Brigton, UK (PRWEB) February 9, 2006
There’s a “conspiracy of convenience” between many learning and development managers and business managers – and it must end. That’s the view of Charles Jennings, Head of Global Learning at Reuters.
In a recent interview with Kineo, the leading e-learning consultancy, Charles explained the conspiracy. “A manager comes to a training manager and says ‘I’ve got a problem, I need training’. The training manager says ‘fine, we’ll develop a training programme’. So the training manager develops the programme, delivers it to the business and no-one measures it. The business manager is happy because they feel they’ve filled their requirement, the training manager is happy because they’ve done what they think their job is about, i.e. delivered training, and because no-one measures it, nothing really happens, but everyone’s happy….we need to break that conspiracy.”
Stephen Walsh of Kineo and Charles discussed how to break it. The answer is measurement of the right things – performance, not learning uptake, will shine a light on what’s working and what isn’t. Charles urged L&D managers to take a ‘performance consulting approach’, and ask the question ‘what is your performance gap?’ rather than ‘what training do you need’. “The dialogue needs to change, on both sides”, he noted.
The way people learn is changing too, and learning professionals must respond, he suggested. We’re going through the “googleisation of everything” where workers access information as they need it rather than complete courses. “We should no longer be looking at transferring knowledge; we should be helping people develop the skills to find and process information, turning it into knowledge, whenever they need it…and measuring the performance at the other end to determine if the availability of the tools and knowledge actually helps performance.”
You can hear the full interview at http://www.kineo.co.uk/audio-downloads.html
This month Kineo focuses on the googleisation of e-learning and informal learning with a series of insights on how to use Google to enhance learning and performance to get results in your organisation. More at http://www.kineo.co.uk.
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