From "Training Specialist" to "Learning Generalist"

The face of the Training specialist is fast changing. In growing organizations, especially those with a huge geographical spread training is turning out to be a hugely disruptive activity. I say this with the greatest love for my profession but also with a greater love for pragmatism. Its difficult to coordinate:

• Subject Matter Expert (SME) availability;
  
• Participant attendance (especially if they're billable);
  
• Physical space;
  
• Other logistics

Its also important to appreciate that most trainings are successful when they metamorphose into social experiences because that fuels the most learning and as a consequence the best translation into workplace success. To coordinate that aspect is a bigger challenge. So if its not easy to get an SME, a facilitator and a group of participants into the same place at the same time and create a social learning experience, then how does an organization keep learning?

Here's where I envision the "Training Specialist" -- the master of the 4 walls of a classroom to metamorphose into a "Learning Generalist" that seeks to create learning opportunities regardless of the limitations of SME availability, participant schedules and physical locations. In my career as a Training Consultant, I've often responded to requests for Training interventions that started off with statements like, "We need training on ______". Its been extremely frustrating for me in those days, since I've usually followed a more systematic approach to a Learning problem, that starts with the goals in mind. So my questions to the stakeholders have been:

• What Situations do you expect the learners to deal with as a consequence of this training?
  
• What specific Actions will the learners perform to deal with the above situations?
  
• What Results do you hope to see as a result of those actions?

I have been amazed at how many of these conversations have resulted in us considering a "non-training" solution to create learning.

Workplace Learning/ Organizational Learning seem to be the buzzwords for training professionals today and I guess that's where your Training and Development division should be doing a lot of their thinking sooner than later. So, the thinking should be around how learning can be a part of people's day to day work-life as against limiting it to a strongly structured experience in a training room. Here are some of the areas I feel a Learning Generalist can contribute heavily in:

• Coaching: We will continue to need coaches. But these coaches will work not to inculcate specific skills or attitudes but rather to make themselves unnecessary by making the art of mentorship more common in the organization. That is, the successful coach is one who can create a culture of continuous learning in the individual and in the organization. Training is never a "magic wand" that solves a problem completely. Going by the Conscious Competence model, you can usually only move a learner from a stage of Unconscious Incompetence to a stage of Conscious Incompetence by conducting a training program. To gain Conscious Competence, the learner still needs to experience the skill in real life and receive guidance and mentorship to generalize its application across various situations. Building mentorship skills in the organization is a key role for the learning generalist.
  
• Making Project Onboarding easier: My colleague at ThoughtWorks, Pat Kua has written a fascinating article here about how costly it can get to add new members to teams and how lightweight practices can help make project onboarding cheaper and easier. Pat writes a series of really interesting posts about onboarding strategies here as well and I feel this can be a really valuable resource for any learning professional.
  
• Action Mapping: Its a common corporate trap to get sucked into the endless cycle of conducting training. As a training professional I've done this for a long time in my career, also with the insecurity that "If there's no training, then what will I do?". Cathy Moore explains how you can build a map of the actions you'd like individuals to perform as a consequence of the learning experience (in her context -- e-learning). Its a great way to approach any consulting problem that has to do with Learning, since the "Situation-Action-Result" thinking lets you determine how far people really are from being able to do what you'd like them to do. As a consequence it tells you the level of consciousness the individuals are already at and the "real investment" that the organization needs to make to get them to the desired level of performance. The "investment" may or may not be a training solution.
  
• Making intra-project knowledge sharing easier: Projects get big and projects get bigger. It does tend to get difficult to replicate successes across various corners of the war room as you grow bigger and that increases the cost of a growing project. Its an increasing challenge to make big projects share knowledge effectively; retrospectives and standups notwithstanding. To be able to think of communication mechanisms such as big visible charts, technical huddles, lunch and learns etc, and to be able to harness technology in the the form of wikis, mashups, shoutboxes, microblogging, etc seems to be stuff that a learning professional can do, to make teams more effective. Now some of these are more obvious solutions than others and of course, none of them are novelties anymore. This said, none of these are commonalities yet and a techno-savvy learning professional can play consultant to help build these rich modes of communication in growing teams.
  
• Influencing Organizational Learning: Its all very nice to have efficient project teams, but its even nicer to see knowledge move from within project teams to the rest of the organization. The learning professional needs to think about how capabilities and innovations become more explicit across the firm; how people can avoid reinventing the wheel and how "best practice" solutions can be easily available across projects. Leveraging technology becomes a key skill here, given that face to face communication is usually not feasible. So while low-tech solutions such as Open Spaces are excellent communication methods, its the technology driven solutions of podcasting, video-blogging, tagging, crowd-sourcing that overcome the limitations of time, space and distance. Again, none of these are pathbreaking yet putting together the right combination of technology to solve the workplace learning problem is what the learning professional can help with.
  
• Self Paced/ Online Learning: E-learning is here to stay. The latest e-learning market update from Ambient Insight indicates that e-learning has not only become cheaper, but is also becoming more widely adopted across small and large organizations alike. As a side effect of the recession, every organization wants to be faster, leaner and more efficient and e-learning is a way of maximizing learning opportunities across the workplace. The argument against e-learning has traditionally been the fear of "losing the human touch", but really this is misinformation rather than a problem with the practice. There are two parts to my answer to "losing the human touch":
  
  • E-learning can model classroom interactions as you will see from the simple examples on the Rapid e-learning Blog. So to say that e-learning cannot be as engaging as a classroom experience is perhaps unfair. To add to this, most e-learning is faster paced -- 50% of the usual classroom time; so the boredom of sitting at a computer usually doesn't set in as long as learning is designed with the right outcomes in mind.
    
  • Secondly, all e-learning interactions should seek to maximize the personalized human interactions and limit the more transactional aspects of classroom training. For eg: when explaining User Stories in class, you'll invariably touch upon INVEST principles. The way you speak about INVEST doesn't change from one classroom session to another. What does change is the discussion about applying these principles in one's specific context. Its important to find ways to maximize these discussions to complement an e-learning offering.
  And again, the e-learning market update talks about the growth of online classrooms that help maximize the personalized communication. So, harnessing the potential of social networks and online collaboration tools such as Mingle, Elgg and DimDim becomes a really important part of planning an e-learning implementation. This, I feel is critical to the evolution of learning professional in our times.
  
• Consulting: To optimize one part of a value stream without removing waste from the remaining activities, can often create more waste than the original situation. The effort of getting faster, learner and more efficient needs to happen across the entire value stream with the end customer specifying what "value" really means. This can mean that the learning professional may have to play "Business Analyst" with customers, partners, suppliers and various external associates to ensure that the thinking shift from "training" to "learning" happens effectively. I imagine this could involve an entire combination of activities that includes traditional classroom facilitation but combines more than one of the above activities to create a "learning blend".

Its key for organizations to recognize the evolution of the learning professional from being a "Training Specialist" to a "Learning Generalist" and support their growth through learning the skills that support the above goals. The above areas are in no way exhaustive when it comes to defining the role of a learning professional in these times -- they do happen to be the direction in which the profession is heading and are indicative of the skills that'll be considered commonplace in a few years time.