Take people on Twitter (and all four of us are). I see all this excitement about 140 characters being the road–or the transporter–to the promised land of real collaboration. Then I listened yesterday to tweets from inside a federal government social media conference. Most of the in-person attendees had never used Twitter (some grumbled that people reading tweets hadn’t paid for the conference).

I did a little digging and came up with a comparison. Number of people on Twitter: around 5 million. Number of households in the U.S. that have pet birds: around 12 million.

Tweet, tweet.

So: lots of people in the training field are, and have always been, stand-up instructors focused on very specific content using very traditional approaches. Probably the next biggest batch is the people cranking out that instruction (sometimes there’s a big overlap). And the vendors whose livelihoods depend on feeding that particular elephant.

And the employers, by and large, like it that way, or at least accept it — because by definition half of all employers are below average. The organization’s leadership, when it thinks about this at all, leans to the dosage view of training: so many exposure hours, so many bits in the LMS bucket, so many sign-offs that you’ve taken X.

Unless you’re a Tom Peters for whom starting at the bottom means talking to the chief operating officer, if your vision of job-related learning and performance is wider than the organization’s, you need to build alliances with the people who control budgets. If “informal learning” as a term doesn’t fly (as it won’t, in many places), then call it OJT or individual learning or training 2.0.

First of all – nice Monty Python reference! Right on target. I appreciate your thoughts on this. I had not thought about going to the team members of the managers (D’oh!) It might be a little bit more tricky politically, but I think it is important.

Thanks again for sharing.

I think your anecdotal feedback is what you base your effectiveness on. The softer the skills, the more difficult it is to determine how much of an impact training had. There are too many outside factors that can influence soft-skills training.

For things like software training, it’s pretty simple – can the person perform the task after training? Leadership is a totally different ballgame.

For leadership training I’d talk to the people under your students; the ones being managed. They will tell you what kind of leader the person is. Ideally, talk to them before training and then several months after.

Great tips and advice as usual. I appreciate the ideas you put forward. I was able to have the LDP participants take a management skills inventory before the program and I plan on having them take it again after the program. I also had their managers fill out the same assessment and they will fill out a post assessment as well. My plan is to do this on a 30, 60, 90 day basis. This might give us some insights as to the impact of program. Again – at least in anecdotal form. We’ll see what happens.

Thanks again for the input.

Zed

If your LDP grads are back on the job, and still saying the course made a difference in their daily tasks, that can’t be bad. I’ve done what I called “Level 1.5″ surveys — sent a list of specific outcomes to grads and asked them to rate their current ability on a 4-point scale (can’t do – can do easily; one guy added a 5: “can do in my sleep).

That’s anecdotal, but it’s post-training anecdotal. In this case, the skills were specific (“sync your client data [with the online system],” for example).

The client organization had other, more indirect data about the overall adoption of the system that the training dealt with — so they could see patterns of usage, increase in market share that they attributed to adoption of the system.

You might informally talk to some managers of your grads, asking about their criteria related to exemplary performance.

My experience with del.icio.us is similar to yours–an individual experience. I always share my links with others, but I admit that I don’t often look at the links that are shared with me. I hadn’t really thought about that til I read your comment.

As for Facebook, I also noticed a recent increase in the number of people joining. I started my Facebook account in 2007, but I never really used it because no one I knew was on. Then starting this past fall, I began to get a lot of friend requests. I got reconnected with some old high school and college friends, and I’m more up-to-date with my current friends than ever before. In the space of about a week of re-investigating Facebook, I’ve become quite an addict.

You’ve also helped me to realize that PLEs are something I need to pay more attention to. I’ve read a little about them and I’m always trying to manage my own learning, but I haven’t devoted the time to investigating PLEs that I should. Thanks for reminding me.

Thank you for your comments. You make a number of good points. In particular, I really like your idea of learning resources and the notion of providing resources – I plan to put that one into effect.

I would agree with you that most people don’t want to be content creators – at least not under that label. I have found that people love to talk about what they know. That is what I am looking for in my organization. The ability to provide the tools to enhance conversations throughout the organization so that every shares what they know best and asks great questions.

Thanks again for taking the time to share.

John