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Sarah Danzl

Informal learning options account for the bulk of workers’ development. Sarah Danzl explores how to measure informal learning.

Finding the Value in Informal Learning

By Sarah Danzl, Director of Marketing and Communications at DegreedMost organizations are figuring out how to embrace and overcome the challenges plaguing the workforce -- decreasing skill tenures, new roles and skill requirements, AI and automation, 60-year careers, multiple generations, a dispersed workforce. Finding success against these challenges requires thinking and operating differently. And doing that requires new skill sets, ones we may not have needed in the past.So what are some of those skills that L&D leaders and practitioners should be savvy in?MarketingSometimes L&D teams must also act as marketers, selling the need for employees to invest in their own development. “We need to appeal to our learners, and being ‘appealing’ is a marketing problem, not a learning one,” said Susie Lee, Director of Global Business Solutions at Degreed.Sarice Plate, Xilinx’s Senior Director of Global Talent Acquisition and Development, says her team uses marketing skills almost daily, working to influence the business and increase stakeholder engagement. As digital transformation continues to saturate the business, they continue to find themselves more involved in curriculum design and employee engagement rather than just designing and setting up training courses.“As learning people, we need to inspire employees, influence how they behave, and compel them to engage with us and our learning, with the goal of motivating engagement,” said Lee.Technical knowledge and data analyticsIt seems there is a new app we “must” have almost weekly. And in the corporate space, a new niche solution that will be the end-all comes onto the scene all the time. So as L&D practitioners, we must be more digitally savvy and more technical than ever before. We must understand the tech our employees are already using. We must create learning experience that are personalized, digestible, and flexible. We are challenged to write and curate content that’s exciting and consumable. To do that, we must understand learner preferences and behaviors, aka consumption. Reading dashboards, understanding learning analytics, knowing how to drive conclusions from the data, not to mention having a tool that does this, are big parts of that.Curation, design thinkingIt’s crucial to be able to find meaning in the plethora of content available. We inundated with options; but how do we determine quality on the fly? There are tools like Facebook and Instagram that benefit from causing continuous distractions, our phones alert us every few seconds of new activity, and Google returns hundreds of thousands of search results. It’s important to cut through the noise and quickly find relevant content in the moment of need.Hellooooo curation! Curation is a valuable tool you can use to provide more tailored instruction to employees with the same limited time you have.Degreed defines curation as the process of evaluating, organizing, and sharing learning resources around a specific topic while adding context with your own instruction to create a personal, relevant experience.“Curators are the great librarians of our time, cataloging and prioritizing the best content,” commented Caroline Soares, Director of Curation Services at Degreed.It might feel like these skills are completely nontraditional for an L&D professional to have. And you’d be right. But with 56% of current workforce's skill set not matching organization’s strategy and goals (ATD, Bridging the Skills Gap, 2015), we should do something different than we have been if we want to be successful. And there are more benefits than just increasing your skill set and making yourself more valuable.“With the rollout of our new \[learning\] strategy, every member of my team is now engaged, helping with content curation, consulting with the business to build pathways, designing curriculum to best meet the needs of the business. It’s truly been a shift for some, including myself, but we’re embracing it and we’re making the shift so far successfully. I think the team overall feels more energized now and excited about our roles and how we can impact and build organizational capability,” said Plate.There are many free resources out there, like Degreed, to get started learning these and other great new skills!

3 New Skills L&D People Should Have

From ATD TechKnowledge 2017: Outdated RFPs are going to win you outdated tools that don't (and probably can't) meet your true needs.

Sarah Danzl

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