Learning Delivery: Meeting the Learner Where They Are - Part 1

Editor's Notes

• #3: Good morning everyone and welcome to today’s webinar, Learning Delivery: Meeting the modern learner where they are. I am Monica Kraft of Xyleme, and today I am pleased to be joined by Cristine Duckworth Lipscomb, Sr. Learning Strategist, owner of Intrac Inc., and partner in the Chapman Alliance. Cristine hello, and welcome. Thanks Monica…. [Cristine introduce yourself: i.e. I have collaborated with clients worldwide including Wells Fargo, FIAT, and Victoria’s Secret, on learning strategies that enable individual performance, and the technology framework that supports organizational success. ] *
• #4: Monica: Today’s webinar is 27 minutes long in honor of the modern learner. Modern learners tell us they have just 1% of their work week, or 27 minutes, to dedicate to personal development. This webinar is part I of a two Part series. Please, please, please ask questions today using the question box in your GoToWebinar control panel. Although we won’t get to all of your questions today, Part II of the series will be dedicated to just that. You will receive a copy of today’s slides and webinar recording as well so thank you for joining. *Christine help us understand the modern learner. What do you believe are the top Workplace Challenges that the modern learner is facing?
• #5: Cristine My clients are challenged with juggling more tasks with shorter turnaround times, in a dynamic work environment where things are constantly changing. We are searching for answers – or at least information – under time pressure. *
• #6: CRISTINE: This time crunch is universal. I see it across industries…pharma, financial, healthcare, manufacturing. Individuals are really struggling to keep up. MONICA: Yes we hear it all the time. The graphic on the right is compliments of one of our customers. It represents this business issue in a way that many of us are facing today. The complexity of our products is growing a faster rate than we can produce expertise. Said another way – we have more to learn but less time to learn it in. In Caterpillars case, they HAD to find a way to reduce time-to-competency for their technicians from 15 years down to 5. *Let’s look at the modern learner.
• #7: Monica The reality is that we are all modern learners, regardless of our age or generation. Bersin by Deloitte studied learners today, and found that 80% of learning happens on the job now, and that employees are accessing information and learning differently, using search engines and mobile devices. This is not a surprise, we have heard this. But I didn’t realize that we are getting interrupted as frequently as every 5 minutes, ironically by work applications and collaboration tools designed to help us. Workers claim that 41% of their time is spent on things that offer little satisfaction and do not help them get work done. If we could make our learning content more accessible and consumable, bite-sized being the buzz word de jour, what would that look like Cristine? Cristine – When I began my career designing training programs 20 years ago, we used 17 minutes as the general guideline for learning blocks. The learner lost concentration after 17 minutes of activity. Now the guideline is 3 minutes or less. In 20 years, our attention span shortened by 14 minutes! As a consultant who jumps from conference calls to virtual meetings and in person work sessions, I get a chance to listen to small talk across different industries before the meetings begins. Here’s the thing we share: People like to do a good job and feel good about the work they are doing. And what I often hear is people struggling with a feeling of incompetence… *Start Poll
• #8: CRISTINE How about you? Do any of these experiences resonate with you? As a learning strategy consultant, I want to enable learners to do their job more efficiently and effectively…to feel competent; be competent * Learning content is key to competence…. and taking the time on the front end to create a content strategy and governance can save so much time on a daily basis across the organization...and give back a few minutes every day for all of you who feel you don’t have enough time to do your jobs.
• #10: CRISTINE Istock – mountains of information How much information or data is there? I don’t know – nobody really knows. IBM asserts that there is more than 2.5 billion gigabytes (GB) of data is generated every day and about 75% of data is unstructured, coming from sources such as text, voice and video [http://www.bbc.com/news/business-26383058] NEW 6.16 {REDUNDANT?} This is what I see…Recession reduced headcount…not necessarily workload People are straddling several jobs, with very little time to get up to speed and master competencies of job expectations. In many cases, the job expectations are not clear because the environment is continually changing. I work with clients in finance, pharma, retail, manufacturing, health services…and while the economy has improved morale with my clients, everyone is still struggling with moving mountains of information under tighter deadlines…including me. Again - Overwhelmed, less patience, more distractions. My clients need easy access to relevant information at the time of need…or urgency…to get a job done by deadline. What type of information? Quick reference guides, recorded online meetings, memos, whitepapers, eLearning courses, PowerPoint presentations…etcetera…. Where do they go for the information? Sharepoint, email folders, the really organized project team member who keeps everything, and Google. This is a SURVIVAL strategy. Stressful, short sighted. What’s needed is a content strategy.
• #11: CRISTINE Content strategy means different things to different people. What is a content strategy? (refer to definition) How do you establish a content strategy system or framework? The process starts with people… who define the process. These people form a Steering committee, sharing committee, collaboration committee…(well, it’s still a Governance team)
• #12: CRISTINE Istock superhero office (the organized team member) What is governance? Who is governance? Decision Makers and contributors who define the framework for content management and are guardians of delivery. Governance can be bureacratic…or it can be simple. One client stated the content delivery charter as simply: Brainless and Painless
• #13: Monica – In order to deliver content that is easy to use and relevant over time, we need to consider the content itself, as well as the content development process. The goal of your organization is to produce content that meets the needs of the modern learner in the most efficient way possible. *We recommend some rules of thumb to help you produce effective and efficient learning content.
• #14: First and this may be a mindshift for some – Content is not a course. We need our content to be granular and modular so it can be assembled in different ways and matched to the learner in any context. Cristine offered a rule of thumb as well, on the size of the content. A single concept or idea should be communicated in 3 minutes or less.
• #15: Content can be built as smart content. What this means is that we build our content at the “right size” and the properties (or meta data) of the content contains what it is about, who it good for, and why they need it, along with things like version, date/time stamp, author or owner, type – Lesson, Topic, Question, Media, etc. Does the governance team help this Cristine? <Answer>
• #16: To produce smart content, it has to be shared by content developers, so it can be used, reused, assembled and maintained very efficiently.
• #17: Monica Quick example to explain what we mean about assembly and reuse…. The CRM system is strategic for most organizations. The yellow pieces represent the content blocks that will be reused over and over again. The text is the glue, the story that makes it relevant for the particular job role or audience. In a recent industry conference that I spoke at, one of the participants said they counted over 250 instances of the “how to log in” content in their training. Cristine, how do templates help content developers create effective content for the modern learner? *
• #18: Cristine – Right, let talk about templates…for eLearning courses, PowerPoint files for web-based presentations, quick reference guides, job aids… Templates create consistent frameworks for information. Templates make it easier for the user to navigate information within a document when it is presented in a recognizable format, but perhaps more importantly – templates allow for universal content reusability and searchability. When we create a governance strategy, we recommend creating templates for developers, who have accountability for and familiarity with creating content, and templates for subject matter experts – the infrequent contributors who have some responsibility for sharing information. The templates for developers have a little more flexibility, because again, content developers are more mindful of content creation standards. The templates for SMEs are similar to a cake mix…contributors follow the instructions to insert their unique content, and the template will conform with content reusability and searchability. * Let’s turn our conversation to content delivery
• #20: Monica Today’s learning environment is distributed. From the learner’s perspective, when we think about personal development and on-the-job moment of need, it might be unrealistic to expect our learners to look in the same place for learning. Delivery of Learning content has never been trickier and now we also need to think about mobile NOT as an afterthought, but as a core piece of our development and delivery strategy. Cristine, what should we be focusing on? *
• #21: CRISTINE If we are overwhelmed, distracted, short on time to do our work… Do we want to use headspace for thinking about how to find content…or how to solve work problems? When our charter is “brainless and painless” – we need to think about making things easy and intuitive. A few questions we ask: Where do people go now to get content? Can we leverage that path? Or simplify it? How can we simply search results? What content is essential?
• #22: CRISTINE Use your analytics and reporting to find out what content is accessed regularly; by whom; how often. Create a prescription for clearing the clutter. If content hasn’t been accessed in 12 months or 18 months, archive it…or get rid of it. Importantly….create guidelines for uploading new content and organize the content. “No junk drawers”
• #23: Monica Knowing what content you have and how it is performing week after week, will let you maintain learning environments that are free of clutter and easy to use. Content analytics are different than the normal course analytics that you are used to today. They answer questions about who, what, when and possibly why your content is being accessed, but at the granular level – the topic or page, not at the course level. Think of it like Google Analytics for a website. If your content server is serving the many distributed learning systems, then you can get a pretty holistic view of your content performance, rather than trying to aggregate various analytics from different delivery systems.
• #24: Cristine – variety of clients, industries, What does content maturity look like?
• #25: Content capability maturity, according to Bersin, is an indicator of being a High Impact Learning Organization, which is an indicator of high business performance. When you look at the 4 key capability areas on the left, there is a natural progression that occurs in the organizations that we work with. For Learning delivery, a reactive organization is focused on creating that amazing elearning course or mobile app that gets high marks on engagement and effectiveness, but low marks on scalability and reusability across other modalities, programs or applications. We posit that content reuse is both a core capability for L&D but also one that drives content maturity. As you move to the right on this scale, content reuse becomes more systematic. And along with that comes the ability to keep your content current, relevant and learning system agnostic so you can meet the modern learner whereever they are, not just today but down the road when a new delivery platform or device comes into view.
• #26: We know that technology can act as a backbone for your content strategy. From a technology perspective, what do you talk to your clients about Cristine? Cristine - Leveraging existing technology – adding to your technology stack – (With much power comes great responsibility) Client experiences/status As the amount of unstructured data increases exponentially, workers will continue to feel overwhelmed. We can invest now in content strategy and governance that saves each person few minutes each day across the company. Some of the tools exist today in your organization. Leverage those systems to lay the groundwork. There are more systems that can increase productivity, positioning companies to transform learning content into competence.