Rachel Burnham writes: I thought I would begin my blog for 2017 with a
collection of resources to help L&D professionals review where your practice
is.
This is not in anyway
a best of 2016 collection – if it was I would have missed out some wonderful
pieces! Nor does it focus on the new
& shiny – some of these ideas in this collection have been around for quite
awhile. It is, if you like, a capsule
collection of blog articles, sketchnotes, video clips and reports, which taken
together can provide you with a concise introduction to what modern workplace
learning is about. It also includes some great resources on ways to invest in
your own learning and development and so be #always learning.
1. ‘Learning: Experience plus Reflection’ by Tanmay Vora
A great place to
start in any piece about L&D is what is learning and I have picked two
pieces to explore this. The first is a
short blog and a wonderful Sketchnote by Tanmay Vora, who is one of my very
favourite Sketchnoters. He can be found
on Twitter at @tnvora. His drawing
explores four ways we learn as set out by Charles Jennings – challenging
experiences, opportunities to practice, challenging conversations and time for
reflection.
2. ‘Learning is Complicated’ by Sukh Pabial
The second piece on
learning is a thought provoking blog article from Sukh Pabial, which explores
some of the challenges we face when we are designing learning – it is good to
produce short, focused resources to stimulate learning, but to really develop
complex skills and mastery takes more than this, and also more than traditional
content driven courses. I think this is
where Tanmay Vora’s picture of Charles Jennings’ four ways of learning is so
helpful, in reminding us what is required for learning that has an impact.
3. ‘The Performance Paradox’ by me
My third pick is a
piece of my own, which argues that if we want learning to be effective in the
workplace, we paradoxically need to focus a little less on the learning and a
little more on the performance required.
This performance focus will subtly shift our emphasis on every aspect of
the L&D role, whether it is identifying needs, design, delivery or
evaluation.
4. ‘L&D: From Delivery to Dialogue (and Business Results)' by David James
This blog by David James picks up on focusing on
performance and explores how dialogue could help to identify real needs. David suggests that creating and curating
resources to address these needs will be more effective than traditional
courses rolled out across an organisation.
5. ‘Experience Design: Dump the Content’ by Nick Shackleton-Jones
Nick Shackleton-Jones
has written on many occasions on a similar theme to David James, about the need
to develop resources rather than courses.
But in this particular post, he tackles the other side of the design
challenge, which is to design experiences and so this piece connects back to
the earlier points made by Sukh Pabial and covered in Tanmay Vora’s
Sketchnote. Nick Shackleton-Jones
argues passionately against ‘content-dumping’ and sets out ideas about how to
create experiences that really help people to learn. I think a key point here is about designing
with ‘what we want people to be able to do’ in mind, rather than what they need
to remember – and this links again to focusing on performance.
6. ‘Curation as a process for learning’ by Martin Couzins
In this video clip Martin Couzins is being interviewed
for Learning Now TV about the process of curation by Nigel Paine. Curation is the process of searching out,
selecting and collecting together resources produced by others – and it is
therefore an important part of the process of moving from courses to resources. Martin is an expert on all things curation,
so it is great to hear him discussing this.
7. ‘Unlocking Potential’ the Towards Maturity 2016-17 Benchmarking Report
If you haven’t come across the organisation ‘Towards
Maturity’ or their CEO Laura Overton before, then this latest report in their
annual series is a good place to start.
Towards Maturity is a benchmarking organisation that enables
organisations to compare their approach to tackling L&D to that of world
class organisations and by doing this make improvements. This report presents a picture of what these
world class organisations are doing and how other organisations compare. It is full of insights and action points for
both organisations and also for the development of individual L&D professionals.
The report identifies how L&D professionals are
developing their skills and notes the part that networking and reflective
practice play, alongside participating in courses. So that provides a good lead into to my
final group of pieces.
Back in October I
wrote about how my own views about networking had changed from seeing
networking as a rather unpleasant necessity for business development (I have my
own business after all!) to seeing networking as a key tool for my own learning
and personal development. And I drew
this Sketchnote to illustrate this change. Is networking part of your development
toolkit?
9. ‘How I use social tools with my team’ by Michelle Ockers
In this short video,
Michelle shares how she and her team make use of a range of social tools such
as Sharepoint, One Note and Storify to communicate and learn together. This video has a very practical focus and
demonstrates how internal social networking can be enabled through the
effective use of digital tools. Michelle
is a great exponent of Working Out Loud (WOL), which involves sharing what you
are working on to enable learning from one another – the concept is discussed
in my post on networking - but this video from Michelle demonstrates it in
practice.
10. ‘It Starts with You’ by Julie Drybrough
This blog is all about reflective practice, what it involves
and how to approach it. I particularly found it helpful because it digs a bit
deeper into how to approach personal reflective practice.
So, that is my 10 pieces. My selection box, to help you to update your
skills and stretch your L&D practice.
I hope you find it interesting, but more than that I hope you find it
useful!
I would be interested in your responses to this piece.
Rachel
Burnham
10/1/17
Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D
professionals update and refresh their skills.
I am particularly interested in blended learning, the uses of social
media for learning, evaluation and anything that improves the impact of
learning on performance.
