Friday 24 April 2015

Corporate Training is Broken

Hi All,
In our next few articles, we will be sharing with you write ups by Jay Cross, an amazing thinker on 'Why, What and How' Training can be done better in your organisation.
Write up 1
Corporate training is broken. Training departments are no more at fault than bankrupt companies like Blockbuster Video, Borders, Silicon Graphics, Nortel Networks, Circuit City, Bethlehem Steel, Smith Corona, Polaroid, Wang Labs, or Underwood Typewriters. They all offered great products. They all fell behind the times. They were all eclipsed by new technologies.
The world around corporate training has changed. What worked twenty years ago doesn’t work well in the social, always-on, networked world of business we now inhabit.
Traditional training departments cannot build courses fast enough to keep up with the speed of change. Service industries challenge workers to acquire tacit knowledge -- the kind of know- how one learns on the job, not in the classroom. Person-to-person instruction is no longer cost- effective.

Industrial organizations are morphing into collaborative organizations. Traditional training is broken and needs to get back in step with the times.
Workers collaborate to solve problems and come up with fresh thinking. They donʼt learn about these things; they learn by doing them. Deep learning is experiential.

You can put knowledge into a worker’s head through learning, or into the job itself which we call performance support. Should we make people learn the knowledge or should we put it into an app? Do I need to memorize something or simply know where to find it when I need it? It’s a perennial trade-off.
In the old days, when knowledge workers were not tethered to the Internet, workers stored most of the knowledge they needed in their heads. Now they store information in their outboard brains -- their hard drive, or, more likely, the cloud. Performance support is a vital piece of the collaborative infrastructure.

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