Awards: Most effective training + Elearning company of the year

This post is a bit of self congratulatory trumpet blowing, but the past two weeks can’t go by without comment. Last night Brightwave won the E-learning Production Company of the Year Award at this year’s E-learning Age Awards. That’s a fantastic achievement and well deserved – the team are highly professional, talented and great fun to work with. Our clients seem to agree too with comments like:
“…completely agree with the judges comments and for me you were always the front runner…you’ve consistently out performed and out thought your competitors”
It’s great to get a gong, but even better to know that your efforts are appreciated by those who matter most.

Perhaps even more importantly, it’s good to know that the e-learning solutions you design actually work and make a real difference to real people in real need of support. So the previous week it was fantastic to win the Most Effective Training Programme at the CCA-Global Awards for our work with Sky. It’s a real exemplar of how a learning portal can genuinely be easy to access, offering engaging, interactive learning content and produce highly motivated and better performing staff.
It’s made a difference: that’s what it’s really all about. Too little training (whether in the classroom or online) can genuinely say that which is both indictment and an opportunity for positive change. If we can champion quality over quantity we will be making good progress as an industry.
On a wider note, it’s great also to report that Brighton ( probably one of the best cities to live in in the UK) continues to go from strength to strength as a centre of excellence for e-learning design expertise. It’s probably fair to say that the majority of commercial e-learning activity in the UK can trace its roots back to the seaside in the South.
For more on that and awards ceremonies in general, check out Donald Clark’s recent posts on the subject.
Trumpet blowing ends: normal service now resumed.

Move aside CPD, UPS is here...

This article originally appeared in Training Journal in June 2009 (PDF). In it I coin the term Ubiquitous Performance Support (UPS) as a better description of how workplace place learning will develop in the future. Comments welcome.

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Lars Hyland investigates how Continuous Professional Development is being transformed by digital connectivity and challenges how we assess competence and performance in the workplace.

The worst recession since the Second World War is having a profound effect on the workplace. Jobs are being lost in almost every sector, some being hit harder than others. Nearly half of the UK workforce plans a career change, by choice or otherwise. So, having relevant, marketable skills and experience is more important than ever and a priority for those wanting to stay in work or search for new work.

Training professionals are in the same position and must also remain skilled, as was recently demonstrated by the CIPD who responded to the changing economic conditions with its own set of redundancies in April. More significantly, perhaps, is the CIPD's own attempt to update its professional development programme and help build the skills of the HR community.

The new ‘HR Profession Map’ replaces the current CIPD Professional Standards and is a result of detailed consultation with HR directors across the main economic sectors, as well as senior professionals and academics. The map describes key HR knowledge areas, associated behaviours and sets out four bands of competence. This is designed to be more relevant to today's HR organisational landscape and deliver "sustainable capability".

Now, this could be said to be the goal for all workers no matter what their discipline, be they engineers or accountants. How do you stay relevant in a highly interconnected, global marketplace? Where does the responsibility lie for learning and development? Is it with the organisation you work for, or with you, the individual?

Personal brand challenges professional qualification as sign of quality

We all have anecdotes about our educational experiences, about how little we remember and how what we do remember has little practical value to the activities and jobs we do. Clearly, education strives to provide a platform for transferable skills, to give us adaptability and resilience to apply what we know in new and constructive ways.

Once in a job, continuous professional development intends to keep skills fresh and relevant, building on our real world experience. But does it? Too often qualifications misrepresent the value and capabilities of the person holding the certificate. All too frequently the curricula fail to keep up with the highly bespoke and rapidly changing realities of the workplace.

In today's digitally connected society, the value of a qualification is in danger of being superseded by a highly public individual record of activity and achievements - the personal brand.

Marshall McLuhan famously wrote in 1964 that: “The medium is the message”, recognising how new technologies impact our social and professional lives. The technology available today, from internet-enabled personal blogging to social networks such as Linkedin, enables the individual to provide the message personally and truly gives rise to the individual as the medium. This is a seismic shift in the flow of communication and information.

A controlled hierarchy has been replaced by a multi-nodal, interconnected network where each one of us control what we send, receive and participate in. The internet works this model efficiently and cost-effectively. The commercial world is now realising the shift in consumer attention with exponential growth in online advertising and marketing. We have always liked connecting, sharing and creating with others, but we now have the tools to do so easily. Television, news and print media are struggling to redefine their roles in the aftermath.

Education and training will follow this shift, as individuals realise they can consciously control their own learning and development. Crucially it doesn't have to look and feel like the classroom and lecture halls of old – although this remains a revelation to most adult learners.

Your personal brand - or in other words your social capital - could be described as a product of your academic, professional and life achievements and your network of contacts. Online media tools such as social networks (for example, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Xing) and content sharing (blogs, wikis, Youtube, Flickr, Twitter again) make it easy for individuals to control their own personal learning and sphere of influence.

This social capital cuts right across normal organisational boundaries and structures. The speed with which contacts can be made and expertise shared renders many traditional learning experiences achingly slow by comparison and frustratingly one-dimensional. It is this movement which has significant implications for the design of CPD support.

Impact of informal learning on CPD

Jay Cross, an active proponent of informal learning in the USA recently commented:

"As networks continue to subvert hierarchy, successful organizations will embrace respect for the individual, flexibility and adaptation, openness and transparency, sharing and collaboration, honesty and authenticity, and immediacy. Training is obsolete because it deals with a past that won’t be repeated. Learning will be redefined as problem-solving, achieving fit with one’s environment and having the connections to deal with novel situations."

Disappointingly, this world-view has yet to establish itself in any widespread reality. Much workplace learning is primarily formal in its delivery, using methods that at best make cursory use of the technology available to support and nurture a more effective and lasting learning experience.

Slowly, this is changing. Various market research surveys and studies in the past 6-12 months reveal a transformation towards a more blended learning experience. There is also an increasing use of e-learning and online collaborative exercises amongst geographically distributed groups of peers and mentors.

Brightwave's E-learning Trends Survey 2009 demonstrated this transformation by polling learning and development specialists within large UK organisations (5,000 plus employees). The survey revealed that while 80 per cent of total training budgets are likely to be cut or stay the same, half of the organisations are expecting their e-learning spend to rise.

This shift is being driven by the learners themselves, rather than HR it seems. An independent study commissioned earlier this year by the training provider, Cegos found that: "Half of employees across Europe want more e-learning and blended learning during the next three years, while only about 40 per cent of HR professionals plan to develop more programmes using these techniques.

“Learners are also keener to embrace collaborative tools like blogs, forums and wikis – 44 per cent of employees want to see these techniques developed, compared to just 32 per cent of HR professionals. Face-to-face learning is more popular among HR, with 42 per cent of respondents wanting to see more classroom learning compared to 38 per cent of employees."

With time and cost pressures growing, there is a real appetite for more flexible forms of learning. The same study found that over 80 per cent of employees were pleased with their e-learning and blending learning experiences. Employees were even calling for more work-based scenarios, self-assessment and tutor/peer support, rather than a return to traditionally exclusive classroom formats. This implies that HR professionals need to understand how to leverage technology to avoid being completely bypassed in the future, as predicted by Cross.

CPD in real time - Ubiquitous Performance Support

With the advent of real time, anywhere access to learning opportunities, it is now possible to offer what might be termed Ubiquitous Performance Support (UPS). Using a flexible, integrated set of tools that centre on your internet connected mobile phone, you can instantly query your professional and personal network of contacts to provide advice and guidance at the point and time of need.

At the same time, you can access your own personalised repository of knowledge, learning tutorials and other relevant content. The outcomes of how you perform in each situation can thus be recorded and self (and peer) assessed to help you improve your performance the next time you find yourself in a similar situation.

Just think of the power this environment has to support individual learning and performance. Instead of the inherently "just in case" model of CPD, which is subject to problems of updates and relevancy, UPS offers a "just in time" model that delivers actionable learning and accelerates the acquisition of practical experience. E-learning is crucial in underpinning this whole process from pre-induction (getting new starters up-to-speed) to ongoing performance support.

This thinking also extends the concept of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). Using Wikipedia (the reference resource of choice for the digital learner), PLEs are defined as:

"Systems that help learners take control of and manage their own learning. This includes providing support for learners to:

• set their own learning goals
• manage their learning; managing both content and process
• communicate with others in the process of learning

and thereby achieve learning goals."

Continuous Professional Development will need to find ways to accommodate this model of learning, providing a higher degree of flexibility and adaptability than ever before. This is more than likely to create some tensions. As the learning experience becomes more bespoke, it will increasingly challenge the concept of standards and levels of competency that are often used for comparison and assessment purposes.

Going further, how do you measure and certify completion? A common measure is contact time or hours learning. When using online tools, environments and peer networks, the learning becomes interwoven with normal daily activity - making it harder to quantify than attending a half-day course. Interestingly, the interwoven nature of the interaction is more effective in transferring the new learning experience into real performance improvement on the job.

Professional associations managing CPD credit schemes will need to work out viable and meaningful ways of measuring this learning activity when their target audience drifts away from more traditional learning. The International Association for Continuing Education and Training (IACET - www.iacet.org) is the caretaker of the CEU - Continuing Education Unit.

The IACET define the CEU as ten contact hours of participation in an organized continuing education experience under responsible sponsorship, capable direction, and qualified instruction. IACET CEUs may be: "Awarded by a college, association, company or any other organization willing and able to meet each of the ANSI/IACET 1-2007 Standard. Awarding IACET CEUs requires that a permanent record be established for each individual to whom IACET CEUs are awarded, and a transcript of that record must be made available upon request."

When learning activity is interwoven with other activities, how does this get meaningfully calculated? This is no doubt an interesting challenge, especially where learner activity records are spread out over many sites, services and personal interactions.

As I write this there is a significant amount of online discussion about the vagaries of measurement, including comments from the popular bloggers Tony Karrer and Harold Jarche. A serendipitous "Tweet" through Twitter pointed me to an amusing anecdote from Gloria Gery (http://www.gloriagery.com/articles/whydont). Gloria is a pioneer in the field of performance support systems and seeks real measures for learning effectiveness, she says:

“At a meeting one day, I suggested a new measurement criterion.

‘Why don't we weigh the students and report on a cost per pound?’

A deep quiet overcame the meeting. It was finally broken by a softly spoken question.

‘What?’

I guess I was being given a chance to reconsider, but I didn't take it.

‘Why don't we install a scale in the entry way,’ I said, ‘like the one they use for cattle. We can have each student stand on the scale before entering class each day. We can then calculate the return on our investment by volume.’

Needless to say, this attitude was a subject for much discussion both on that day and on my annual appraisal. While I wasn't exactly serious, the idea didn't seem any more irrelevant than some of the success indicators I was reporting on monthly.

None of the measurements I was supposed to take asked if anyone learned anything or if our interventions changed their performance.”

Measures that matter

As Gery rightly points out, traditional training measures (including hours spent "learning") demonstrate the separated nature of much training activity, which is divorced from the actual work context. Measures that matter - reducing errors, increasing productivity, reducing costs, increasing revenues are actually easier to track when learning is woven into the workplace environment.

CPD in its current form does contribute meaningfully towards this goal, but we really need to go further. We need to inject similar real time support across the board, just like my example above.

Looking forward

In lean times there is a tendency for organisations to cut back on overall training spend – although this short-term measure can in fact cause more long-term damage as it means you won’t be in good shape for the inevitable economic upturn and you risk losing the best talent.

In fact, there is an increasing importance of CPD during a recession, as re-skilling becomes more important for professional development with staff taking on new responsibilities if head count is cut. Furthermore, those that do take responsibility for their CPD are likely to be less impacted by the recession, and will come out with more skills.

Simply cutting training budgets is a mistake, because without effective investment in people and performance support when the economy picks up, opportunities will be missed. Indeed, many newly redundant people will discover that they can work productively in new ways outside the corporate structures they have left behind - and they may not return.

Instead of cutting budgets, organisations should instead focus their training attention on the business critical activities of the organisation. Thankfully, a new CiPD survey shows that despite the recession, 70 per cent of the HR community feels training will remain a high priority and CPD remains top of the agenda.

Social capital will inevitably grow in importance and the increased control we demand over our use of media - whether it be on-demand television or interactive shopping - will drive a wider thirst to be in control of our own learning and development. E-learning will continue to offer the most flexible learning opportunities and with mobile broadband internet access becoming more practical, my vision of ubiquitous performance support should become a reality for us all, not just the early adopters.

Home Sweet Office - the changing workspace

Wired Magazine have run an interesting feature reminding us that with a functioning networked society the old assumptions of physically working alongside each other are rightly being challenged. But its interesting how slowly the notion of teleworking/telecommuting has moved into the mainstream.

Though a third of the more than 150 million working Americans telecommute at least occasionally, most do so just a few days each month. Only 40 percent of companies permit any sort of work-at-home arrangement, which means most insist on full-time attendance.

Engagement isn't the issue. As this study points out:

Last year, researchers from Penn State analyzed 46 studies of telecommuting conducted over two decades and covering almost 13,000 employees. Their sweeping inquiry concluded that working from home has "favorable effects on perceived autonomy, work-family conflict, job satisfaction, performance, turnover intent, and stress." The only demonstrable drawback is a slight fraying of the relationships between telecommuters and their colleagues back at headquarters — largely because of jealousy on the part of the latter group.

In comparison the traditional office environment can be counter productive:

According to Gloria Mark, an informatics professor at UC Irvine, the typical office worker is interrupted or switches tasks every three minutes — hardly enough time to accomplish anything of substance.

Aside from the productivity and environmental benefits, working remotely places more emphasis on mediated communication skills and active learning. Clearly different disciplines apply, but they appear to be less of a barrier to effective performance than the traditional head office cubicle model in the long term.

Changing the office environment

But some organisations are recognising the need for change and have radically challenged the preconceptions of an office space. Interpolis - a Dutch insurance company - has transformed their HQ into an environment that encourages effective communication and focuses on results, rather than activity. In doing so they have freed up 51 percent of their working areas, cut 33 percent of construction and equipment costs, and reduced office usage expenses by 21 percent. Employees have no separate desks, work virtually paperlessly.

Nooteboom - who was responsible for the transformation project commented:

One should attend the Interpolice office - depending on the function - at least two to three days in office due to social cohesion. In contrast to the past, work is not measured on the presence, but output; The performance of the staff expected by the company. This is a fundamental change that requires time and training - amongst workers, but even more in the administration. What are the new tasks of the management ? No longer to check whether someone is there, but to define the output and control it. It takes months to incorporate this culture into a company.

As I wander the corporate corridors of various organisations here in the UK, there is some evidence of attempts to free workers and provide more conducive work spaces. But there is a long way to go before the fundamental culture shift described by Nooteboom is achieved.

Learning as you like it

This week will be the Learning Technologies 2008 show in London. I'll be there for both days (30/31 January), delivering a seminar on "Less Learning More Often" which covers some of the ground described in my earlier article on the theme.

I've also written the Last Word for the Learning Technologies magazine which as a sneak preview I've reproduced below. I'd be interested in your responses so if you're coming along, see you there.

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"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

I sometimes think that a large proportion of the education and training world unwittingly lives by the cynicism of this famous passage of Shakespeare (As You Like It, Act 2 Scene 7). As students or adult learners, how many times have you felt part of a helpless and trapped audience for a teacher or trainer who is more interested in their own performance than yours?

The famous bard goes on to describe the second of seven ages of man:

"Then the whining school-boy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school."

He's identified the core problem with most learning experiences we have – a failure to engage and harness our intrinsic motivation to learn. Now this is a problem not just limited to school boys and our school days – it affects all of us at all ages. And the world has clearly changed dramatically since Shakespeare's day, even just in the past twenty years. In a connected world, technology is fundamentally challenging traditional models of education and training, empowering us to learn in a more fluid and natural way than ever before, at our own pace and place. The learners are taking control, at long last.

So how fundamental is this change?

Well, consider the research of Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University, formerly Chief Scientist at NIIT in New Delhi, India. His "Hole in the Wall" experiments with communities in India, Cambodia and Africa demonstrate that children can intuitively learn how to use interactive multimedia applications in very little time. By literally building a networked PC into a wall accessible in an outside space (very much like a cash machine here), and providing no direction or instruction he sat and waited to watch what would happen. One child learned to browse in 6 minutes and was teaching 70 other children by the end of the day. They interacted with content that was not even in their own language – they had to self-learn English to get to the content itself. In one experiment children managed to grasp basic concepts of biotechnology and the principles of DNA! All this occurred without a teacher or classroom. Tellingly, he found that children learned best when the "hole in the wall" was kept right away from the traditional school environment. Now this is "informal learning" in its extreme, but it provides a compelling argument for us to radically review how learners of all ages, in education and in the workplace, spend their time developing new skills and acquiring new knowledge. Are we holding people back rather than propelling them forward?

In the corporate world, the attempts to define and (ironically) control "informal learning" are forcing us to realise that much of the energy and resources that go into our formal approaches to educate and train goes to waste. Forcing us to learn away from the context of our actual job environment, in concentrated blocks of time goes against the core truth that we will forget and fail to apply most of the new knowledge and skills we are exposed to when we go back to our normal activities. In contrast, when we harness the available technology around us, we move away from artificially extracting "learning" from the "performance" we want to see demonstrated.

Connectivity is rapidly accelerating the learning process, and the younger generation who don't know a world without the internet and mobile phone, get this more than most. In fact they take this for granted. Increasingly, they won't stand for the one-size-fits-all pace of traditional classroom based sessions that deny the existence of these tools. Why leave the workplace when you find the answers you need at your desk, on your laptop, in your phone? Through simulation we can practice skills and gather virtual experience that we can more readily and directly apply in real contexts. Not only that, we can literally pull out of thin air the resources that support our performance, just-in-time, at the point of need.

So, while many corporate environments appear to be a long way from being able to harness this phenomenon, in many ways they are being bypassed by the way we are using technology socially. Social networks cut across hierarchy: knowledge is just a search and a few clicks away, and virtual environments allow us to practise (perhaps crudely at present) quite complex technical and soft skills. Now, not everyone is naturally drawn to these experiences. However this is often a matter of design and usability.

Take Nintendo for example. With their DS and Wii gaming platforms they have brought e-learning to the masses. Who would have thought that in 2007 we would see Nicole Kidman, a Hollywood actress, advertising a Brain Training game on national TV and in cinemas? Travel to the Continent and you'll see that the top selling "games" for the DS are English Training and other life skill based titles. Apple, with their iPhone, iPod and iMacs, have succeeded in making technology highly desirable. Both organisations share a core principle – they are design-led and obsessive about the overall user experience. Good design that is sensitive to the user, is intuitive, is exciting to interact with and simply does what it is meant to do. Imagine if your corporate systems, tools and processes were as easy to operate. We could remove whole swathes of training activity that are only necessary to make good poor design and usability. In terms of e-learning design, too many products are hard to use, un-ambitious in scope, and dully written. No wonder many people's experience and perception of e-learning is poor.

But it doesn't have to be that way. We can shift our learning design principles to those that take into account current cognitive research. We can genuinely consider the environment in which people will use and interact. We can tailor our design with the personal goals of the individual. Then e-learning becomes truly performance enhancing. After all, learning can only ever be as you like it.

Applying Social Networking in the Workplace

I wrote this article back in November for Learning Technologies magazine. I'm placing it here as a matter of record and to note that social networking tools are clearly important to accelerating the (effective) learning process.

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We are social animals by nature, so any technology that allows us to connect more efficiently and effectively with others will flourish. Mobile phones and the internet itself are testament to this fact. Social networking tools have been around since the internet started such as Usenet and the abundance of discussion forums available. What we have now allows us to extend our immediate network of friends to include the friends of our friends, and the friends of our friends of our friends. The principles of social networking rely on a new level of openness and sharing of information, personal and professional.

How many friends have you got?

Facebook, YouTube, Linkedin, mySpace, Bebo, Xing – no doubt you've come across some if not all of these social networking tools by now. Indeed, you may be one of the 50+ million people across the world intently engaged with their Facebook home page, swimming in a sea of "pokes", invitations to play Scrabulous and solving the world's political ills through collective virtual action. HSBC in the UK recently felt the power of its bite when they tried to change the terms of their student bank accounts (in the favour of HSBC naturally). A revolt lead by users of Facebook forced a U-turn. David Cameron's recent endorsement at the Conservative Party conference showed how mainstream these tools have now become – although this could also mark its card amongst the trendsetters who having already abandoned mySpace, will look for the next cool community in which to hang out on the internet.

But underlying the hype are some powerful behaviours such as sharing knowledge, experience and information which the learning and development community ignores at its peril. However, the corporate reaction appears to be heading in the opposite direction. In September 2007 it was reported that a third of employers have banned their staff from using social networks such as Facebook over fears that it saps productivity and risks security. Several people have indeed lost their jobs through posting defamatory comments online while others have caused themselves professional embarrassment as their once private antics become easily searchable.
It seems that rather than work invading our private lives the opposite is in fact happening.
At the same time a YouGov poll found that half of all broadband users log onto social networking sites more than three hours a week, with a higher percentage of women active than men. This is a tidal wave of a trend that may be fruitless for corporate policy makers to battle against. Instead we should be looking for positive ways to harness this naturally enthusiastic behaviour.
Indeed, to this end, networks such as Facebook have developed business focused tools that allow the customisation and integration of company information. There are other organisations that offer business networking tools that are closed and focused, allowing a more private level of information exchange between employees of the same company. Motorola have already benefited from this approach describing improvements to the quality and cycle time of collaboration within the firm. Microsoft and IBM have also embraced social networking encouraging staff to publish their profiles and professional interests, to write blogs, and to engage in cross functional collaboration.

Divergence or Convergence?

When discussing new technology it's always good to keep a close eye on any underlying research as this tends to provide a clearer picture of the real value it holds. The Economist (2007) reported that Swisscom, Switzerland's largest telecoms operator, has a User Adoption Lab run by anthropologist Stefana Broadbent and their research has looked at usage patterns associated with different communications technologies. Based on observation, interviews, and user logs conducted across several European countries they found that despite the opportunity to keep in regular touch with a wide circle of friends through their mobile phones, the typical user spends 80% of their time communicating with just four other people.

Another interesting observation was how people used different communications technology in quite different ways. The fixed line phone was found to be the "collective channel", where calls are made "in public" because they are relevant to others around them. The mobile phone was predominantly used for last minute planning and to coordinate travel and meetings. Texting was used for "intimacy, emotions and efficiency", email for administration and to exchange documents and other media. While instant messaging and internet voice calls are "continuous channels" open in the background while people do other things. One of Broadbent's conclusions was that "each communication channel is performing an increasingly different function".
A remarkable discovery was that despite increased availability of essentially free voice communication, there has been little observed growth. Instead the increase has been in written channels. Broadbent observed, "Users are showing a growing preference for semi-synchronous writing over synchronous voice". We appear to be increasingly happy to multi-task and interleave our communication on a constant basis, irrespective of whether we are at work or at home.

Always connected

Tools such as Twitter (www.twitter.com) build on this trend to keep in constant touch by offering "micro-blogging". This enables you to send constant short messages to your community of what you are doing each step of the way. This can be done at your PC while you work (for example your message might be, "now working on XYZ project and calling Joe for an update") or out and about on using your mobile (for example, texting "heading towards Oxford Street, London"). This constant communication of your activity, its proponents tell me, leads to some useful interjections (such as "Joe's sick, call Amy instead") and chance meetings ("I'm at the top of Regent Street – want to meet for a coffee?"), that would not have happened without this channel being "always on".

This may not be your own idea of fun, but it is to a growing number of people who use it socially and are bringing it into work, expecting to be able to keep these channels always open. As HR and learning professionals, we need to be able to see the value of this type of behaviour for creating many more learning opportunities for individuals, and for accelerating and enhancing performance at work.

Applications in the workplace

Let's bring this back to a more traditional situation. We have a group of staff attending an off-site training event. This could be visiting a newly fitted shopping outlet that will eventually roll out across the network, or perhaps a product launch event. Or you could be a travel company, wishing to send a team to experience some new resort hotels. Logistically (and economically) not everyone can go. However, it is now possible for everyone to share in that experience.
Those attending could maintain a daily blog, posting their thoughts, photos/video taken on their phones. They could even use a micro-blogging tool on their phone to send back regular streams of where they are and what they doing. The wider community could get a lot closer to experiencing the event than they would otherwise; they can also participate. Sending back comments and responses means that those attending can ask questions on their behalf, can be reminded to complete certain tasks and generally support and share in the learning experience of their colleagues. This dialogue can continue after the event and when everyone is back in their normal roles, continuing to add helpful reinforcement.
These streams of communication can also work well for distributed teams, teleworkers (who are growing fast in number with the availability of broadband), job-sharers and any other community of people with a shared interest in keeping in the loop with each other.
Indeed, this can challenge the very design of traditional training experiences aligning activities more around "experiences" that are shared at the time they happen rather than the too often ineffective cascade once back in the office. An obvious place to start is in onboarding and induction of new employees. It's crucial to ensure new staff feel integrated into their new work environment and a company social network can accelerate that enormously. Indeed with profiles filled in during that "pre-joining" period, new staff can connect with staff of similar interests and job roles irrespective of geography. What a welcome that would be - and especially at a time of intense focus on employee engagement and board level fretting around finding and holding onto talent.

Elsewhere in the organisation, how about using wiki technology (see www.wikipedia.org to this in action) to build product knowledge and customer service know-how? The solution to a specific customer problem can be recorded directly by an employee and made available to everyone for comment, amendment and addition. Over a relatively short period of time you end up with a definitive solution that has benefited from substantial peer review.

The virtual world

Virtual worlds also offer a further dimension to collaboration, allowing users to interact with the environment around them as well as with each other. This has powerful learning potential by serving up experiences that accurately simulate situations that may occur in the real world. Tools such as Second Life are being joined by new, more flexible environments that can be adapted to specific applications. Indeed, one organisation is launching a service which will allow mini-virtual spaces within your own website enabling visitors to collaborate visually and instantly. What does this mean for learning design? Well, it emphasises how important simulation and immersion is to providing learners with much needed practice and safe opportunities to demonstrate new behaviours and skills.

If you think online collaborative environments are niche, consider these statistics from the book, Digital Korea by Tomi Ahonen and Jim O'Reilly. In South Korea 43% of the population have a personal profile in the virtual world Cyworld. Lineage, an online game, has 14 million users worldwide, which is twice as many as the often cited World of Warcraft.

What are you waiting for?

Embrace social networking and the prize is yours because it can accelerate innovation, problem solving and overall productivity with only the lightest of touches from traditional management hierarchies. Indeed, networks are already spawning co-operative working amongst individuals and small groups that can match (if not beat) the larger, traditionally structured corporate entities. All this is built on trust – without it these networks will quickly dissolve.
Learning has always been about content, context and collaboration. The network connects all these elements so it is accessible when, where and how you need it. With the new applications arriving as part of the Web 2.0 wave of innovation we can start to see how learning can be dramatically accelerated and made immediately actionable.

That old maxim "Knowledge is Power" appears to be waning. Maybe the new mantra should be "Your Network is Power". So beware. Build your network. It may be your only economic lifeline in the not too distant future.