Tuesday, July 31

The Bottleneck - A Lack of Succession Planning in HR

We are all faced with a hobbling paradox. Most agree that employees make or break an enterprise, but the HR team often seems to be constantly catching up.

Business leaders complain that they have to "break in" new HR people, and that individuals with HR degrees in college are not overly useful. Finally, when business leaders do praise HR, it is an individual person who gets praised, not the department.

Obviously, this impacts Training and Development efforts directly. Any real effort to develop Big Skills requires a trust on the sponsor's part and a competency on the deliverer's part that too often are just not there. And any T+D efforts not around Big Skills is just treading water for the training group.

As I work with global organizations, I have recently been aware of a staggering truth. Most HR groups have no succession planning for themselves. This is true even when HR works hard to create succession planning for every other part of the enterprise.

If this is true, it both provides an explanation and a surprisingly easy remedy for the Hobbled HR group. And best of all, HR is already good at it: they know the tools of identification, rotational assignments, fast tracking, retention for strategic talent, partnering with business groups on critical projects, and global exposure.

We have all heard the jokes about the lawyer who died without leaving a will, or the shoemaker's children going barefoot. So maybe it is time for the doctor to heal thyself.

Tuesday, July 10

Choosing Tools - Big Question for July

As compared to ten years ago when there were roughly four major authoring tools, today there are a large number of different tools and different approaches to creating content. You can use standard authoring tools, rapid development tools, LCMS, simulation development tools, HTML editors, Wikis, and many others including a vast array of media creation solutions. And to make matters more difficult seems to be a constant flood of new tools. We literally have 100s of choices.

So, this month, The Big Question is...


Choosing Tools?

Please answer this question by posting to your own blog or commenting on this post.
(For further help in how to participate via blog posts, see the side bar.)

Points to Consider:
  • How does the eLearning design process need to change to accomodate such a wide variety of tools?
  • How does the tool selection process need to change?
  • What should learning professionals do to stay up-to-speed? Do they need to learn new tools constantly? Can they stick with a few tools?
  • Will this trend continue? If so, then what does that imply for us?


Cathy Moore
Making Change
Elearning examples are here!
Jeff Cobb
Mission to Learn
E-learning Tools and Strategy
Claudia Escribano
LifeLongLearningLab
Too Many Tools?
Karl Kapp
Kapp Notes
Design Day and the ASTD Big Question for July
Janet Clarey
Janet Clarey, Brandon Hall Research
Choosing Tools
Quintus Joubert
eLearning Blog
eLearning tool selection

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Sunday, July 1

Capability-Based Content

Stephen Lahanas recently started a new topic on the Learning Circuits Blog Discussion Wiki. His topic is Capability-Based Content which he describes as:

Capability based content is developed specifically with capability assimilation as its primary expectation outcome. This directly contradicts the majority of learning content developed today using traditional assessment-based outcome paradigms. Capability-based content represents both a pedagogy as well as methodology for content development.

Not only would Stephen like to discuss this topic with others on the LCB Discussion Wiki, he's looking to get some help in building out a model and examples which can be operationalized to drive the development of capability-based content.
If you're curious and/or would like to help Stephen with this project, check out the capability-based content page on the LCB Discussion Wiki.
Remember, the LCB Discussion Wiki is available to any member of the LCB community who wishes to us it to raise a topic for discussion with the community. Just create a page, add your topic and you're off and running. Please also drop me a note using the form on the FAQ page so I can help you make sure your page is formatted correctly and a notice, like this one, gets posted to LCB to let everyone know your page exists.