Career Move

I'm giving up my consultancy business. I began Executive and Professional Development Ltd in 2005, when I left the eLearning Alliance, having undertaken very little consulting work prior to that. It's been varied and enjoyable, I've met many interesting people and undertaken some great projects. But the time has come for a change: I've found the fluctuations in workflow difficult to contend with, and the economic downturn hasn't helped.

For some time I've coveted a more 'traditional' learning and development role: I've worked as an old-fashioned training manager in sectors as diverse as engineering/manufacturing and voluntary/charitable; I've worked on the supply side of management development; I've been a consultant and writer; and I've been involved in e-learning strategy at a national level. But I haven't tackled a learning manager's role for a while, and its lure is irresistible.

I'm pleased to announce that I'm joining Volunteer Development Scotland, based in Stirling, in their new role of Learning and Practice Development Manager. Among my new responsibilities, I'll be looking at learning through the practice of volunteering, national occupational standards and professional awards in managing volunteers, and increased use of e-learning and blended learning. There's a big agenda, and I'm enthusiastic about adding value in VDS's programmes providing leadership, quality assurance, and resources for volunteering in Scotland.

I also intend to keep up my writing and blogging, and I look forward to growing my network.

Experiential Learning

I recently (only about 2,300 years after the event!) came across this quote from Aristotle: "for the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them." It kind of sums up the problem with experiential learning. As Peter Honey (a couple of millennia more recently) said “learning from experience is tough, you get the test first then the lesson afterwards”.

And yet experiential learning remains one of the most important approaches to learning and development, especially in the world of work. Learning for work is about more than the acquisition of knowledge or even skills: it’s about applied learning, about changing behaviour; about demonstrating competence or more; about using the knowledge and skills acquired to gain performance improvements. And not just for the individual learner, but to share them with their work team and among the whole organisation – to achieve business results.

Given this importance, it’s odd that we don’t have very much simple language to explain it, as distinct from the range of terminology associated with learning through teaching and the classroom (or more recently, all the techie jargon associated with e-learning, but let’s not go there again). Some of the cumbersome phraseology in the last couple of paragraphs – “experiential learning”, “demonstrating competence”, “performance improvement” – requires quite a lot of explanation for what is essentially very simple activity.

I’m coming round to the view that “practice” is a succinct way of describing what we’re talking about. It’s commonly used to describe sporting activity, like football practice, or musical activity, like piano practice; it’s widely understood to represent the process of learning by doing things repeatedly, until you get them right; and it’s a common word with little ambiguity attached to it. We’re all familiar with the saying that practice makes perfect.

So perhaps we should talk less about “experiential learning” or “work-based learning” and more about plain, simple, practice.

I hope to get the opportunity soon to apply this thinking – to practice what I’m preaching. In fact, I’m dissembling a little: I know I’m going to be looking at this in a major new project I’ll soon be undertaking, so more on this theme will inevitably follow.

Learning platforms

I sense some disquiet among techies when we refer to learning platforms: it may be the terminology is not strictly accurate. But I increasingly prefer it to the array of acronyms, none of which is much clearer when spelled out, and which only serve the cause of mystifying e-learning when presented in abbreviated form.

VLE – Virtual Learning Environment – is my favourite, but remains open to misinterpretation, as is its near relation MLE (Managed Learning Environment). The popular LMS, short for Learning Management System is, I think, especially misleading, as it conflates Learner Management System with Learning Content Management System, two different things.

A learning platform, whatever we call it, essentially comprises some or all of three components (and perhaps some additional features). These are illustrated in the diagram.

The Learner Management component manipulates information about learners. This is what enables learners to manage their personal information, and it is what yields records and reports for organisations. Crucially, this is not just about e-learning, as it may be used to manage learner information relating to all learning activities, including those that remain exclusively offline.

The second component is about courses, learning objects and learning resources – the content of learning programmes.

And the third, sometimes neglected, component is about managing the learning processes. Hopefully this is about more than simply building pages of illustrated reading with quizzes bolted on at the end. It can include a virtual classroom, or collaborative tools like discussion forums, blogs and mini-blogs, or wikis.

Many platforms have been around for a decade or more now, and amazingly, we still seek clarity on what they actually do. I hope this post helps.

Why coaching is misunderstood

I used to think that coaching was something I hadn’t done very much of. Even though I wrote about coaching, mentoring and related activities in my first book, A Guide to Management Development Techniques, offering a couple of coaching case studies along the way, I still felt it was something I hadn’t practiced much. I’ve recently learned this is a common misconception.

I’ve been looking more closely at coaching recently, as a result of writing a short contribution on the subject in the CIPD’s Learning and Development manual. John McGurk, CIPD’s Learning, Training and Development Adviser, writes in the August 2009 issue of Impact, Quarterly Update on CIPD Policy and Research, that “if we identify the behaviours of coaching rather than the concept of activity, we find that coaching is already much more embedded through the activities of line managers than might be expected”. In other words, managers already do a lot of coaching – they just don’t recognise it by that name. Frustratingly, McGurk doesn’t go on to give examples of this, but they can be found in the report he references, Coaching at the Sharp End (CIPD, 2009).

The report highlights some characteristics of a coaching style of management, including:
# Development orientation (I help them develop themselves as individuals)
# Planning and goal-setting (I help them express their own action plans)
# Mutual support (If any of them has a good idea, I always use it)
# Effective listening (I spend more time listening rather than questioning)

..and the lesson for learning and development professionals is that we need to engage with people at this level of detail rather than speaking our own code of “coaching” that we mistakenly assume others implicitly understand.

Performance and potential

Performance management doesn’t get the press it used to. It seems not so long ago that every other article you read about learning and development was addressing a performance agenda. Even some learning and development job roles were being redefined, and renamed, as being about performance improvement.

And rightly so. Too often, in the past, learning was seen as being about serving time on apprenticeships, or completing courses and qualifications, as though acquiring knowledge, skills and credentials was the main objective. The emphasis correctly shifted to applying that knowledge and skills, and the changes in performance that could be achieved for individual job roles, for teams, and for organisations as a whole. Linking learning and development to performance management meant it was more business results oriented.

So what’s changed? The answer is that talent management and development has come onto the agenda. It’s still important that learning helps develop performance, but there’s now another focus as well. Potential. Instead of just focusing on performance improvement, learning and development is now also about developing employees’ potential, such as to foster critical skills needed in an organisation (key talent development) or to prepare people to take on new roles in an organisation (succession planning). Leadership development (for future leaders) is perhaps the most glaring, and common, example, of investing in the development of potential rather than performance.

Talent management is about maintaining not one focus, but two – the distinct but complementary imperatives of performance and potential.

Do learning objects really exist?

Twenty years ago, learning and development professionals were preoccupied with concerns about not reinventing the wheel. This was the time of the creation of National Standards (NVQs and all that), and the idea was that a lot of work was going into defining generic job roles, and training and assessment routes – work that could be picked up and re-used almost anywhere, with a little tweaking. This made some sense, especially if there were opportunities for learning through sharing ideas.

Ten years ago, e-learning pursued the same obsession when it introduced the concept of learning objects.

illustrated by this diagram (click to enlarge):

A college lecturer of my acquaintance, well-versed in teaching National Certificate modules, was puzzled as to how much further courses could be broken down beyond the modular level, and suggested to me that these objects were no more than “facts”. Of course, learning objects come in many other forms, but whatever they are, they haven’t caught on in the same way.

The truth is there’s a lot to be said for reinventing the wheel, in terms of the learning process you go through when you try it. And in reality, many learning designers have preferred to start from scratch, especially when the technology represents no barrier to doing so. So the vision that never materialised was that all courses could be disaggregated (clumsy term, but is ‘chunked’ any better?) into components that could then be re-assembled into other courses.

I suspect the most workable solution lies somewhere between the vision and the everyday reality (the latter is often at least partly driven by "Not Invented Here" syndrome). Certain objects may indeed be stored in a databank for frequent re-use, such as diagrams, pictures, video clips, audio clips and reference documents. But the elements of learning that bring these resources together are probably best reinvented for each use.

My Visual CV

I have recently discovered, and been very impressed by, a great resource called Visual CV. I think a better name would be Online CV or Web-based CV, but the idea is that rich and dynamic content may be added to your CV by placing it on the Web instead of on paper. You can make your CV visible to everyone at its own URL, as I have done at http://www.visualcv.com/kenfee. Or you can restrict access to whoever you want - the private version (not visible at my URL) includes all your personal contact info.

Creating my visual CV reminded me that I keep meaning to add video clips to this blog. The snag is I have to create them first, as I don't already have some. However, as a test, a starter, and to encourage me to create new video clips, here is the short clip I've included in my visual CV - it's almost six years old, and shows me introducing the Inaugural Scottish E-learning Lecture, which was themed around a food analogy, to explain my otherwise bizarre comments!