Elearning blog: Learning re-imagined

From capitalism to talentism: a complimentary webinar with Lucian Tarnowski

27 March 2013 – 12 p.m. GMT

Understanding the role of social media in talent engagement

As the prevalence of social networks continues to grow, more and more of us are using the likes of Twitter and Facebook for not just personal, but business use. Indeed, last Christmas Twitter revealed that it had more than 200 million monthly unique users; with both people and businesses keen to get involved and reap the benefits of this increasingly mainstream communication medium.

So with interest in social media at an all time high, does it have real relevance for businesses beyond representing a nice add-on?

Lucian Tarnowski, founder and CEO of BraveNewTalent.com, believes social media has created a fundamental shift in the way organisations communicate and engage with talent. He believes talent is king in the modern workplace and will explain how businesses can use social media to engage and foster talent, in a free Skillsoft webinar on Wednesday 27 March at 12pm GMT.

In the session, Lucian will explore:

• The effect and impact of social media on the talent function.
• How next generation talent now expects to be engaged online.
• The opportunity to leverage the internal knowledge and content at your organisation to the external world.
• Social learning trends and the future of online learning.

If you are interested in finding out more about how to use social media to attract and retain top talent, visit our event page to register for the free webinar. We look forward to seeing you (virtually at least!) on the day.

About Lucian Tarnowski
Lucian is Founder and CEO of BraveNewTalent.com the social platform where organisations create talent communities in order to attract, engage, develop people from their past, present and future workforce. The long term value is that BraveNewTalent will map the talent graph by knowledge, skills and potential enabling organisations to increase the efficiency of applying human capital. 

Lucian has been honoured as a Young Global Leader (YGL) by the World Economic Forum. He is also winner of the Global Enterprising Young Brit. In his spare time Lucian runs Take Heart India, a no overheads charity that provides blind and handicapped students in rural India with the vocational employment skills that guarantee them jobs for life. Lucian speaks to audiences around the world about the convergence of talent and technology and its impact on the future of the global workforce and education.

Upcoming webinar: Kick-Starting a Corporate University

Learning and development are a crucial component of a well-defined talent management strategy. A solid talent management program not only increases employee engagement and leadership effectiveness – but it places employees ahead of the competition and drives customer success.

Join Skillsoft and First Data for a complimentary webinar
Kick-Starting a Corporate University
Thursday, September 6 from 1-2 p.m. EDT

Join Skillsoft and Mary Miller, Vice President, Learning Architecture, First Data, for a webinar that will show you how to create an aligned human capital strategy.

Forget Social Learning! Make Learning Social Your Priority

By John Ambrose

 

Over the past 18 months, I’ve been delivering a variety of talks to audiences of learning professionals large and small.  The core premise is that

social learning, defined as the contextual blending of social conventions with learning content, will be profoundly transformative over the next decade.

  

 

Well, it’s time we stopped focusing on social learning.  That is, until we’ve mastered learning social.

 

 

What I mean is that every learning professional who intends to remain in this field during the next decade needs to take the plunge.  Now!  Because learning about social technologies comes from experiencing them, not just reading about them.  Like learning to swim, internalizing the real value of social technology requires active participation. 

  

 

Don’t just take my word for it.  American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) President and CEO Tony Bingham recently said, “Understanding the huge impact Web 2.0 technologies have on how the workforce learns is critical to engaging employees and customers, and ultimately, critical for an organization’s growth and success.”

  

 

As a learning profession, we have a long way to go.  ASTD’s recent report “The Rise of Social Media: Enhancing Collaboration and Productivity Across Generations,” found that only 24% of survey respondents report that their own informal learning activities include social media.  This jibes roughly with what I’ve seen from audiences in North America, but overseas I would put this in the single digits based on my informal polls.  We can do better.

  

 

Diving In or Sitting on the Edge of the Pool?

 

 

I found it interesting that the same ASTD study reported that ‘nearly all’ survey respondents indicated they ‘use social media’ in their personal lives.  I believe this obscures what’s really going on.  My hunch is respondents equate ‘using’ to ‘having used or having some basic understanding.’  The vast majority of learning professionals are not swimming in social media, rather they are dangling their legs into the water while they sit on the ledge of the pool. 

  

 

As proof, I’ve been conducting a little experiment with many audiences. I asked everyone to stand and then ask people to sit if they’ve used various social networks or technologies -- from more obscure to less.  In an audience of 75, I’d ask, do you use Orkut? Delicious?  Maybe one or two sit.  Foursquare? Yammer?  Maybe three or four more.  Twitter?  Maybe five, ten will then sit in a really wired crowd. Facebook gets a good chunk to sit, maybe 20 or 25.  Linked-in?  That gets another swath of those still standing to sit -- but not everyone.  Believe it or not in most audiences, there is still a cadre of learning professionals standing!  I resort to YouTube and email to get everyone in the room to sit.  

  

 

My experiment is fun, but the underlying message is serious.  Today’s learning professional is on the front lines of a sea change in how employees will learn.  Navigating this sea requires more than a tacit understanding of one aspect of the water.  It requires the ability to swim.

  

 

Here’s how to jump in and get wet:

  

 

Establish a Facebook profile.  Don’t worry about embarrassing your kids.  They have two profiles anyway – their real profile (for family and adults) and their pseudo profile (for talking to their peer circles).

  

 

Join one or more social communities on Linked-in.  A variety of SkillSoft groups have been created around the world, including SkillSoft eLearning and SkillSoft Government Users Group.

  

 

Get on Twitter.  I know you think it is a waste of time, but just create a profile anyway.  It’s simple and fast. Then use search.twitter.com to search on the teams “#lrnchat”, “#educhat” or “#elearning”.  The  “#” acts as a community tag so it is easy to find related posts.  These are some of the more popular and dynamic learning communities.  Explore.  Click a link.  Reply to a message with a comment of your own.  Congratulations, you just “tweeted”.  Now, follow those with comments you find interesting.

 

 

You are on your way.  You are now in the water.  Feels good, doesn’t it?

The Learning Professional’s Guide to Social Media, 101

This past year was the defining year for social media.  With 350-million members of its online community, ‘Facebook Nation’ surpassed the population of the USA and if it were a country would sit behind only India and China.  Twitter exploded from relative obscurity to become a favorite sounding board for everyone from Iranian reformers to Ashton Kutcher.  And Linked-in quietly leveraged its vast database of online profiles into one of the most effective recruiting engines of all time.

Yet despite the publicity and the increasing number of prime-time TV references to social media, it is surprising how many people are still confused by, intimidated by, or just in plain old denial about these networks.

So I offer you this mini guide to the Big Three social media sites along with why it is important from a learning professional’s POV (point of view).

Linked-in:  This is the career web 2.0 site. You create a profile, and the magic of the site starts connecting you to just about every colleague you once worked with. Even those whose names you’ve long forgotten.

Why Important?  There are dynamic discussion groups on almost every topic, including excellent groups on every conceivable learning topic. Get free advice, share best practices, find good people to hire. Your HR department is likely paying Linked-in to get access to resume data for recruiting purposes.

Facebook:  The big daddy of social media. This is your friends and family site. You create a profile and start ‘friending’ people you know. This allows you to share pictures, musings, and links with them.  Your kids will be embarrassed that you finally joined, but your friends will chide you with ‘what took you so long’ messages.

Why important?  Facebook blurs the line between professional and personal relationships. Facebook can help you sustain distant relationships with colleagues spread all over the planet who you might see just once or twice per year.  Most people don’t talk shop, and that’s ok. This is a digital replacement for the water cooler.  And since I’ve heard the term ‘water cooler learning’ more than once, why would you not want to imbibe?

Twitter:  New kid on the block. Simple concept.  You can send and receive messages (i.e. ‘tweets’) that can never exceed 140 characters, including spaces.  Roughly the amount of text up to that last period. You can follow whomever you wish. You don’t share personal information.  You share ideas and links.  

Why important? Twitter gave us the ‘activity stream’ concept which is a powerful model for collaboration. The stream is a dynamic list of all comments from those you follow. The user guardrails the content by adding or deleting followers based on what they tweet about. Twitter is also a way to eavesdrop on the world’s conversation.  Want to know what 40-million+ people are saying about your company’s brand, type it in the search box and read the stream.

These short descriptions purposefully underplay the functionality of these sites. But this is only a 101 course. Now that you’ve passed, continue on to 201, which requires that you delve into these sites on your own.  Only by experiencing these sites first hand will you be able to begin visioning how the concepts behind social media might be leveraged for learning in 2010 and beyond. 

By: John Ambrose

Many training organizations I speak with are intrigued by Enterprise 2.0 technologies and their promises for creating a viral collaborative community within the organization.  At last count, there were more than 400 companies out there touting ‘e2.0 technologies’ … everything from wiki and blog products, to products that promise a safe Facebook-like or Twitter-like platform that can be rolled out behind your firewall.

Admittedly, some of these products are quite impressive, but they all share one common thread.  They are all enabling technologies. Just software.

Early efforts with these products are mixed at best.  Many early adopters or experimenters with these technologies report a lack of success in creating a sustainable collaborative environment. 

McKinsey, in a white paper entitled Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work,published in February 2009, observed the same phenomenon and described it this way:

“Perhaps because of the novelty of Web 2.0 initiatives, they’re often considered separate from mainstream work…Thus, using Web 2.0 and participating in online work communities often becomes just another “to do” on an already crowded list of tasks.”

Does this mean that social environments can’t work in the enterprise? Emphatically no.

But I am suggesting that there is a better way. 

There are three ingredients to creating a sustainable collaborative environment:  1) enabling technology; 2) abundance of content; and 3) enthusiastic community. When brought together, these three ingredients can produce a delicious collaborative result.

So the call to action for those learning professionals seeking to leverage collaboration to drive new levels of learning is simple.  Think about starting not with the enabling technology, but with your existing content and your existing active community of users who are already coming to your learning destination.  For instance, if you are currently using a product like Books24x7 from SkillSoft, why not think about the millions of pages of professional reference content that you already license as “seeds of discussion” for a thriving collaborative environment.  

Social collaboration offers great potential to help informal and formal learning, but the most effective path to accomplishing this will be to leverage what’s already working.

By: John Ambrose

What a Birdy Told Me

I have already acknowledged an addiction to Twitter. And, I am happy to write that I have found yet another reason to love the site. Twitter allows me access to events that I cannot attend.

The # sign is a powerful thing in Twitter-ville. It creates a dynamic page with whatever word(s) follow it, allowing people to virtually gather and weigh in on a topic. #sscafe09 gave the world access to SkillSoft’s Cafe held in Orlando in September. By following that event on Twitter (via searching for that ‘phrase,’) I was able to keep up with the news – SkillSoft is poised to launch the SkillSoft Leadership Advantage and showed a sneak peak of upcoming inGenius – and get a feel for what people were discussing: the power of Web 2.0, the value of social networking in a learning environment and the power that collaboration can have on learning.

I was also able to keep up with the CLO Symposium. Imagine that. I’m sitting at my desk in Nashua, NH, and simply typing #CLOsymposium allowed me to be a ‘bird’ on the wall (sorry, I had to) at the event in Colorado.

The best use of this tool is when multiple people at an event tweet about it together – all using the powerful # sign to allow other people to view their collective wisdom about an event or a topic within the event. It might take a while for people to catch on to this – but it’s a great way to bring an event home to your co-workers in real time. Let’s all meet virtually at the next event and give each other a chance to read what a little birdy said.

By: Rachel Levine

Innovation - Look into the Future!

One of the reasons why I love Twitter is how fast I can get information. (I admit it, I’m a Twitter addict!) I don’t have to search the Web and read through a lot of data when what I really want is a nugget – a baseball score, a status update, a quick bit of information about a news story. But, then there are times when I want more data; when I want to understand something and get a full, rounded view of a subject. That’s when I look for an expert – someone who can talk to me about something, explain something and give it meaning. And, even more value is added when I can hear from other people who are interested in the same subject as me. What are other people saying? What are they thinking? What do they care about?

That’s one thing that I love about my job. I am able to facilitate an environment – through SkillSoft events – where I can invite people to join in a conversation about corporate learning. It’s like the ultimate large scale search, where people can learn, listen and understand in an environment where they’re with their peers, people who face the same challenges.

These days, I hear our customers talking about a few immerging trends in learning. How does mobile learning impact corporate training? How do you gain leverage from leadership training? How will social networking impact learning, today and in the future? These are not the kinds of questions that you can Google. The subjects are broad; they’re big; they’re multifaceted. But, they’re important and need to be talked about, noodled, addressed.

SkillSoft’s upcoming three part Innovation Webinar Series with Training Magazine is a great place to join the conversation. These are important, timely topics that are being discussed in conference rooms around the world. And, personally, I’m excited to join the conversation. We have to discuss what’s next for corporate learning so we can get there together.  As Brad Paisley’s new song says, “Welcome to the future!”

By Rachel Levine