Month: December 2024

Optimize Your Learning Experience

• Pick one learning platform that works for everyone, and stick with it
• Set up collaboration events between specialized teams to discuss and share learning content
• Reuse content that can be reused, modify content if needed.
• Avoid silos: they drain resources and team agility

Have You Optimized Your Knowledge Share?

How Fragmented Is Your Knowledge?

At just about every mature company I’ve worked in, there have been at least 3 major training teams, with 3 different platforms for training.  

• HR general onboarding is usually done through the HR app, and used for both general onboarding and compliance training
• Sales onboarding and enablement are done through a separate environment because of the need for constant training development for new and updated products, competitive discussion points, and certification on new presentations (usually submitting recordings for evaluation)
• Customer onboarding and enablement are done with a customer-facing training platform, sometimes paired with a knowledge base and community for discussion.  

You may have others in your company, depending on leadership needs, how centralized training and onboarding teams are, and whether or not you have a leadership structure dedicated to training and enablement within your organization. 

Fragmentation Is Inefficient and Expensive

Fragmented systems without a supporting structure are greatly inefficient and economically unstable.  Work is often duplicated, training content is largely the same, and yet multiple teams are developing, polishing, and publishing the content to their respective base.  On top of that, there’s the administration of those platforms.  It’s difficult, inefficient, and often the result of new organizations bringing in experienced leaders who are often only comfortable with one platform.  This leads to technical debt and employee headcount to manage the technical debt.  

Centralizing Training Is Also Risky

What if you were to centralize around one platform, one team, and have them develop all the training content for everyone?  On paper, this looks ideal, but in practice it’s impractical.  Every organization that requires training has specific needs, often requiring specialized, audience-specific training that requires specific skills—centralizing your training teams into one single team that caters to everyone runs afoul of the value of specialization.  It’s not enough, even though the economics make it attractive.  You need to think in a different direction.  

Centralized Platform, Decentralized Development

When looking at the viability of a Shared Services Model within a company, Marijn Janssen at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands identified a clear pattern emerging:  there was a need for some decentralization within those services, and the structure needed to accommodate both centralized and decentralized components (Janssen, 2005).  In other words, a centralized platform for services that can accommodate the decentralized nature of your services is the best method of managing a shared services-style training program.  So what does that look like in practice?

One Platform, Many Uses

Not every LMS is going to be able to manage this type of work, because they are built with the needs of one silo in mind.  Why?  Well, back in the day when Learning Management Systems were new and online learning was spoken of with mocking laughter, platforms were generally home-grown and built to solve one problem.  If you were a University, the LMS would be built to deliver courses over several weeks, each gated to release at the necessary week, and past-due content was locked.  If you were a corporation, the initial need was compliance training.  Sales found it more efficient and scalable to publish Sales Training through an online LMS and evaluate presentations asynchronously through recorded and uploaded videos.  Finally, corporate customer training was built to track completion and, as gamification was built and (initially) misunderstood, provide a badge on completion.  

The point is, that each specific need was met with a specific set of requirements, and those requirements were met by a specific LMS.  Eventually, you would get some bleeding over as learning management systems tried to cater to new markets, but that bleed-over was often half-hearted at best.  Fundamentally, they would remain true to their original purpose while providing some under-developed services that cater to potential new markets.  

Enter AI And The Hype

Since the announcement of AI, there has been a lot of scrambling by existing LMS platforms to figure out how they are going to utilize it.  The majority of them, from what I could tell at Devlearn, applied AI in two ways: 

• Generative AI to evaluate or rewrite content as it was being added to the platform.  While this seems great at first, it is easily ignored (perhaps saving the LMS money) and doesn’t apply to those companies that develop training using SCORM systems.  While Generative AI has its place, it’s not going to replace real development.  
• Generative AI for translation/video/Avatar creation was all over the place at Devlearn, and that was fascinating. Video is expensive, and translation is even more so.  AI has done some amazing things with translation in the last few years, with fewer grammatical errors.  AI video and AI avatars are still early, in my opinion, making it obvious that the AI is speaking (because words are often mispronounced) and avatars only moving their mouths, making it somewhat creepy (again, my opinion).  Still, there’s some interesting stuff here.  

What’s missing from most of these LMS systems is the analysis that AI can do, as well as some structural development.  There I only found one platform that looks like it could handle it all:  Fuse Universal.  

Siloed training programs are an economic drain on any organization.

Based on the social learning updated, knowledge documents assigned to the team, and already assigned training, the AI can create a learning path for every role.

Centralize Your Learning Using Fuse

Fuse Universal impressed me.  They unify the Learning Management System, the Knowledge Base, and the Learning Experience Platform into one AI-driven platform that not only tracks learning but provides learning on demand when you need it.  Experienced learners can share their knowledge through social learning, meaning teams can share tribal knowledge without having to post it to the L&D team, get manager sign-off, and wait 6 months for content to be available.  

The killer feature that impressed me the most:  AI-generated learning paths for every role within your company.  If you are in HR, this is your killer feature.  When going through my MBA, it was understood that HR should have skills analysis for every role in the company so they can

1. Hire people with the right skills needed for the role
2. Train people through employee onboarding systems that teach all skills, so all bases are covered

I’ve worked at a few organizations where they tried to do this (eBay comes to mind immediately), but not many.  Most HR departments have team managers write up their skills requirements (because managers are skilled at skills analysis, I suppose), and leave it to the hiring team (silo) to do their onboarding and training.  Hiring teams then struggle to complete this, because they generally lack the expertise and resources to accomplish these tasks.  

AI Skills Analysis And Learning Paths:  The Killer Feature!

Enter Fuse Universal’s AI analysis feature:  Based on the social learning uploaded, knowledge documents assigned to the team, and already assigned training, the AI can create a learning path for every role.  Think about that for a second.  Every role in your company will have a learning path.  That means every employee looking to advance into a different role has a development path to follow.  Every struggling employee has a development path to help them refine their skills.  And no one had to run a skills analysis.  AI took care of all of it.  

 There are several other reasons why you would want to use Fuse as your learning platform of choice, as it can cater to all your typical silos (Onboarding, Compliance, Sales, Customer Enablement, etc).  If you haven’t heard of them before, check them out.  If you have heard of them before but are not using them, reevaluate that decision.  

Collaboration Events

The centralized platform provides the structure and stability for your learning development teams, but that’s just the foundation.  You will need to move into a polycentralized organization or an organization that has multiple collaborating teams that specialize in their respective fields, yet work with the same centralized content.  This will require collaboration events.  An example of this would be new product launch prep meetings:  different development teams will work together in their relative spheres of expertise, but share the content.  

• The Product Development team would provide the technical documentation and expertise to make sure all training content is correct, relevant, and accurate.  
• The Product Marketing team takes that content and provides customer talking points, marketing guidance, and messaging to be shared with customers by internal teams.
• The Sales Enablement will take the content from the Development and marketing teams to put together the sales campaign training and enablement, shared with both Sales and Customer Success teams.
• Learning and Development works with all teams to create similar content (reusing what they can from Sales) and conducts internal training for
  • Support
  • Professional Services
  • Employee product onboarding
  • Customer onboarding and enablement

The content may not differ much, just enough to make a difference in the structure and audience.  Specialist development teams are invaluable for your organizations, and collaboration can cut down time-to-value on training significantly:  much of the analysis work would be done by another team.  

Specialist development teams are invaluable, and cross-departmental collaboration Tiger Teams can share resources and increase the time-to-value of training.

By polycentralizing your Training and Development team, you can take advantage of the natural bridging between silos and increase cross-departmental collaboration

Reuse Content When Possible

I’ve worked for teams where they work through the whole ADDIE process with in-depth analysis, thoughtful design, and conduct hours of development and when it gets to implementation, their work is almost the same thing as another team’s for their silo.  The good news:  everyone’s working hard and producing similar content.  The bad news is that there are a lot of people working to produce similar content.  

I’m a huge supporter of the write once, use often mindset.  When using UNIX-based platforms, I try to automate tasks as much as possible.  Creating training, I reuse assets all the time (you might have noticed some similar images ^_^).  If I can shave off some time without sacrificing quality, I will.  If I work for hours creating the essentially same thing that someone else created, a little part of me dies inside.  When I can, I reuse content.  It might mean re-recording existing written work or editing some existing video, it doesn’t matter.  Anything that takes less time to qualitatively repurpose is more valuable to me than “reinventing the wheel.”  

Avoiding Silos

As I started my career, I thought that siloed teams were a fact of life or an entity that was necessary for the corporate world to run.  I was a cog in the great machinery of the office, and if I did my work and handed it off to the right people, the machinery would turn and the business would flourish. It wasn’t until I joined leadership that I realized the truth:  silos were a natural withdrawing process, and it builds distrust within organizations.  They are inefficient, rarely effective, and require more work to reconcile the work done than, well, the work done.  

The thing is, it’s really difficult to break down silos within an organization, even if you are building that organization anew.  Silos naturally happen, and yet they also have natural extensions into other teams, and Training and Development is one such natural extension.  By polycentralizing your Training and Development team, you can take advantage of the natural bridging between silos and increase cross-departmental collaboration.