This is a phrase that is much bandied about in learning management circles, but is it actually adopted with the same vigour that it is promoted? I set myself a challenge for a month to record whenever I had a learning need and what steps I took to gain the knowledge required.
The outcome for me was a heavy bias towards Google and YouTube, with most of my learning needs being generic life admin tasks like “why has my dishwasher stopped working?” or “when should I start training my son to be an international goalkeeper?”. These generic items are (mostly) widely publicised on the web and therefore didn’t cause me much issue, it was the more focused areas at work that should have been more difficult. For example, as a desk-bound keyboard worker, the finer points of our policies on how to lift heavy things properly don’t really affect me on a day-to-day basis or when I wanted to find out our latest updates to one of the systems I’m not directly involved with every day.
In moments where acquiring this specific knowledge is important, I can turn to our online training management platform Centric LMS for my learning. Centric LMS will not only show me the generic learning that is available to all staff within our organisation, it’s the role-based assignment of learning that allows content to be pushed directly to me based on what is deemed to be necessary for my current role or my progression into a new one. Members of my team can share important, trackable content to make sure others have read and understood what is quite often business-critical information.
I have found within previous organisations that if I didn’t find what I was looking for within 10 minutes I would revert to asking someone else (and quite often interrupting their flow) so it’s really important that this content is easily searchable, fast-paced and kept in bite-size chunks. Ultimately the outcome of my challenge was that for the detailed workplace-based learning it was clear I needed a platform provided by my organisation that would allow me quick and painless access to the finer detail of our operation.
In our organisation (and that of our clients) that platform is Centric LMS and of course, I’m an advocate of it, however irrespective of what is used the more important point is that without a quick and painless facility for acquiring workplace knowledge is your organisation really able to give you the facility to learn anything, anytime, anywhere?