It appears that organisations realise the value of continuos education, but are constrained to let people dedicate time and effort for the same purpose. The reasons for such a paradox , vary from resources to loss in business productivity. These are some real testing times for L&D folks. Adding fuel to the fire are the learners - the texting folks, who value independence as opposed to compliance.
Since training , is an intervention step to make a behavorial change, getting the new age workforce to recognise the importance of doing a job effectively and efficiently is a challenge.
Since much of learning is based on observing, conversing, trial and error, coaching and searching a system that can create a very short duration learning track covering some of the steps above may work.
Ray Jiminez's has an interesting solution to this - "One idea -one action". This has a deep seated connection that learning needs to connect with learners context. Try looking at a picture in a group, and what each one sees may be at variance to what others may see. It is also known that people create own strories out of the information stored in their mind. Remember Inception and dream within a dream. Very often, we leave this process alone in any kind of learning. Conventionally, we let people to form their own opinion after tabling an idea or a proposition. If this were to be reversed - show a picture and than ask a question ( more of thought provoking kind) , the idea gets planted by finding answers to questions asked. Or better still, Reverse it by getting the learner to ask those questions based on the image. This process triggers a connection between ideas, images and actions quite instantaneously. Some have opined that learning is not a linear outcome of an image , process and behaviour. Learning can happen at anypoint.
I like this idea , as it is based on natural learning principles of observing, conversing and trial error. As the modules can be extremely short (may be couple of minutes) , and one idea one action at a time, it is possible to build a whole repository reflecting various situation.
It is known that informal learning aligns with our natural learning ability. However, leaving learning completely open and self paced may not match organisational outcomes. Therefore , creating short cycle learning helps to give an informal flavour to a formal requirement. This helps in developing bite size learning chunks, and therefore an interesting step.
