social learning - why it's topping learning & development agendas

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Social LearningWhy it’s topping Learning and Development Agendas.


How Do We Learn?It’s a fundamental question for Learning and Development managers to ask, and it’s one that should inform all the work we do. So, how do we do it? Think back to the last time you started a new job, what was the first thing you did? Did you walk straight through the door, plant yourself at your new computer and boot up the training software? No, of course not, you turned to a coworker, introduced yourself and asked “what do I do?” We rely on one another for guidance and help, and we also recognise that some questions are better answered by colleagues than the internet. If you’d asked Google “What do I do” you’d have ended up here:


wheeldecide.com/to-do-decision-maker/

Which while a very entertaining website for finding things to do with your day probably isn’t what you had in mind. Some questions just aren’t answerable by the internet, and it’s that kind of question that social learning hopes to help with.

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70:20:10

One theory of learning that I’m sure has cropped up for you before is the 70:20:10 model of learning. Essentially, 70% of learning is on the job, informal experience.

This is the kind of learning that I’m sure anybody here who has had a Saturday job in their youth can relate to, this is “go out on the shop floor and stack shelves.” It’s far and away the form the majority of our learning takes, and in a lot of ways that’s simply due to the nature of working and learning at the same time.

20% of our learning comes from feedback, whether that feedback comes from colleagues, managers or even customers. This 20% is a bit more formal and trackable, if you’re asked to improve your work in some area during a performance review you can keep an eye on progress and suggest relevant learning.

The remaining 10% is left to the training your company actually provides. This is the sort of elearning and face to face training that L&D managers are used to being able to control.

Now don’t confuse this for a list of efficiencies, we’re not saying only 10% of training programs go in, we’re saying they only supply 10% of new learning, the majority comes from experience.


How do turn experience into training?One theory of learning that I’m sure has cropped up for you before is the 70:20:10 model of learning. Essentially, 70% of learning is on the job, informal experience. This is the kind of learning that I’m sure anybody here who has had a Saturday job in their youth can relate to, this is “go out on the shop floor and stack shelves.” It’s far and away the form the majority of our learning takes, and in a lot of ways that’s simply due to the nature of working and learning at the same time. 20% of our learning comes from feedback, whether that feedback comes from colleagues, managers or even customers. This 20% is a bit more formal and trackable, if you’re asked to improve your work in some area during a performance review you can keep an eye on progress and suggest relevant learning.

The remaining 10% is left to the training your company actually provides. This is the sort of elearning and face to face training that L&D managers are used to being able to control.

Now don’t confuse this for a list of efficiencies, we’re not saying only 10% of training programs go in, we’re saying they only supply 10% of new learning, the majority comes from experience.


We ask them!We ask them! Rather than trying to second guess with analytics what makes an employee a success what we should be doing is going directly to the source. But cornering an employee and demanding they share their knowledge isn’t going to necessarily lead to the best results, for one thing knowing which are the right questions to ask can be an impossible task in itself.


How Social Learning Works

So really the best thing to do is let employees ask each other for help and just keep a record of what’s been said so it can be looked up in the future. This prevents employees searching for answers from inappropriate sources, reduces time wasted trying to understand obtuse instructions and creates a resource bank that is specific to your company’s processes and systems.

It is in a sense a self curating system, providing your staff with a place to discuss methods and tips without the formality of a Q&A session. The idea is take the principles of social media (communication, sharing of popular content, mixed media) and apply it to workplace learning and discussion.

It evens means you can have remote workers contribute their knowledge.


Why sharing is the most important thing in the world.

Ultimately, the plan with social learning is to create a space where the culture of sharing contributes to workplace learning. Right now if you go online the most important thing for any website or piece of content is how much it’s being shared.

Sharing is how we decide if something is worthwhile, if I share a video or article with you it comes with my endorsement. It’s such a good measure of what content is worthwhile that Google have based their search engine on the concept. Sharing is what powers the internet, and the same concept applies in social learning.

By having staff share resources they find online you get a filtered view, with people plucking out what’s useful and then showing it to their peer group. If you implement a system with a feature similar to “liking” on facebook staff will make the good resources rise and the bad ones sink, creating a cultivated list.


Making friends and influencing people.

If you can encourage this culture of sharing in the workplace it brings with it another benefit: reputation. One of the main reasons that things like facebook, twitter and linkedin work is because they work of this idea of reputation and feedback loops. If you publish a blog and people like and share it, that makes you feel good about yourself, not only because people are saying they like your work, but because people are endorsing you as a worthy source.

If you can keep contributing to the community in a helpful way, people will respect your views and opinions, and you’ll have a reputation for making and sharing great content. This is why people love being followed on twitter, or getting subscribers on youtube. Using social media techniques you can create a similar feedback loop for office training, encouraging employees to like, share, and build each other’s reputation.


It’s about the journey...Over the course of your time on the social learning platform you’ll build up a backlog of all your blogs and posts, which help illustrate how you’ve developed as a learner. Having this record of your learning journey allows you to see how far you’ve come, and acts as a record of your learning that L&D managers can look at.

It’s worth encouraging employees to keep contributing by including their blogs and updates as part of their feedback in employee reviews. If you reward good contributions you’ll encourage more, and before long you’ll have a successful self tutoring community within your business.


Millennial Expectations

By 2020 75% of the workforce will be millennials (Bersin, Deloitte)

Millennials are used to this type of communication (1.23 billion facebook users)

Systems that aren’t social will seem antiquated

Social learning shouldn’t be considered a luxurious or surplus addition, over the next few years it’s going to become an expectation thanks to the workforce shifting into the hands of millennials. We’re seeing an influx into the working world of not only people who grew up with computers, but were young enough that when sites like facebook and twitter launched they were there from day 1 trying to use it, mastering it, and then becoming dependant on it.

If your workplace doesn’t embrace this type of learning you’ll fall behind the curve of expectation, and younger staff may struggle to engage with your training. This is the generation that took facebook from 1 million users in 2004 to 1.23 billion users today.


The User Experience

With social learning you can embrace this generation’s short attention span by making systems that play with the feedback loops that social media uses. So you can send push notifications to phones where users can quickly and easily engage with the system.

For example, if somebody posts a question asking for support’s help, people in support can receive a notification on their phones and if one of them has the time can quickly answer it like one might respond to a facebook message.

This is the kind of expectation millennials have of their technology, and it’s a vital part of making the user experience engaging. By giving mobile access with a responsive designs you allow users to engage in micro learning, looking up the answer in quick moments rather than having to hunt through Google or premade LMS courses.


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social learning - why it's topping learning & development agendas

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