Learning at the Speed of Business

The corporate university is going through it’s second wave of transformation. Pioneers of this were McDonald’s in 1961 with their Hamburger University, and GE with their Leadership Centre in 1956. Today, the learning organisations leading the way are corporations like Boeing, Apple and Danone. All leveraging new approaches to learning, partnering with leading think tanks in corporate learning and leveraging technologies.

The elearning sector has also changed to accommodate this transformation in the corporate university. The focus now is less in the formal element of learning and more with the informal. This is due to two major factors, one – the expectation of the modern learner has changed, they are using these technologies in everyday life, so expect more. Two – learning has become part of the culture, a competitive advantage for forward thinking businesses, the modern learner needs learning at the speed at which their business is adapting and changing.

The modern day corporate university, according to McKinsey

What’s the new Rapid Authoring?

Business is moving too fast to create blended learning programmes that take a long time to produce, this approach is becoming less common. Think about it, you have a learning need in your business that’s very specific and ever changing, you create a blended elearning+workshop. By the time you have built the structured programme (let’s say 3 months), the business has changed and your content is no longer relevant. Content is contextual, we must remember that as L&D professionals.

The new rapid authoring is video. The days of creating online learning using SCORM objects is dated. The business is changing too fast. User generated video is on the rise, businesses can leverage mobile technology to provide authentic at the point of need learning content. They can also rehearse their learning with others within a social community. This is great for sales and customer success teams.

Is video professional enough for businesses?

One concern you may have before adopting video as your delivery mechanism would be the quality. Employees recording themselves in the workplace may seem like a dangerous game. One of the counters to this is that video is authentic, do you really need to bring in state of the art equipment and a studio for social learning to happen?

Often within the social learning community, employees can see the value in sharing knowledge quickly. They are not interested in the quality and businesses can see benefits of this. Another major factor is the bottom line. Employees capturing the learning on the job and sharing it is much more cost effective than creating blended learning programmes. This enables the L&D team to focus on more value added activities such as analysing learning analytics or providing 1:1 coaching. Google leveraging this model with their ‘g2g’ community. This model was built on some of the principles in 70:20:10 learning. The 20% of learning was facilitated via coaches who were volunteers from within Google, they would work on the 70% of learning on the job and capture it using video. In doing so, the Google L&D community become the glue between the formal classroom training and the rest of the business. The employees who did volunteer and created videos were the ones that got exposure in the business and were always front of the line when it came to new opportunities for promotion, given they had volunteered on top of their day jobs.

What about security?

With the new GDPR legislation within the European Parliament coming into play, businesses are looking closer at data protection and security. One large business was using WhatsApp to share video based learning amongst around 100 colleagues. This is fantastic learning, and, something they should be proud of!…However, it’s not secure. What’s app has been built as a social media tool for individuals and lacks the security measures required in an enterprise. What’s more, the business should have a tool that is branded to their organisation where they are able to control the users accessing the platform and also review analytics. They need to make the informal video learning formal by being able to capture this content.

What’s the biggest learning tool globally?

Most people would say this is the Google search engine. But, has L&D technology really got to this point yet? The years of development that enables Google’s algorithms to work isn’t something we can clone for corporate learning quickly. The second would be YouTube (yes, also owned by Google).

According to Google, YouTube is a huge learning resource for people, with over 500M views of learning related content every day (see below). One million of these videos are shared everyday, so there is a social community element to YouTube. Over 50% of the learning content uploaded is outside of the US and the learning related content hosted on YouTube is more than the Library of Congress.

If you would like to learn more about how Watch and Learn can support informal learning in your organisation with video you can watch this short clip – https://app.biteable.com/watch/1558589/4fa0fe56ff80e7c32e38c924e5610ca2ae44ddb1

Or

Please contact us and we would be happy to help.