#GuildChat for 12/20/19: Moving from the Training Department to L&D

Our next #GuildChat takes place Friday, December 20th at 11am PT / 2pm ET. This week’s chat is on Moving from the Training Department to L&D.

First, thanks to Kel Krehbiel for coming up with this week’s topic! We love suggestions from the community, keep them coming!

Ideally our work should be less about some of the traditional metrics training departments have focused on – bodies in seats, time spent in the classroom, or completion of courses – and take a more broad view on how both formal and informal learning and workflow support all come together to help individuals and organizations meet their goals. But what can you do when you work for a company, team, manager, or client who’s more focused on checking boxes than if the efforts you’re working on make real changes in behaviors and skills? How can we convince those we work with and for that this shift in thinking is worth the effort, and once we have them on board how can we help them to make this admittedly complex transition? As well, how can long-time training specialists make the leap to produce more than just the formal learning they’re experienced in?

Join us this week as we look at how organizations and individuals shift from a narrow focus on training to a broader approach to supporting performance improvement.

Prospective questions:

Q1 Why do you think training is often seen by leadership as the only or best approach to organizational performance issues?
Q2 Training is not the same thing as learning. What strategies can we use to help ensure that organizational training promotes learning?
Q3 It can be uncomfortable doing work in new ways. How can we help our colleagues ease into new approaches to the work we do?
Q4 The audience you’re designing for may also have expectations that learning at work always happens in formal training courses. How can you help them see workplace learning in new ways?
Q5 Small experiments or alternative efforts to training can be useful to show a proof of concept. What’s an example of one you’ve seen or tried?
Q6 Have you ever leveraged use cases, case studies or research to support a shift in approaches? How’d that work out? What would you recommend?
Q7 In your current role, what are some ways that you can enhance social, informal and/or workflow learning to reduce the emphasis on training?
Q8 Have you experienced the transition from a training organization to a learning one? What lessons did you learn that might be helpful for others hoping to do the same?

Missed this GuildChat? Don’t worry – you can still read through what happened on our Wakelet transcript of the chat!