As Chief Learning Architect at Business Critical Learning, David Glow works with clients to identify key drivers for their company’s success and align performance solutions to optimize results in those areas. By helping clients focus on items with maximum impact, David is helping them produce the best results—which translates to ROI.

He frequently presents internally to large clients, teaching hundreds of global training departments his best practices for LMS administration, training solution development, assessment strategies, and ROI. At the Questionmark 2010 Conference, he presented two sessions: ROI strategies and using Questionmark as a total solution to optimize the investment in the tool by leveraging its capabilities to the fullest. You can contact him on LinkedIn.

Q. From your perspective, what is the current state of the training and development industry?

I have seen more significant changes in the past two years than any other time in my 15+ years in this industry. The two major factors changing training currently are collaborative technologies and higher demand for results.

Because of the proliferation of collaborative technologies, training departments are transitioning from the role of being the sole or primary provider of learning assets to the role of directing organizational learning. Tomorrow’s trainers will provide frameworks and guidance to facilitate knowledge transfer and learning between peers and experts within the natural workflow of the organization (including access, permissions, and controls where appropriate). There will always be centrally developed and deployed courseware, structured curriculum and prescribed learning paths.

But this is not the majority of learning actually occurring in organizations. Training professionals must take steps to address the day-to-day skills development and sharing to shape a construct to share, capture, improve, and deploy this wealth of organizational knowledge so it becomes a competitive advantage. If not, it is a tremendous resource lost to the organization.

The worst economic climate since the Great Depression fueled a demand for clear results. This is a challenge for training, since training expenditures clearly appear on the balance sheet, but value of training does not; it must be proven and shown. This is a process. For every initiative, there should be a clear up front agreement on what business impact is expected, how it will be measured, and how all variables influencing the measure will be addressed (the biggest derailer to any ROI study).

Engage your executives and experts who perform such forecasts—sales, finance—in the process. They plan major strategic initiatives for the organization with target metrics and account for variables that influence them. The workforce development component of these plans should be no different and can leverage the same rules and methodologies put forth in other strategic business plans. The bonus: the C-suite will probably be very happy you are asking these questions and provide support to get them answered.

Remember: the metrics are business results (efficiency measures, revenue changes, cost containment, quality improvement, risk reduction scores), not activity measures. Training often falls into a trap of reporting activity: number of courses completed, number of hours trained, instructor utilization, number of employees through a curriculum. I see some of the new training system metrics boasted on “successful” implementations falling into the same trap: number of articles posted, number of communities, percent engagement of employees within a community.  These aren’t an indication of what value the tool or learning provides to the business.

The process is simple (execution is a little more challenging):

1. Ask your executives what matters. My favorite: what are the top 3 things you worry about? Yes, it can be that simple.
2. Define the rules of how to handle variables that influence the measures of the solution’s contribution to the issue
3. Get the measures per the rules
4. Don’t take your eye off the ball

If your executives don’t ask for a lot, anticipate the unexpressed needs and go to the results presentation over-prepared; you will either confidently address new, emerging—but anticipated—questions, or give them the stuff they hadn’t thought of.

Q. Sounds like the only way to understand the impact of training on ROI is to look at the business from 10,000 feet. Seems like collaboration between executives and trainers is key.

The collaboration spaces and tools available today facilitate effective communications and real-time sharing. Normally silo-ed teams can come together quickly and effectively share unique perspectives and expanded expertise; everyone who needs to be involved in a solution can be quickly engaged in the process and brought onto the same page. This can be done in a fraction of the time and cost then was possible just a short time ago. The accessibility of information and the ability to manipulate variables on shared documentation across large groups enables real-time collaboration with complex tasks that can get to the end point in the quickest possible manner.

Q. Switching gears a bit, are there tools related to performance improvement? What role is technology playing in human performance improvement?

Technology is THE catalyst for solving performance issues. In the middle of a task, workers cannot call “time out”, infuse themselves back into classroom training to improve their knowledge or skills when they hit a roadblock. The issues are handled real-time, on-the-floor, as part of work. Formal learning can’t effectively address this.

Even eLearning doesn’t lend itself as effective reference-ware in a work context.  Think about it: worker has issue; worker logs into LMS to see what course might address the issue; worker navigates to training and registers to explore, or access a completed training module; worker navigates into the training to the specific topic in question…not going to happen.

Help system/EPSS, Google it, Intranet, discussion board, Sharepoint Project Space, IM, text message, email, tap on the shoulder, phone call…all seem more effective options.  Here comes the silver bullet every naysayer loads for the argument: “What if the person gets/accesses the wrong information (or asks the wrong person)?”

This is a concern, but the uncomfortable truth is: it’s happening right now in your organization, and has for some time.  The issues with trying to control all information is that it creates layers and barriers that make it ineffective for business, so employees find alternatives.

By using collaborative technologies available today, businesses can do a few things.

First, is providing a framework and removing bottlenecks. As an employee with an issue, I can receive guidance on where I send my SOS signal so I get good, qualified help from the right resources and people in the organization because I know where to go, and who to ask (this may occur over time as community experts emerge).

Second, in most cases, the organization as a whole is aware of the discussion and can address any misinformation in a helpful and consultative manner to provide a correct and consistent message to the persons engaged in the issue.

Third, this is generally saved in a format where anyone else experiencing the issue can easily find and access this discussion and find their solution, or continue the conversation to a new degree of support.

Thus, it isn’t just individuals that can learn better from use of these technologies, the organization as a whole becomes more effective at sharing and transferring knowledge.

Q. If employees are learning more from each other, what is going to happen to instructor-led training? How might that area evolve over the next 5-10 years?

Training has changed so significantly in the past two years, it’s difficult to predict what it might look like 5-10 years from now, since the technologies today weren’t even on the map five years ago, and the pace of development continues to accelerate.

I feel that organizational knowledge-sharing and learning spaces will start to emerge as a more mature methodology and technology. I hope some form of mashup or paradigm will emerge to allow the worlds of “formal” and “informal” learning to have some form of baton pass or handshake, as the needs for accountability and tracking are important to many industry segments. Although informal learning is the majority of learning, the importance of tracking and learning paths needs to be addressed where it is necessary.

I anticipate we will come up with a better term than “informal learning.” (Please!)

Aside from the increase in all things m-learning (mobile learning), the only other major development I would predict for the learning space is a rise in kinesthetic learning. With gaming platforms like the Wii and a growing population of programmers designing in this space, we may be able to train and test specific physical tasks in the future at a fraction of the cost and time than was possible just a short time ago.

Q. I’m sure you’ve also heard the term “online learning community.” What role might that play in our future?

Online learning communities will eventually be the first place that employees go to address their workplace challenges.  This power of online networks actually didn’t strike me until about 2007 when I was in the middle of a challenging project with a very large client. At several meetings, the highest ranking stakeholder at the table said “have you talked to <new lever point>.” Every company has its lever points—those people in key positions that have the formal or informal power to get something done in a certain domain.

It was at that point that I realized the truth behind something that I read in college: it takes new CEOs a long time to build and understand the networks necessary to execute effectively in the organization. This made the new CEOs results suffer in comparison to the predecessor, who generally left his/her network at its strongest point.

Up until a short time ago, understanding the organizational network—those key relationships, their roles, expertise, and even informal influence—was only acquired through working in the company long enough to experience it. This knowledge of the network to leverage the right people in the organization was carried around in people’s heads, and not documented or shared in the company. Tools today attempt to have as much of that explicitly defined so users can seek out the right resources, expertise, and relationships to quickly resolve issues and work effectively.

Q. I like your emphasis on getting things done. David, thanks for sharing with us. Judging from our conversation, we probably read a lot of the same stuff. Any recommendations?

Jane Hart’s blog is the first place I visit each morning (her eLearning pick of the day); her site(s) have much to offer. Many of her colleagues (Jay Cross, Harold Jarche) are mentioned on the site, and I quickly find myself on their blogs.

The Elearning Guild is probably my second most frequently-visited site. It is a treasure trove of information, methodologies, original research, and true experts.

CLO Magazine is a brilliant publication, and if you truly want to understand the trending concerns at the C-suite regarding learning, this is the best resource.

Questionmark is a vendor of assessment and survey software; their site contains some of the best whitepapers and presentations on designing effective assessments and analyzing test and survey results in the industry.

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee

LinkedIn: at the end of the day, it’s the people behind the knowledge. Get them in your network.

Tagged as: collaboration, formal learning, human performance, informal learning, training, web 2.0