If you are not already a follower of the ASTD Big Question each month on the Learning Circuits blog, I highly recommend it.  Every month, a general question is posted on a “priority topic facing learning professionals.” Anyone is open to respond.

Starting this month, I will be doing my best to chime in each month.  You will be able to find my responses on this blog.

It turns out that this is a particularly apropos month to get started.  This month’s question happens to be directly related to an important new study just about to publish to our membership:

A great question – and one of great interest to our research members.  It was the second most wanted topic of research as found in an internal research study we did with our membership at the end of last year.

At this point several others have already responded. I encourage you to peruse their responses.  These previous posters have done a great job addressing the attitude (Harold Jarche), skills (Jay Cross and Clive Shephard), and underlying metaskills (Nancy White and Michelle Martin) required for staff in today’s corporate learning functions.  Clark Quinn addresses the skill requirements for what he calls 'learning ecosystems', essentially the same concept as the learning environments that Josh and I have both written about recently.

For my part in this conversation, I want to share with you a preview of our next major research study set to publish this month.  Recently, we (like many others) have noticed certain potentially disruptive trends in the evolution of corporate learning functions themselves, including a growing recognition of

• - the importance of informal learning in organizations, 
• - the power of new technologies to both deepen and hasten the flow of information across organizations,
• - the changing needs and expectations for learning on the part of different generations and geographies of employees,
• - the increasing speed at which the human capital needs of the organization are changing, and
• - the increasing inability of current learning and HR practices to solve for all of these new challenges.

In response, we’ve spent the better part of the last year focused on how corporate learning functions are evolving – in basic operation and overall mandate – to stay relevant and productive.  The outputs of this research are twofold: first, the Bersin & Associates Enterprise Learning Framework; and second, a major industry study – High Impact Learning Practices: The Operating Guide for the Modern Enterprise Learning Function.  Using the Framework as the roadmap, this study paints a portrait of a specific kind of High Impact Learning Organization®(HILO): one that is prepared to meet the challenges of today’s changing business world.

As part of this research we have created a high level index comprised of 10 key principles or indicators that characterize the modern High Impact Learning Organization®:  The Modern Enterprise Learning Index.  We compared hundreds of training departments against this index, and used the results to identify what separates those that “get it” from the rest.  Included in this analysis was a look at the disciplines of the modern HILO.  What disciplines must the learning function master in order to achieve and sustain high business impact in the world of enterprise 2.0? 

Our research identified a very clear pattern. 

First, modern HILOs are clearly better than their peers at “the basics,” such as instructional design and project management, and by wide margins.  They were also significantly better at performance consulting – which we believe is a critical success factor for all HILOs. 

The key takeaway here is that, regardless of the need to adopt new approaches and transition the learning function to a new role and mandate for the organization, the basics of operating a training department are still important and will be for the foreseeable future.  Training directors and managers should look to add the “new” disciplines of the modern learning function to their teams, not necessarily replace current skills sets.

So what are these new disciplines of modern enterprise learning?

I am pleased to say that our research is confirming what I have seen already from several of the previous respondents to the question.  The points of greatest difference, or other words, the disciplines that most separated the modern HILOs from the rest were:

• - information architecture
• - knowledge management
• - information visualization 
• - rich media development
• - business intelligence
• - community management
• - a deep connection to and mastery of the business processes of their audiences 

Of course these are just disciplines; how they are applied in real life is a different story.  In our study, we cover each in more detail, distilling the many conversations we had with exemplary learning organizations into how these disciplines are best translated into functional roles and responsibilities within corporate training departments. 

I will end this post with a brief example that I think captures where training departments are headed and should help illustrate the application of these new disciplines. 

British Telecom, one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services, has recently implemented the “Dare2Share” program.  Dare2Share supplements BT’s current learning efforts with a YouTube-like platform for social learning.  The environment is free and open.  BT is careful to let employees experiment, innovate, collaborate, communicate and share their experiences and knowledge in engaging ways.

Dare2Share represented a huge cultural shift for BT.  The organization was accustomed to a controlled, top-down approach to learning.  BT learned along the way that encouraging effective social learning and ensuring business alignment would require someone to shepherd the environment as a formal job responsibility. BT would need to explicitly cultivate a culture supportive of knowledge sharing, including institutionalized means for modeling and rewarding desired behavior.  The training deparment would need to help the organization at large solve for issues of knowledge context, consistency, and discovery.  And they would need to teach employees how to create good content.

For that purpose, BT has created a special sub-team within its training department, including instructional design and multimedia developer resources, whose express responsibility is to go out into the company and teach the skills of creating effective and usable content. Right now, this team is small relative to the staff devoted to more traditional efforts; but BT envisions a day when this team is really the first and primary function of their learning organization.

So, imagine my fellow learning professionals: what would you need to be good at to get a job in that learning organization?

-David