Are you ready for this? Learning Professionals!

If you are a learning professional, traditional metrics that you track will be obsolete. How will you redesign your programs to meet the new demands?
Once the talent market place takes shape, the whole process of learning will undergo a sea change. Today organizations spend $400 to $600 dollars per employee for their learning in a year. This money is spent on various things like the salaries of the learning team, the LMS, content, assessments, platforms of various kinds like practice tools. This also includes the infrastructure like classrooms.
Today if you’re u are a part of the training or learning and development team in any company, the job of getting a trainee or an employee to learn and up-skill is your responsibility. You work with the basic presumption that training and building capabilities among its employees is your prerogative. Your KRA or rating is at stake if someone does not learn. You are expected to get them to learn and apply that knowledge at work.
In the new talent market place and the gig economy, most of the people working on projects for your company are not your employees. You will not have the luxury of forcing them into your programs or classrooms or classrooms. If your learning programs are not of value for their career goals, they will simply not participate and consume your programs.The metrics that learning teams today track & maintain like, man hours, throughput, feedback score, all turn redundant.
How do you still get them to learn and improve their skills?
In the new marketplace the role of a learning professional will undergo a sea change. Traditionally you are expected to be good, in instruction design, delivery design, its implementation, and be good at some basic feedback or business outcome.
The business outcome expectation will continue and will take larger priority. You now need to prove to the business, the very existence and value that you provide as a function.
Architect
You need to unlearn traditional models of skill building and think with a fresh canvas. I see the canvas as an opportunity to correct all the mistakes and complexities we managed to pile up over the years.
You are no more the custodian of knowledge. Sure, your experience helps, but for the basic insights, the learners do not need you. You need to move from custodian of knowledge to distributor of knowledge.
Your job now will be to create the required infrastructure and environment for the learner. Your role will now morph into generating the curiosity, pointing the learner towards the right place to look for the knowledge and challenging their learning. Your new job will be to give them challenging projects that shape the skill and provide them with required information of what will make them proficient in the skill.
Curator not an artist
Everyone learns in a differently, and has individual preferences. These preferences are shaped over years of experiences and their social demographics. These learning preferences are hard coded into their systems. If you want them to learn and apply their skills to full potential, you need to create the right set of infrastructure, for them to pick content on their preference. Let them explore, practice, self-assess and then get certified.
Content is not sacred anymore. Pick a topic and you will find, material on the web. Content is readily available at no, or very minimal price. Anyway most of what we do across companies are pretty standard and similar. That is why, the talent marketplace in the first place. Specific customer level details and IP content is of course internal.
A good learning program will now be the combination of right infrastructure and best content that is already available. This will give the learner the experience, and drive towards a preferred outcome.
Be a social engineer
Your communication strategy should aim at getting the learner to sign up for programs on skills that your business will need. This will mean you will have to be active on the virtual social networks and drive that behavior through a design. Socially engineer in other words.
I tried to put together a first cut version of the learning canvas based on three premises (Awareness, Knowledge & Skill). If your strategy can attract learners generate awareness, pull them to explore and gain knowledge and make them stick by developing the skill, you will need a good branding & communication strategy.

You may argue that learners may consume content, you may not want them to. That’s OK. It will either come handy in a future project, or you would not have spent big money for it anyway. After all they are not your employees and you cannot control what they learn.
You may also argue, that creating this infrastructure for all the skills you need across platforms will create redundancy and some modes not may not be consumed at all. True. But that’s why you have the analytics. It helps tweak your content regularly.
With the right analytics and insights, you can understand the popular, highest ROI and in-demand topics. You can also use this insight to socially engineer demand for future skills based on the market place insights. This is a good thing.
Learning is not a science, not at least till we figure out how the brain network works. When we do, we will probably have to just learn the way, Neo learns in matrix. But for now we are far from that reality. Till then, it is always,
In pursuit of the perfect learner…
