So what have we learned and what do we still need to learn or grow into?
First, as a conservative organization, we are slowly learning how to make the systems work together from the 'people development' perspective. We, like all organizations, have made mistakes in believing that a new technology is 'the' answer to whatever misses or issues with learning offerings. This is the case here as well.
Technology alone isn't the answer to making a system work. We are continuing to hear (and starting to hear anew from some) that the system (the LMS, the performance management system, etc) isn't solving problems because the systems are.. fill in the blank. True. All of it. To make the system work, you as a human need to do that work to connect your people and their activities and use the technology to record their activities. The technology isn't the system; the people are the system and the technology is a tool.
Second, we have to think more about how the real life activities of individuals contributes to their development as much as the formal learning systems we've put in place. As I've mentioned earlier, workplace learning is more than simply plunking people down into a classroom or having them complete projects for their development. Workplace learning is developing an environment (eLearning Guild and others would call is an ecosystem) where formal, informal and accidental learning is made available to help employees get better at their roles, find a place in the community that is the organization, and move the organization's goals forward. This is more than structuring classrooms, eLearning, on-the-job activities, mentoring, and performance tools for an individual. This is about purposefully creating a community from the employees' perspectives and creating spaces where opportunities to grow, connect and practice are available. Technology systems can help provide locations and structures, but they can't create environments - organizations have to do that on purpose.
Finally, I think the team I worked with has started to learn about the strength and power of saying 'no' to things that aren't a fit to the technology. We've started to learn that there is strength in considering the differences between what we can do and what we should do. A technology system has purpose-built functionality and we are learning to work collaboratively with our partners and vendors to find ways to work within the technology and find new technologies to support requirements that our learning partners have which don't fit with this system. We aren't ignoring or MacGuyvering the system; we are finding new ways to help our learning partners accomplish their goals. So we are learning too!
This shift in technology, in design thinking for building a learning ecosystem, and the literal move of millions of pieces of data has made quite a year. We birthed the baby and now it's sleeping through the night. Next year it will grow and develop; I hope we can keep up!
