Letter to a Colleague on Learning Trends

Jay,

I have to think that the trend towards more the active encouragement of informal learning (vs. structured or formal learning) has to be at the top of my list. While we all recognize the importance of good formal learning for times such as onboarding, leadership development, and “high potential” development programs, there is a movement towards active encouragement of informal learning opportunities that utilize the use of Web 2.0 tools like wiki’s, blogs, video, social networking, group chat, and mobile technologies. While the use of the tools is significant, how they are used is even more significant. Over 80% of learning that occurs in a company is informal, occurring many times in the hallway or around the coffee machine. What are you doing to encourage these opportunities and maximize their value? Are new opportunities like mixers, co-working and social networking encouraged? Incentivized? Are they captured on blogs and wikis?

This more than anything is where I believe that training, organizational dev, h-performance improvement, and hr can make a difference in the Enterprise because our job is to develop people + culture + process.

That’s my 2 cents,

Mark