Chris Howard, vice president of research and co-founder of Bersin & Associates, shares his insights on critical success factors in effectively leveraging technology for learning and development initiatives. In recognizing our Know it Now™ online learning platform with a 2010 Learning Leaders Award for Vendor Innovation in Learning and Talent Management, Chris stated “measurable business impact was one of the key things we looked for in choosing winners.”
Q: What questions do you counsel organizations address before investing in online learning?
A: The first generation of online learning basically replaced classroom instruction, taking content and turning into web pages. The resulting courses were often too long and people wouldn’t take them. Organizations should ask themselves:
1) How does learning fit into the overall picture, the overall instructional plan?
2) How can we combine modalities – classroom instruction, eLearning, coaching – so as not to replace classroom instruction, but rather to augment classroom instruction?
Q: For organizations looking to effectively integrate online learning into their development initiatives, what critical success factors should they consider?
A: Measurement should be at the top of the list. In general, measuring learning is a real challenge. Traditional models, with Kirkpatrick probably the most well known are fine, however; our perspective on measurement is that ultimately it’s all around impact.
Many of the Learning Leader applications we received showed a variety of metrics, but measurable business impact is what differentiated the winners. The way I look at learning is like any other business function: once you’re properly aligned with the business impact, you can measure a lot of things.
Executive Conversation’s industry, sales training, is one of the most dynamic examples. Companies may have lots of new products coming out quickly and struggle to keep up training on all products. By setting up training to be readily accessible, chunking it up into pieces and delivering in a variety of modalities, sales people can get it when they need it and resulting sales performance can be tracked.
Q: Learners work on their actual accounts and opportunities to complete activities within Know it Now, in your opinion is the learning efficacy of using such real world scenarios stronger than relying on case materials?
A: Definitely. There’s nothing like getting your hands on the real problem. In the case of sales people, who are not inclined to sit in front of a computer for hours at a time taking a course, this is especially true. We believe if you do the homework upfront and design training to meet the needs of the target audience and the objectives of stakeholders, you can most successfully align with the business model.
Q: What are some of the most common shortcomings you see in leveraging technology for learning and talent management?
A: It gets back to knowing your audience, their tolerance for online media, how much time they’re willing to invest, how they prefer to learn, and the type of training you’re doing. The ‘throw it up and hope they come’ model that people did a few years ago has limited adoptability and was not successful. That’s the biggest misconception — deploying online learning that is not part of a plan or performance assessment or needs analysis and hoping they will come.
Q: Know it Now integrates learning, application and measurement within a single framework, how important is blending each of these elements for effective online learning?
A: The more you can do that the better. However, many organizations don’t have the time or see the importance. That’s where they bring in an organization like yours with the expertise and experience. Our research shows it is certainly optimal if you can have those pieces working together. In our view, the sum then becomes equal to more than the parts.
Q: What technology trends/advances do you see blossoming over the next 12-18 months?
A: The biggest areas we see are social capabilities, the concept of the organization teaching itself after some initial content introduction. We call it ‘we-learning.”. This is where the target community learns from each other with some support from a subject matter expert. This can be done in tandem with a formal initiative, or outside of that when the target audience already knows something about the subject and is just trying to sharpen their skills, or get ideas from someone else. We see training organizations becoming more of a catalyst for this type of collaboration so those in their organization can teach themselves online or offline.
Q: What’s a key area of focus for Bersin & Associates today?
A: We’re definitely focusing on talent development, talent acquisition and talent management strategies. In the sales arena, for example, we’re seeing development techniques designed to increase effectiveness versus simply to ‘sell more’ and using that as the sole basis for promotion. For example, how do we ready those in the sales organization who t exhibit leadership characteristics to take on new management responsibilities? While organizations often want that to happen organically, we’ve seen sales organizations prosper by integrating sales training with bigger programs for becoming a more sophisticated organization.
