In the past, it has been the role of L&D to ascertain the resources necessary to supporting performance in the organization. Finding the information, creating the resources, and making them available has often been a task that either results in training, or complements it. I want to suggest, however, that the time has changed and a new strategy may be more effective, at least in many instances.
Creating resources is hard. We’ve seen the need to revisit the principles of learning design because despite the pleas that “we know this stuff already”, there are still too many bad elearning courses out there. Similarly with job aids, there are skills involved in doing it right. Assuming those skills is a mistake.
There’s also the situation that creating resources is time consuming. The time spent doing this may be better spent in other approaches. There are plenty of needs that need to be addressed without finding more work.
On the flip side, there are now so many resources out there about so many things, that it’s not hard to find an answer. Finding good answers, of course, is certainly more problematic than just finding an answer, but there are likely answers out there.
The integration here is to start curating resources, not creating them. They might come internally, from the employees, or from external resources, but regardless of provenance, if it’s out there, it saves your resources for other endeavors.
The new mantra is Personal Knowledge Mastery, and while that’s for the individual, there’s a role for L&D here too: practicing ‘representative knowledge mastery’, as well as fostering PKM for the workforce. You should be monitoring feeds relevant to your role and those you’re responsible for facilitating. You need to practice it to be able to preach it, and you should be preaching it.
The point is to not be recreating resources that can be found, conserving your energy for those things that are business critical. One organization has suggested that they only create resources for internal culture, everything else is curated. Certainly only proprietary material should be the focus.
So, curate over create. Create when you have to, but only then. Finding good answers is more efficient than generating them.
#itashare
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