I had an interesting – if not somewhat depressing – conversation with my six-year-old’s teacher the other day. This woman is in her sixties, and has been teaching perhaps longer than I’ve been alive. My daughter simply adores her, and I think she does a fantastic job at reaching the kids. That’s what made the discussion rather sad.

She was describing to me how one day the county sent an observer to watch her class. The teacher went about her day, touching on all the curriculum points, and the students were happy and attentive. After school, the observer took her aside and told her that she was doing a wonderful job, but they would like to see her reading from the curriculum book more. There is too much deviation.

I won’t forget the look on her face as she was recounting the conversation with the observer. I can only describe it as defeated. Here is an educator who has spent most of her life shaping young minds, and now she is forced to follow strict guidelines and requirements, with very little wiggle room to meet individual needs.

I am sure that the educational leaders in my school system understand that children learn in different ways and at different speeds, but in the name of pragmatism, budget cuts, and “results” the children are given a one-size-fits-all approach where the teachers are often are simply expected to be delivery vessels for the curriculum, and not encouraged to treat children differently based on their own talents and learning styles.

After lamenting the state of my children’s education system, I began thinking about the state of training and development today. We all understand that people learn in different ways, but do we put that into practice? For all the theory about learning that exists, are we still building one-size-fits-all strategies and forcing everyone to go along? Just because we are no longer children does not mean we don’t all have individual learning preferences and needs.

If you haven’t already, take a look at some of the theories behind the way people learn. There is Fleming’s VARK learning profile, which can determine if you are a visual, aural, read/write, or kinesthetic learner. David Kolb has an inventory to determine if you are a converger, diverger, assimilator or accommodator. Anthony Gregorc  developed a learning model that looks perceptual qualities (concrete and abstract) an ordering abilities (random and sequential). The list goes on and on and even delves into assessments such as Myers-Briggs and Hogan.

With all of this information available, how is it that – for the most part – we treat the workforce as one singular entity? Granted, things are changing. The latest trend is to move learning out of the classroom, and allow learners to work at their own pace and on their own schedule. However, is this because it is beneficial to the learner? Or just because companies like to save money and can do so by discouraging face to face training?

However, advances in technology are truly a game changer for corporate education. Although advances in technology can be overwhelming, they also allow an organization to meet individual learner needs and be innovative without going back to a one-on-one apprenticeship model. Although the classroom is still the best form of training for many content areas, the advantages of online synchronous and asynchronous training are also well established. Each progression of learning technology and modalities brings us closer to delivering a unique learner experience.

But how does this new frontier of social and mobile learning really make a difference? I say “new” only because organizations are still wrestling with how to leverage these new technologies for learning. Social media technologies represent an opportunity to capture the way people collaborate and learn in their real lives. These methods of interaction – sharing information, commenting on subjects, making recommendations, etc. – have been going on since people could communicate. Technology now allows an organization to facilitate these interactions, formalize them, and incorporate them into the learning platform.

Mobile technology does the same thing. People are already practically living their lives through their smartphones, one survey found that Android users spend almost an hour a day using their phones. Why not deliver learning in a method with which learners are already quite comfortable? We have been waiting ages for a way to deliver chunks of relevant content to the right people at the right time, and mobile technology now makes this possible.

Learning technology vendors in today’s market recognize the value of these technologies and what they represent for the evolution of learning. In most cases you can end up with what is essentially one solution that is capable of meeting the needs of any group of learners you can create within your organization. Your company can make sure that there is “No Employee Left Behind.”

As a practical example of the technology needs of the emerging workforce, I recently had a discussion with my nine-year-old’s teacher as well. My daughter has to complete a certain amount of reading each week, and encouraging her to complete her reading has become a struggle. I began letting her read her books on a Kindle, and her reading has since been exceeding the requirements. I did check with the teacher to be sure it was okay to use the Kindle for in-class reading, but once I showed her the ability to highlight passages of interest and make notes, she was sold. While I would be the first to decry the death of the printed book, I no longer have to fight with my daughter to finish her reading.

David Wentworth

Brandon Hall Group

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Greetings, all!

Understanding the Landscape

As Brandon Hall Group’s newest Senior Analyst, one of my first official duties (aside from writing this blog) was to attend the eLearning Guild’s Learning Solutions 2012 conference in Orlando, FL. What I found there was an astounding number of learning technology vendors that until that moment, I had no idea existed. Please, do not let that statement tarnish my burgeoning reputation as an industry analyst. For the past several years I have been conducting research in the space where learning and technology intersect, but I, like many buyers in today’s market, focused my attention at the time on the solution providers that had the greatest market share and the largest marketing budgets.

At the Learning Solutions event, I met several representatives from these smaller yet important solution providers, and it was great to see the passion they have for what they do and who they serve. Competition drives innovation and progress, and a market that supports all levels of solution providers is healthy. It can only help buyers to have so many options when it comes to learning technology solutions, but I also understand that it can make purchasing decisions difficult. I hope that the experience and knowledge I bring to Brandon Hall can help make those decisions easier for you and your organizations.

Sharing my Expertise

I have spent quite a bit of time during the last few years focused on the use of both social media tools and mobile devices in the delivery and facilitation of learning. Sometimes, when you are so wrapped up in something and spend every day thinking and writing about it, you get fooled into thinking it’s more widespread than it really is. But in speaking to companies and looking at what the buyers and solution providers are struggling with in this space, I am reminded just how nascent these technologies really are.

In the 90’s and early 00’s I worked in the music industry. In fact, during the dot com bubble, I worked for a digital media company that encoded music and video for the internet. We were also working on projects aimed at delivering music via cell phones, which was basically science fiction at the time. I bring this up because I see the way the music industry reacted to digital music as very similar to how the learning industry is approaching social media and mobile devices today.

At the time, a big part of my job was convincing the record companies that it was not only okay, but beneficial to them to have their music encoded and stored digitally. It was like pulling teeth. They couldn’t see how they could make money and they felt they were losing content control of their product (sound familiar?). The market was shifting around them, and they were unable to look beyond their current experiences. It took the big record labels years to figure out their digital strategies, and the number of opportunities missed is immeasurable. However, many smaller labels and independent organizations took advantage of the new approaches to delivering music quickly. In this day and age, can you imagine a record executive deciding that their music label would not have their music available on iTunes? Never!

Exposing Learning Functions to the Future

I’ve found that learning functions also fall along these same wide spectrums when it comes to realizing the shift taking place in their world today. Sales and marketing functions have been dealing with the consumerism of their functions for several years – and have been embracing the social and mobile aspects of their work environments very quickly. Many learning organizations, on the other hand, had have not embraced these new technologies. Although I’ve met learning organizations that have embraced the new learning approaches, other seem to want to sit back and see if social networking will go the way of the pet rock., and mobile is just too confusing to even consider for those same organizations.

Learning needs to get ahead of the curve for once. Right now, the solution providers are in the driver’s seat, because the buyers don’t know what they want. So the solution providers design solutions for problems but these solutions may not be good solutions for a company’s needs. If companies could figure out what they want from these new technologies then vendors will start to deliver. The new discussion is about the ways that people learn and social media is simply a technological representation of how people tend to collaborate and interact in real life. Mobile devices are simply the next delivery tool, falling in line behind the chalkboard, the CD-ROM, and the laptop.

So, that takes me back to the sea of small to mid-size technology vendors that exist. These are the companies that are nimble and hungry enough to develop really innovative solutions, but the buyers need to become much more savvy with this many vendors in the market. It’s time to get familiar with concepts like the Cloud (hint: it’s the Internet), HTML5 (web videos without Flash) and the Semantic Web (the Internet gets smart). If you have no idea what you need, you’ll end up with something you don’t want.

I look forward to taking these technology journeys with our members and finding out what people are trying to accomplish. I also look forward to learning more about what the vendors are offering and which direction learning technology may go next. So to those whom I’ve already met, thank you for your warm welcome, and to the rest, I can’t wait to talk with you!

David Wentworth

Brandon Hall Group

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As an analyst, I have the good fortune to speak to organizations of all sizes across a wide variety of industries, and one thing that always amazes me is how many of these organizations treat learning and development and talent management as two separate organizational functions. Learning and development has its agenda and objectives and talent management has theirs. Learning and development has its learning management system, and talent management has its talent management system. And the two technology platforms typically aren’t even integrated with each other. Does this make sense? Isolated in different organizational silos, the left-hand of learning is sometimes wildly unaware of the right-hand of talent management. And vice versa. No matter what the angle, this makes no sense to me.

Am I the only one puzzled by this distinction?

Okay, hold on. From one perspective, this separation thing does make sense to me. Long before Isaac Newton described the universe as one big machine, human beings were teasing all of experience apart and coding the pieces and parts into different groups. Air—Earth—Fire—Water. Molecules—Atoms—Electrons. I get it. We love our buckets. At some level, intellectually isolating and sorting things from each other is just what we humans do. Right or wrong, it gets us by. We treat learning and development and talent management separately, because it makes organization easier and somehow more manageable.

But there is a good reason classical physics has had to make room for its antithesis, quantum mechanics. The universe is not a machine. Pulling things apart can change them fundamentally. In the world of experience, two plus two doesn’t always equal four. In the world of experience, sometimes our experience is five.

And therein lies the problem with treating learning and development and talent management as two separate functions. The two are inextricably linked. They are part and parcel of the same employee experience, and we really can’t manage one apart from the other without losing something incredibly important in the process.

At the end of the day, employees don’t separate their organizational experiences into different functional buckets, and we shouldn’t either.

For a far more practical (and a lot less philosophical) exploration of the value of integrating learning and development and talent management, you should plan to attend our webinar on Tuesday, March 13th: The Learning – Talent Connection: How a Single Technology Platform Can Accelerate Workforce Performance.

Until then,

Scot Lake
Senior Learning Analyst
Brandon Hall Group

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I started this blog a couple of blogs ago by talking about gamification in the workplace. Specifically, I was wringing my hands over the fact that the idea of “playing games” while at work doesn’t sit well with most folks, and I made the simple observation that we need a better term if we’re going to sell this idea to stakeholders.

Then I ventured down the path of trying to figure out—just what is a game anyway? My thinking was that this was the logical starting point for understanding anything that had to do with games. How could we even begin to have meaningful conversation about anything games or game-related if we didn’t first understand, and at least partly agree on, what makes a game a game?

I realize now that I probably took the longest possible route to get to where I wanted to be, a place where I could discuss gamification.

As much as I enjoy the topic of games, and even as much as I believe that games can play an important learning role in knowledge acquisition, retention, and transfer, I have to conclude that games and gamification are two very different topics. Apart from the fact that people react sharply to the word “game” when hearing the term “gamification,” for the most part, the two don’t need to be discussed at the same time at all. We don’t have to understand much about games in order to discuss gamification. Games are games. We know what they are, but gamification?

Gamification is really just theft.

Let me explain.

When talking about gamification, the label “gaming mechanics” can add clarity to an otherwise vague notion. Gaming mechanics—the mechanics or devices of a game—can be thought of as the hypothetical levers, pieces, processes, and parts that, when assembled into a coherent situation or activity, make the whole thing work. Take Monopoly for example. The mechanics in that game are game cards, purchases of property, randomly assigned player setbacks and advances, accumulation of money, etc. When all those devices come together, and individuals agree to the stated rules and objectives, the game takes place.

When I say gamification is theft, what I mean is that gamification takes the conceptual devices from a game like Monopoly and uses them for some other purpose. It’s very simple really. If you want to “gamify” an experience or activity, you need only look at the games you are familiar with and figure out how to steal (okay, “repurpose”) the devices found in the game and apply them to your given situation. Accumulating fake money during Monopoly is both fun and engaging, maybe it could also be both fun and engaging in other scenarios?

Of course it can be, and the marketing universe has known about this secret of engagement for a long time. S&H Greenstamps (most of you are too young to remember, I’m sure) started handing out stamps for select retail purchases back in 1896. Airlines have their frequent flyer programs (first started by Texas International Airlines in 1979) and credit card companies have been promoting their rewards cards for years. Consumers like these gaming mechanics, and as consumer loyalty grows increasingly difficult to earn and sustain, it looks like we’re going to see a lot more gamified marketing strategies in the foreseeable future.

But shaping and engaging behaviors through gaming mechanics isn’t just for marketing. Just as consumer loyalty is growing more challenging, so is employee engagement. According to research done in 2011 by BlessingWhite, Aon Hewitt, and Towers Watson, employee engagement is at an all-time low.

The percentage of engaged employees in North America appears to hover around 33%, while the number of disengaged employees appears to range from a low of 28% to as high as 48%, depending on the study.

What’s emerging is the desire to gamify learning and development activities in the workplace with the hopes of getting some of the disengaged to increase their engagement in their work and personal development. While that may sound like backwards thinking at some level (who would argue to keep the disengaged on the payroll?), increased engagement is a business opportunity, where increased engagement by any percentage translates into an organizational win.

The application of gaming mechanics to learning and development is still in its infancy, but a number of organizations are already experimenting with what works and what doesn’t. And the results show promise.

Solution providers are also gearing up to help out, and gamification functionality opportunities such as leader boards, badges, points, and levels are starting to appear in the technology platforms that employees use.

But one thing we know already: Just because the technology exists, doesn’t mean organizations should use it. Applying gaming mechanics to learning and development activities isn’t a silver bullet solution. Like applying lipstick to a pig, adding gaming mechanics to a flawed or ineffective learning and development program isn’t going to help matters, and in many cases, it is likely to make matters worse.

When considering gamification for your learning and development program, your first step is always to ensure that your core solution is coherent, and that your gamification strategy is an integrated part of a larger plan.

Scot Lake
Senior Learning Analyst
Brandon Hall Group

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