The new knowledge economy — in which most employees moved to knowledge production from information consumption — has changed the way people learn and work, and the gap is closing between these. Employees learn whenever they Google, tweet and share in social networks, and they produce knowledge all over various digital threads, walls and streams. Yet the behaviors encouraging people to acquire knowledge often stop at the training room door, where the traditional hierarchy of trainer-knows-best prevails.
Why? Because knowledge production has historically been viewed as a hobby — a pastime, even a distraction — and not a facet of work. That’s a mistake. Employees no longer work in a world where “boss knows best.” The world is changing too fast, and the only way to keep up is to enable a culture of learning in the workplace. Companies need to think of learning as a core function on par with traditional functional units such as finance, operations and marketing.
