We have been spending a lot of time in recent posts talking about the enormous potential for m-Learning. In a span of only 20 years, wireless services have reached almost 50 percent of the world’s population. There are now more than 3 billion mobile subscribers globally, that number is expected to grow to 4.5 billion by 2012. In the workforce development industry, these numbers translate into new ways to reach and engage learners.

On Wednesday, June 10th, 2009, at 2PM EST, come join me, along with Don Duquette, GP’s corporate learning and development expert, for an interactive webinar, sponsored by General Physics Corporation, on practical solutions to help you navigate the opportunities and pitfalls of mobile learning.

The webcast will focus on:

• Explosive growth of mobile subscriptions
• Huge interest in mobile as device for K-12, University and Corporate Learning
• Results from survey on the current uses for learning & development
• Potential bandwidth, instructional design, LMS capability challenges

We want to hear from you before the webinar–what are your questions, and what issues are you dealing with as you explore how to implement m leanring in your orgnaizaiton. Send me an email here
Thanks and See You Online.
[tags]M Learning, Performance Support, Talent Management, General Physics Corporation

I showed this chart to several colleagues who are Chief Learning Officers for professional service and financial service firms to gauge the impact on their functions in light of the current economic situation. We discussed how the learning function will evolve in the months ahead:

Three areas surfaced as keys to grappling with the current economic situation:

1. Targeting the top three initiatives HRD leaders can accomplish in 2009 assuming fewer human resources and corporate learning staff and budget decreases of up to 40%. This translates into having a razor sharp focus on a critical few initiatives that will deliver the highest impact to senior executives. Some include: more emphasis on creating “formal” on the job experiences to nurture informal learning, having an enterprise wide coaching and mentoring strategy in place to supplement whatever formal learning can be offered and preparing managers to “have difficult conversations with employees”.
2. Providing a range of “real time” online performance support tools to managers. Previously these tools have been created for jobs in such functions as customer call and operations. But now that formal learning may be reduced, more managers and newly appointed leaders will be looking for performance support tools as a way to assist in creating on-the-job improvements.
3. Examining how to leverage current content vendors to provide greater pre and post learning experiences—in other words exploring how to deepen some vendor relationships to provide learning interventions rather than just creating access to online content.

How are you adjusting your learning department to the new realities of driving greater effectiveness and efficiency into the learning function? Share your thoughts with me.

[tags]Chief Learning Officer, Performance Support Tools, Pre and Post Learning[/tags]

If you are like me and did not grow up playing multiplayer online games also known as MMORPG’s (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) it is important to give you some context. Multiplayer online games are a large and growing market with current estimates topping 50 million users. World of Warcraft alone has 10 million players who each pay a subscription fee of $15 a month. According to the Palo Alto Research Center, participants’ play an average of 20 hours a week, their average age is 27 years old and 85% are male. They are not exactly your typical corporate employee, but the question is this: What can we learn from how these virtual teams form to solve a problem and then disband?

Questions about what the participants do when they play these games has caught the interest of corporate talent and learning officers. Essentially, they are facing the same organizational challenges as many of our leaders in today’s FORTUNE 500 firm, namely they are:


• In constant recruitment mode
• Experimenting with being creative about motivating and rewarding top talent
• Using the latest collaborative tools so global teams can be constantly connected to each other
• Incorporating more personalization into day-to-day interactions with team players

So, if we believe these online games are a preview for what leaders will be facing in the next few years, what can we learn about what works? Here are some lessons and observations from Leadership’s Online Labs article:

1. Think first about how to change the game rather than solely focusing on “building individual leadership competencies.” Two suggestions: First think about offering immediate individual and non-monetary team rewards. This can range from public ratings and ranking systems recognizing stellar individual contributions (think Amazon ratings here) to devising a game-inspired set of incentives where players have visibility into what their reward will be if their team is successful. As the HBR article states, “the power of online games is that people care very much about the virtual gains and losses, even if the currency that records them can’t be exchanged for dollars.” So the processes we set up for documenting individual contributions and allowing these to be rated, commented on and ranked is a very powerful incentive.
2. Create more detailed views into the profiles of team members as I discussed last week in my article, “Performance Learning 2.0“. The static employee profile used for decades by human resource officers is slowly being replaced by a “personal employee tag cloud” where you can view a snapshot of an employee’s personal and professional life—courses taken, language fluency, projects worked on and work/life goals for next few years. But a note of caution here, employees will ask how this data will be used and companies will need to develop a set of guidelines and policies if they go down this road.

Some questions for you and your teams as you leverage the lessons of online games:

• What is your Facebook Strategy? This has come to mean do you have a strategy for embedding social media into your learning/talent development offerings? This does not have to also mean losing control or taking risks regarding security. Rather, it implies that your organization is making a commitment to experiment with using social media as a way to become relevant to the Millennial Generation.
• How much of your Learning & Talent Management staff is from the Millennial Generation? Are you tapping into this mindset as you partner with your customers to design and develop new programs?
• Are you taking the lead to “educate” your organization’s IT department on how game-inspired processes and incentives may need to be created to attract, develop and retain Millennial Generation. For example, have you created a presentation on social media for learning and shared this with your IT department? Remember IT departments need to be brought along early rather than having Human Resources “come up with a solution and then try selling it to IT.” One way companies are doing this is appointing a Chief Technology Officer for their learning department.

Please share your thoughts with our growing community and me.

[tags]Online games, talent management, Harvard Business Review, Leadership Development, Facebook [/tags]

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]]> http://2020workplace.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=133 3 http://2020workplace.com/blog/?p=118 http://2020workplace.com/blog/?p=118#comments Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:24:42 +0000 Jeanne Meister http://newlearningplaybook.com/blog/2008/04/07/business-week-50-best-performers-is-your-company-on-the-list/

The annual Business Week survey of the 50 Best Performers is out on newsstands.

Here are a few things to think about: Is your company on the list? What are the companies on the list doing in terms of people development?

First the top list of companies:
1. Coach
2. Gilead Sciences
3. Allegheny Technologies
4. Verizon
5. Questar
6. Apple
7. Colgate-Palmolive
8. BJ Services
9. Abercrombie & Fitch
10. MEMC Electronic Materials
11. CB Richard Ellis Group
12. C.H. Robinson Worldwide
13. IntercontinentalExchange
14. UnitedHealth Group
15. CME Group
16. Starbucks
17. Robert Half International
18. Avon Products
19. Cognizant Technology Solutions
20. Sunoco
21. Goldman Sachs Group
22. Exelon
23. Amazon.com
24. Rockwell Collins
25. Nucor
26. Varian Medical Systems
27. AT&T
28. Autodesk
29. T.Rowe Price Group
30. Bed Bath & Beyond
31. Pepsico
32. Expeditors International of Washington
33. Lehman Brothers
34. Google
35. Schlumberger
36. Best Buy
37. IMS Health
38. PNC Financial Services Group
39. Constellation Energy Group
40. Sherwin-Williams
41. Microsoft
42. Precision Castparts
43. Titanium Metals
44. Moody’s
45. Coca-Cola
46. Barr Pharmaceuticals
47. TJX
48. Centurytel
49. Nvidia
50. Exxon Mobil

A few observations:

The list is created based on financial measures. Business Week selects the top performers in each of 10 sectors based on two key metrics: return on investment and sales growth over the past three years (and for the financial service firms, their return on equity and growth in assets). But as we know that only tells a small part of the story. What about the commitment these companies are making to innovation and people development? One of the companies – Lehman Brothers is in fact doing both, all the more remarkable given the current chaos in the financial services and sub-prime marketplace. This year Lehman Brothers ranked number 33 on Business Week’s Top 50 list and while down slightly from the previous year, the company continues to make a commitment to people development.

One of the interesting innovations in learning used by Lehman Brothers is Metaphoric Learning, a learning method that takes participants out of their familiar surroundings and gives them the opportunity to immerse themselves in a new world. Metaphorical Learning is not just another fad. Rather, this learning method, as pioneered by Duke Corporate Education, ties learning outcomes to key business priorities. At Lehman Brothers, metaphorical learning is used to develop relationship building skills among investment bankers who become part of a pit crew changing tires trackside at a NASCAR race while building key skills sets that focus on developing execution skills and how to be a member of a complex team.

To date, over 500 Lehman executives have participated in metaphoric learning experiences and according to Lehman Brothers there has been a relationship between those who participate in these learning experiences and an increased retention rate. Is this method widespread? Currently it is focused on niche populations in financial services and medical fields but is gaining traction among a broader segment of workers even New York Police Department has used metaphoric learning to build observation skills among police detectives. Is it effective? The key to using metaphoric learning is to be sure it is linked to strategic business goals, the specific skill sets you want to build in a target audience and then measure the outcomes such as increased employee retention, revenue and productivity. If you have experience with metaphoric learning please share your experiences with us.

[tags]metaphorical learning, Duke CE, Lehman Brothers, Business Week[/tags]

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]]> http://2020workplace.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=118 1 http://2020workplace.com/blog/?p=109 http://2020workplace.com/blog/?p=109#comments Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:16:38 +0000 Jeanne Meister http://newlearningplaybook.com/blog/2008/03/28/talent-management-what-is-your-ceo%e2%80%99s-involvement-and-engagement-in-growing-global-talent/
The demand to grow the best breed of talent is on the CEO agenda but still many CEO’s struggle to resolve the talent shortage for their businesses. There is a fundamental disconnect between how executives value the importance of talent management versus the amount of involvement and rigor they have in the talent management process. This is one of the major findings from Growing Global Executive Talent, a global online survey of 412 executives conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and Development Dimensions International (DDI). Click here to download the PDF of the full report.

According to this survey, 55% of respondents said that their organization’s performance was likely or very likely to suffer in the future due to insufficient leadership talent.

One of the more compelling quotes in the survey findings was from a CEO in support of investing more time in talent management. David Novak, CEO of Yum Brands, shares this in the survey; “Show me a good leader and I’ll show you a good business.”

A number of key findings emerged from the survey that can be highlighted and referred to as evidence of the importance of talent management, namely:

• 66% of the respondents from the survey are making talent management a core business strategy equal to or more important than other business priorities. Some CEO’s are increasingly playing a hands-on role in expanding and fine-tuning their talent management initiatives. For example, Mr. Majdi Abulaban, vice president of Delphi Packard Electrical Architecture, said he is now spending 50% of his time on talent management, up from 35% two years ago.
• 55% of respondents said their firm was fair or poor at identifying talent and communicating promotions. Strong talent management depends on clear communication where potential candidates understand where they need to improve and what they need to accomplish in order to be in line for advancement.
• Only 20% of respondents said they spend time on managing leadership talent or involved their human resources department as a “true strategic partner.” One thought for Human Resource professionals: Be proactive in involving yourself as a business partner. Waiting to be “invited” to assume this role will clearly not work for you. One suggestion: develop an enterprise people development plan, this will give you the strategic view into your organization’s talent needs. Furthermore, given the fact, that just one in ten CEO’s said they reviewed leadership talent with their Board of Directors, this appears to be another opportunity for Human Resources professionals to begin to engage with their senior leadership in putting talent management on the agenda for the Board of Directors. And having an enterprise people plan may be the first request of the Board.

So, the survey asks what is preventing companies from adopting a more “rigorous” approach to talent management? Some common strategies mentioned in depth in the survey findings include:

• Develop an integrated talent strategy – meaning do not patch together various programs, but rather adopt one comprehensive strategy requiring leaders to serve both as executive sponsors and champions of the talent strategy as well as active participants in the development of talent.
• Identify talent potential early – the demand for strategic leaders is outgrowing the supply and this results in the need to identify and invest in internal leaders on a regular basis. This requires a routine scanning of the skills, knowledge and talent of the organization, and isolating leaders who show a combination of strong performance and leadership potential.
• Use innovation and take “calculated risks” in executive development – push your learning vendors to use innovative design approaches including metaphorical learning experiences – a term referring to a learning method that takes participants out of their familiar surroundings and gives them the opportunity to immerse themselves in a new world as they go through a set of learning exercises.

So what are your barriers to gaining traction with talent management inside your organization? Please share your experiences with our growing community.

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[tags]talent management, talent retention, talent leader, global talent, ceo[/tags]

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