Training Industry Blog

In my last three blogs, I described how organizations can better support current business initiatives, increase organizational responsiveness, and reduce curriculum acquisition and development costs by aligning business needs with their instructional assets. The first two steps are 1) Documenting your Business Needs and 2) Analyzing your Curricula. The third step of this process is Aligning Business Needs with Curriculum Assets.

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Many of us can recount stories of organizational change initiatives that did not deliver the outcomes promised. This lack of success is not limited to a particular type of initiative. There is an alphabet soup of changes that your organization might have tried with disappointing results. No matter what the acronym, sabotage and resistance are often blamed for such failures. I cannot count the number of times participants in my workshop on organizational change focus on—perhaps blame—resisters as the main source of the problem implementing change. It might feel better to have a scapegoat, but it is rarely a sign of progress.

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Anytime learning leaders gather you can be sure there will be an open exchange of ideas and a frank discussion of problems and solutions. You can also expect, especially these days, to hear about how technology impacts education. At the recent CLO & Talent Management Forum, the talk this year was about perceptions, participation, coaching, content and tools, ranging from learning portals and communities of practice to invisible gorillas and Cookie Doodle. Training is a rich tapestry.

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As companies navigate the prolonged recession, downsizings and reorganizations have become business as usual and the toll on productivity and worker morale can be catastrophic. How do you continue to drive critical sales efforts that sustain companies and keep people focused on their customers when there is a cloud of fear throughout the enterprise?

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In my last two blogs, I began describing how organizations can better support current business initiatives, increase organizational responsiveness, and reduce curriculum acquisition and development costs by alining their business needs with their instructional assets. The second step of this six step process is Analyzing your Curricula. Following are the activities that are typically performed during this step.

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An info-graphic titled "The State of Digital Education" was recently published which portrays a story of the rapid transformation of digital technologies in k-12 and post secondary education. The graphic addresses the size of the education marketplace, disruptive technologies impacting the education process, trends bringing education into the modern world, and new technologies which will work together to result in more effective learning solutions.

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Several years ago, we transitioned from being “training professionals” to “learning professionals.” I think this transition was a more effective representation of the role learning professionals were beginning to play as self-paced e-Learning and blended learning solutions became more widely used. Our role of actively training workers changed to the role of creating the tools and environment that gave workers the opportunity to learn. In this change, the worker took the active role in gaining knowledge and was no longer a passive recipient. As an industry, we stopped using the term “training professional” and began using the term “learning professional.” At this time, e-Learning or technology-based learning was still a small percentage of most businesses learning content portfolios.

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