staff Truly Engaged?

Each working day your employees come into the office and work diligently to keep your customers happy, but are you sure you’re making them feel like a valued and vital asset to the business?  Have you honestly taken a moment to step back and take a look at whether you’re truly engaging your staff?

We all know that if staff feel undervalued and are not given the opportunity to develop their skills, they will become unmotivated and disinterested in the business, with performance levels and productivity suffering as a result.

Research published by the Engage for Success task force reported that the UK can deliver £26billion GDP growth by better engaging employees at work.

Join an Engage for Success webinar led by David MacLeod on 22 May, 2013.

David MacLeod chairs this task force, and believes that 20 million workers are not working at full capacity because employers are not actively engaging them. During the webinar he will demonstrate how employee engagement can make a huge difference and be key in the long term prosperity of your business.

David will cover the following points:

• Why employee engagement is such a hot topic; what are the bigger changes in people's attitudes and the nature of work that employee engagement is a response to.
• What the difference is between transactional engagement and transformational engagement.
• What four things are present in organisations that really engage their people?

We look forward to welcoming you to this discussion, so don’t forget to join us on Wednesday 22 May 2013 at 12pm BST for the lowdown on the Engage for Success movement.

Register today!

About David MacLeod
David is co-chair of the government-sponsored, employer led task force on employee engagement launched by the Prime Minister at number 10 in March 2010. He was commissioned by the Department for Business (BIS) to take an in-depth look at employee engagement and to report on its potential benefits for organisations and employees. This led to the report Engaging for Success: enhancing performance through employee engagement.

David is a non-Executive Director of the Ministry of Justice, a visiting professor at the Cass business school, a fellow of the Ashridge business school, an associate of the Institute for Government, and a fellow of the Institute of Marketing. He has also co-authored a book on the theme of how to engage people to win.

The USO, a Training and Development Maven, and Hundreds of Hungry Learners

By Katherine Doe, Marketing Manager, SMB & Compliance

When the USO, a nonprofit organization supporting US military personnel and their families, needed help in building a global learning program for employees, we at Skillsoft were up for the challenge.  However, our partner at the USO, Dr. Angela Kegler, was quite the training and development maven when we met!  Already a seasoned professional in the learning world, Dr. Kegler just needed the right solution to fit the unique needs of the USO.   She explains, “We wanted to provide consistent training covering our core values, diversity awareness and information security across the board and eliminate consistency issues in training with a single learning hub.” 

And so, Skillsoft helped her build USO University.  Now, Dr. Kegler has an easy-to-scale on-boarding program, specific courses to support the USO’s core values and compliance initiatives, and a learning management system to track elearning and instructor-led course completions.  So what did USO employees think of USO university?  Employees logged 1,000 online course completions in the first 37 days USO University was live.  What makes that number significant? Learning was not required.  “Our staff were so hungry for learning,” Dr. Kegler says. “When you provide the right tool at right time, your people will use it.”  Additionally, 84% of learners said they’d recommend USO University to fellow employees.

To learn more about how the USO achieved such fantastic results with their program, take a look at our full (2-page) case story, here.  And, check out this InformationWeek article that explains how USO University was the catalyst for the USO’s adoption of a complete cloud strategy.

A big Skillsoft THANK YOU to Dr. Angela Kegler and all our friends at the USO!  It’s partnerships like this that prove that effective, global training and development programs can be built for nonprofits and SMBs. Oh, and you make my job easier, too! Cheers! 

Counting Down to Skillsoft Perspectives

We're just seven business days away from 2013 Global Skillsoft Perspectives! Watch how an attendee from Dollar Tree benefited from this networking opportunity. 

Dollar Tree Shares and Networks at Skillsoft Perspectives from Skillsoft on Vimeo.