A few weeks ago, I read a blog post by Andrew Jacobs called Turn and Face the Strain. It was about the lack of ability of L&D to be innovative and provided some reasons that hold us back from doing things differently – from being disruptive. It’s definitely worth a read.
After I read the post, I shared a link to it on twitter:
To which Andrew replied:
I commented that for me it was my confidence but in reality it’s also for the reasons he mentioned in his post. It can be hard to change and try something different.
I thought about this and replied:
By this I mean L&D solutions within my organisation. To which he responded:
It got me thinking, what would Ultimate Personalisation look like? Here’s a list of what I came up with, in no particular order:
- Talking to new employees a few weeks after they have started to see how they are settling into our organisation and finding out what support they need for their role.
- Gaining a better understanding of our employees and the environment in which they work by spending time with them on-the-job i.e. getting away from my desk and going to where the work is being done.
- Talking directly with the employees whose managers or supervisors say they need ‘training’ and find out what the real issues/gaps are.
- Following up employees who have completed courses or been to conferences to find out what they’ve learned, how they’ll apply it and how we can share this knowledge/skills with others in our organisation.
- Creating informal workplace networks that encourage the sharing of ideas and experience between employees.
- Creating customised learning solutions for individuals and teams and not generic ones.
- Curating resources on a range of topics and encouraging employees to share and add to the collection and importantly, making the information easily accessible by those who need them, when they need them.
- Providing personal development opportunities on topics not related to work e.g. general interest topics.
- Working with top performers from within our organisation and encouraging them to share the ‘secrets of their success’ with others.
- Being a learning role model myself within our organisation by sharing, participating and collaborating.
What else could Ultimate Personalisation be?
I’ve started to do some of these things and I’ll write more about it in the coming months.
I’m sometimes frustrated because I think that I’m not in a position of influence. The reason being is that I’m not in charge, I’m not the manager/supervisor. But, this is an excuse because I can still be influential from where I sit in our organisation.
What other ways can we be disruptive?
Footnote: While putting this post together, I came across another great blog post worth reading Status Quo Sucks by Shannon Tipton that talks about a need for L&D to do things differently.
Learning Snippets 