Category: Informal Learning

SuccessFactors Acquires Jambok – Is this Corporate Learning 3.0?

This week SuccessFactors announced the acquisition of Jambok, a small platform company with an innovative and powerful solution for social learning and knowledge sharing.

Jambok was the brainchild of Karie Willyerd and a small technical team at Sun, where Karie was the Chief Learning Officer and pioneered knowledge and video-sharing with the Sun Learning Exchange ... Read more»

Today’s Chief Learning Officer: Tamar Elkeles – A CLO of the Decade

One of the privileges I have in my role is the opportunity to meet some of the great world leaders in corporate learning and development.  In the interest of helping our industry understand the changing role of corporate training and talent management, I would like to talk about the changing role of the Chief Learning ... Read more»

How People Learn: It Really Hasn’t Changed

Over the last several months I have been in many meetings with HR and L&D professionals talking about the enormous power of formalized informal learning. As we walk through out enterprise learning framework and talk with people about the need to expand their concept of training, I am reminded of the work we did back ... Read more»

From E-Learning to We-Learning: SkillSoft InGenius

Today the corporate training industry is evolving from ten years of focus on e-learning and blended learning towards a serious and transformational focus on “we-learning.”   We named this trend the “formalization of informal learning” and it is now one of the most significant changes taking place in corporate training around the world.

As ... Read more»

Learning and Talent Management in Europe

This week I had the opportunity to keynote the largest learning conference in the UK, the UK Learning Technologies Conference (developed and run by Donald H. Taylor, one of the most knowledgeable professionals in our industry). The title of my presentation was “Informal Learning: What, Why, and How – and what it means to ... Read more»

From E-Learning to We-Learning

The corporate training industry is undergoing some major changes.  Over last few months we have been involved in many discussions with organizations about the tremendous needs to build, manage, and formalize their social and collaborative learning programs.   This is being driven by many factors:  the slowing economy, the “always-connected” nature of the workforce, and the ... Read more»

Modernize Corporate Training: The Enterprise Learning Framework

Over the last year or so we have talked with hundreds of companies about their desire to transform their corporate training programs to take advantage of social networking, knowledge management, communities of practice, and better models of blended learning. As we studied dozens of high performing training programs through our Learning Leaders® program, we ... Read more»

Informal Learning becomes Formal

informallearningIt’s now official. After surveying our entire research membership and having more than 30 conversations with leading HR and learning leaders (including with Xerox, Accenture, British Telecom, Edward Jones, Department of Defense, and Network Appliance), I am now 100% convinced that “informal learning” has become “formal.”  That is, if you want to build a high-impact, ... Read more»

Enterprise Social Software: A New Category

This week we introduced some important and groundbreaking research on a new, important category of enterprise software:  the market for corporate Social Software platforms.   Traditionally our research has focused on identifying the strategies, processes, and systems which help corporate HR and L&D drive effectiveness and business value.  But as we continued to study the ... Read more»

Make Learning part of your Business Strategy

One of the important lessons we have learned from our High Impact Learning Organization® research is the simple but profound fact that learning is part of a corporate business strategy.   While many HR and business leaders still believe that “training” is department which improves workforce productivity and should be treated as an expense item, ... Read more»

Social Networking in Talent Management: Where are we?

Whew.  Earlier this year we embarked on a major research effort to understand the growing role of social networking in enterprise learning and talent management.  The results are amazing.   Let me give you a brief preview of some of our initial findings:

  1. Organizations are working mightily to figure out how to leverage social networking (blogs,
... Read more»

New Disciplines of the Modern Training Organization

This month we are launching The High Impact Learning Organization®, a research study which has been more than three years in development.  During this time we have interviewed hundreds of corporate HR and training leaders and reviewed in-depth trends of more than 780 global organizations. 

Listen Audio Overview of this research:  click here.

As ... Read more»

Managing Innovation: Google and the “Learning Culture”

As we prepare for our annual research conference IMPACT 2008:  The Business of Talent®, I want to mention an important topic which has come up frequently in the last few weeks:  the critical importance of managing innovation.

All organizations in all industries must continuously deal with change.

Our research continues to show that one ... Read more»

Talent Management in Financial Services – Impact of the Slowdown

This week I had a call with five financial services clients to understand the impact of the economic slowdown on their learning, talent, and systems investments.  How are HR, talent strategies, and enterprise learning investments being affected by the credit crunch and slowdown in the US financial system? 

(The clients included companies in banking and ... Read more»

Starbucks Nationwide Training Day: Did it work?

On February 26, 2008 Starbucks embarked on an interesting experiment in enterprise learning:  the company shut down all its US stores for several hours to train 135,000 employees in a single shot.   The goal of this program was to “reenergize our focus on the things that have made us the leading roaster and retailer of ... Read more»