What does this mean for HR professionals?

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Jeanne will be continuing this discussion on the saving patterns of Gen Y when she speaks at the coming TD Ameritrade Institutional 2012 conference, “Shaping The Future Together.” Jeanne is speaking about “Learn What Gen X and Gen Y Want in the Workplace.”

We will be checking our Twitter feed so send us your questions on this topic to #TDAI2012 and we’ll will write a future post on the dialogue and questions about Gen X and Gen Y.

The graphic above is taken from the AFOL community, or Adult Fans of Lego. These adult fans make up 10% of Lego’s billion-dollar business. My advice: Chief Learning Officers should take a page from Chief Marketing Officers. Learn what drives success in these communities and as noted in the excellent book, Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, begin your journey to build a community by asking yourself key questions such as:

1. What business objectives are you trying to achieve?
2. What pain points/passions/areas of general interest do your community members need help with or want to give assistance to?
3. How will you support and maintain the community? Communities are cheap to launch but to be effective they must be constantly supported with new content, new features and new designs.
4. How will you measure success? Think beyond just the number of visitors and number of page views to business metrics such as increases in the engagement of employees and customers and decreases in costs.
5. What are the incentives? Community members need to be rewarded for their participation.

Now how do these lessons apply to an internal community that a learning & development department may launch? There is actually quite a bit of overlap – one can ask the same questions, the answers will differ for an internal community versus an external community, but the overall secrets to success are the same, namely:

• Start with a business objective
• Understand the passion of your potential community members
• Build into your budget the resources to support and maintain the community (think beyond technology resources to people and training resources)
• Set metrics early on to measure your success in business terms
• Be creative about providing rewards and incentives for participation – remember your employees contribute to a community in addition to the demands of their “day job”

What other “secrets of success” do you have in running and managing online communities of practice? Share them by either posting a comment or sending me an email.

[tags]Online communities; Groundswell, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Learning Officer[/tags]

I am looking for the ability to send an email to all our Attorneys via 
BlackBerry (1000+) that contains a link. Upon clicking the link a multimedia 
file will either download and play or stream. This multimedia file 
can be actual video or a PowerPoint-type stack that contains audio and automatic slide change. The critical 
factor is that the population of Attorneys do not have to open up a separate application on 
the BB thus making using the BB for learning as easy and seamless as possible.

So far, one leading suggestion is to try Blackberry Video Generator. Now, let’s say you are trying to build a case to your management on why you should be exploring “Wearable Learning For Senior Executives.” Here are some examples to refer to:

There Have Been Record Shipments for PDA’s
According to Gartner, the PDA market (Personal Digital Assistants) showed record shipments of 17.7 million devices, an increase of 18.4% from the previous year. Gartner defines a PDA as a data-centric handheld computer weighing less than 1 pound that is primarily designed for use with both hands (collectively known as “BlackBerry’s,” or “CrackBerry’s” for the addicted). Examples include the RIM BlackBerry 8707v, HP iPAQ 69xx, Nokia E61, Motorola Q, T-Mobile Dash and Sidekick. So there is a huge installed base of senior executives who “wear” a potential training device.

Some companies are already piloting using Blackberry for Training
There are a number of on-going pilots of companies already exploring using the Blackberry for training. Often the target markets are senior executives who use BlackBerry 24X7 in their job. One that comes to mind is a series of pilots being rolled out in 2008 targeting Merrill Lynch Investment Bankers. The objective is to provide corporate mandated training to Investment Bankers over Blackberry. What’s interesting is how the pilot is organized: Merrill Lynch is using their internal Learning and Human Resource staff as the first pilots to work out technical issues as well as test out the ergonomics of programs.

Research points to the need for heavy investments in recruiting high paid professionals as compared to investments in training high paid professionals. Deloitte Research finds that the typical US company spends nearly 50 times more to recruit a $100,000 professional than it will invest in their annual training once they are on-board.

What has been your experience in using the BlackBerry for learning? Share it here with our readers.