Masie survey on how employees learn

The Masie Consortium did a survey on how employees learn. You can read some findings here:

http://www.masieweb.com/voicesurvey


Some of the points I remember are:
- People like the fact they have multiple options on what, how and when they learn. There used to be only a class. Now there is also tutoring, e-learning, social networks, the internet, etc.
- But people also get the feeling that with more options, they actually get less time for learning.
Looks like corporate learning is shifting to 'more freedom but in your own time'.

Learning is like water

I just read a piece of the latest newsletter of Elliott Masie:

"Covert/Secondary Learning Systems? We have been tracking an interesting trend, as some organizations are adding a second or even "covert" Learning Management System to stretch their functionality beyond the capabilities of the enterprise system already in place. Some of these "added" LMS installs have been in business units that want to rapidly expand functionality for targeted learning undertakings. For example, one Fortune 20's Sales Training group wanted a more collaborative approach to their on-boarding, so they leased an instance of a hosted system -- but called it an Onboarding System, rather than a LMS. They transfer the data in batches back to the corporate LMS. We are seeing secondary LMS systems implemented by other divisions or regions of the world, with unique needs that can't be rapdily met by the current LMS. "

It's not just that, there are 'hidden' LMS systems everywhere. It explains why Moodle has such a market share also in the corporate world: as seconcary LMS systems, for pilots, targeted departmental learning etc.

It strengthens me in my believe that learning is like water. It will find a way.

Let me explain: when there is a need for learning, it will happen. If the easiest is to do it via the learning function or the corporate learning systems, that is how it will go. If that is too troublesome process-wise, takes to long or makes no sense at that level, the learning will be disguised as meetings, workshops, LMS systems that are called differently or managed by another group, undercover as unmanaged and unbudgeted 'informal learning' etc. But it will happen. You can quote me on it: learning is like water, it will find a way. So there is a message for all the guardians of the learning function: if you make your service easy to access and use, the learning will go your way. Or else it goes any way the water flows...

Starbucks in North America closes 3 hours for learning

Starbucks in the United States took a rather drastic move: they closed ALL of their coffee houses for 3 hours to educate all staff on how to make a great coffee.

Elliott Masie has a 8 minute video on the Starbucks experience:
http://www.masieweb.com/starbucks

Can the folks at Starbucks maybe share the business case they used to convince top management of investing 3 hours and actually pausing business for that? I'd love to be able to come up with the right justification for that.

L7: ROI for learning braindump

The learning 2007 conference has started yesterday evening and is now at full speed. During the opening session there was an interview with Doug Lynch from Wharton university. He claims ROI is a false number and the learning profession should move towards other forms of evidence to prove its value. Actually he used a quite strong word to describe the significance of an ROI number but I'm not going to repeat it here, both because I didn't get it well and because it's a dirty word that would bring down the level of this blog :-).

I went to his session this morning. Here is my dump:

• We live in a knowledge economy and more people learn in companies than in schools. However there are no peer reviewed studies of ROI in companies. That is worrying.
• It is not that ROI cannot be done, but it is very complex to do and not necessarily meaningful. A quick poll of the audience says 71% say their companies do not have an accurate ROI measurement in place.
  
• Learning is accounted for under GAAP as an expense, even if we talk about it as an investment in people
• Some reasons why ROI is not what we necessarily need: ROI is outcome based but in a learning organization for example it is the process of continuous improvement that matters. For ROI you need to define, measure and monetize all variables that make up the benefits and the costs of learning, while controlling for all variables except for learning. What goes into ROI is also very specific to the company and context.
  
• All things being equal, what is the impact of learning? Well guess what, all other things that affect performance are not equal, performance is affected by lots of things we cannot control for in the calculation.
  
• What we are actually are talking about is the IMPACT of learning, and evidences of that instead of the financial number related to outcome benefits and associated costs ratio.
• So we should all be like researchers and find evidence and validate that in a scientific way. Work with the evidence you can gather or with what is easily quantifiable.
  
• Americans are typically asking a lot of questions and interrupt the flow of the presentation and go into side discussions much more than you will see happening on European conferences. That is not necessarily bad, but at this point I lost it so I don't really know what we could do instead ROI. We did not get to the end or half of the slides, but they will be on the learningwiki.com site later on so maybe I'll get the point of the session later.
  

At a previous conference I remember in a similar session some people and vendors boosting on how they got a number and cracked the holy grail on proving learning value. Then the last speaker came and declared that mankind has been teaching each other stuff since the dawn of time, and we still do not know how to measure its value, although we all feel it does matter. So who started the whole ROI saga in learning anyway? Was it the business that noticed learning and wanted to manage it like any other service or investment? Or was it the learning function that wanted a place at the table and decided it should come up with a ROI number to achieve that?
At the end of the session I'm still as confused about the ROI debate as before. I have more reasons to believe that ROI is not the unifying answer. But I still have no idea as to what other evidences to replace it with. So hopefully I'll get it later and in the mean time stick to Kirkpatrick.