* What do CXOs think of your on-going education?
You know how valuable learning is to your personal growth, but how much does your employer benefit from your on-going education? According to a recent study of senior execs’ perception of learning, bosses agree that learning has a significant impact on revenue, productivity, turnover and innovation.
The study by the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) and IBM, suggests that learning is becoming an increasingly important function for companies to develop and maintain individual and organizational skills, as well as to help companies remain competitive, operate efficiently and improve business performance, say the study’s authors.
The “ASTD/IBM Strategic Value of Learning Study 2005” interviewed CXOs and chief learning officers at 26 organizations across 11 industry sectors. According to Tony O’Driscoll, research learning strategist at IBM Almaden Services Research, all 26 execs expect their education budgets to remain flat but they will be using technology to encourage new ways of learning that also provides the added bonus of better retention of knowledge.
At IBM, for example, the company created IBM Jams, which are live online discussions, attended by IBM workers from around the world to talk about a given subject. O’Driscoll cited one occasion when IBM invited all managers from all IBM divisions worldwide to take part in a three-day “jam” to discuss the strategic value of a manager’s role. “IBM set up a 72-hour jam and polled managers about what were their key issues. IBM invited 32,000 managers to join the jam to advise their peers of ways to improve things that didn’t require money or bureaucratic approval process,” O’Driscoll says.
This online meeting was recorded and archived, and now IBM employees can read and search through transcripts to further their education, O’Driscoll says.
He says learning officers are urged to be more creative with ways to deliver learning, such as IBM Jams. Blended learning, using traditional classrooms and books with online learning, is becoming popular. Blended learning enables employees to learn in their own time since learning materials are made available online by their employers, and employees can dip in and out of programs whenever their schedules allow, attending face-to-face classes when modules demand it. We discussed IBM’s approach to flexible learning and talked about user examples in a short series of newsletters last spring (see “Learn in your own time and on the fly”; “How National City trained 15,000-plus users in 2 months”; “Learning in the fast lane”; and “Learning with the Pep Boys”).
O’Driscoll says CXOs view on-going learning by techs as important. He notes that one CIO told the researchers that unless organizations can cultivate a life-long learning culture among their tech community, “you’re going to be in trouble.”
O’Driscoll says above and beyond learning and understanding the nuts and bolts of technology, CXOs are looking for techs to take their knowledge and turn it into something useful and meaningful. He cited initiatives at 3M and Google in which employees are given one day a week when they can go off and explore whatever interests them in the company to learn more and perhaps contribute their ideas to.
The ASTD/IBM study can be downloaded from the ASTD’s “Training + Development” magazine.
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