Agile Learning for Agile Business
The exhausted phrase is true. Business moves and changes so fast these days—and every worker is so pressed for time and attention – that learning needs to happen in every available nook and cranny. And it needs to be smarter and more agile than ever before.
Smart Agile Learning
What is smart agile learning? For one, it’s focused on precisely what each employee needs to know and when they need to know it, down to a very granular level. Sure, you have compliance requirements, so let’s take care of those. But let’s ask, what’s the learning that drives the bottom line? And what is the learning that keeps your people engaged with their job and with you as an employer? Then—when you know what your people need, how can can you deliver and track that experience easily and efficiently, without delays or paralyzing layers of admin? Those are the critical agile questions.
The answers point to both a content strategy and a delivery and tracking strategy that might be different—even a paradigm upheaval – from what you have today. Maybe that sounds scary, or impossible. Or both.
Corporate Training
Corporate training is indeed in the midst of a paradigm shift. On the architecture and delivery side, the surge toward single source complex enterprise HR “solutions” that characterized the previous four or five years is giving way to a specialty SaaS revolution. Now, the typical HR department uses many different, specifically focused SaaS services, to get the best service and feature set for each function. After all, onboarding is best done by onboarding specialists, rather than by some side feature of a bloated ERP suite. Plus no one wants to maintain a gnarly “inside the firewall” application anymore; you may need a whole team of people to keep that cooking. Best to let that onboarding vendor manage access and your user population.
Job Relevance
On the content side, it’s all about job relevance, speed-to- the-field and convenience. That mostly means that you better be careful what you ask your people to learn—and what you send them. Companies and organizations with effective learning ecosystems have pushed the assigning closer to the employee—in some cases, even letting employees decide entirely for themselves what they learn. What’s important is that those people who are in the best position to know what someone needs should be doing the assigning. Maybe that’s an employee’s direct supervisor, in consultation with the employee, choosing or even creating content that speaks directly to real-world needs or opportunities that they’re seeing right now where the wheels meet the road.
The road ahead may be lighter in technical architecture, lighter in admin layers, lighter and shorter in content sets—but more laser-focused and of higher quality and relevance than ever before. That’s agile learning for agile business.
