February 26, 2001

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ExpertView: How to make learning programs matter

By Clark Aldrich   (clark.aldrich@xboundary.com)

eading companies increasingly use learning programs to change corporate culture and drive bottom-line results. But many business-unit executives still try to build and evaluate this new caliber of programs using the same criteria as traditional certification classes or new employee training--and that's a big mistake.

During the last half-decade, the focus was new training-delivery channels, such as self-paced E-learning and virtual classroom sessions. The focus for the next five years will be how to combine content and delivery to build learning programs that affect the bottom line.

By far the two most critical success factors for strategic learning programs are projecting a consistent experience to a broad audience and making the experience personal.

Training traditionally is a narrow activity: Classrooms only touch about 15 students at a time. Good instructors are hard to find, and they teach the same material differently. Classrooms are also expensive venues. As a result, it's very difficult to use traditional teaching techniques to rally more than a few dozen employees around a new set of knowledge.

In contrast, E-learning is a widely accessible formal training program. A single course can reach any employee who has a browser. Does this mean that E-learning will necessarily unite an enterprise? Not at all. Broadness favors technology, but it's also dependent on what's being taught. A course on double-entry accounting could be available to all employees, for example, but would only be used by less than 1% of them.

E-learning has done exceptionally well in broadening the reach and availability of programs. But content targets only narrow segments of a business population. Because of this, most E-learning feels like special-interest cable channels: They're wonderful if you care about the plight of African baobab trees or the Battle of the Bulge, but not for bringing a group together.

Broadness in technology and content is critical because there's a network effect with learning. Having multiple people sharing similar experiences is logarithmically more powerful. The opposite is also true: Giving courses to only a select group of employees tends to isolate the newly empowered. The interactivity between students is where change happens.

The other critical success factor is the ability to make programs personal. So many training programs are sheep dipping--course sponsors expect that all students will leave the program with the exact same knowledge. We're expected to memorize 70%, 80%, even 90% of the available material. We're given tests. Linear programs work well to teach some skills, such as those in IT certification courses, and are necessary to meet some legal requirements. But our most profound learning moments were most likely personal. Making an experience personal, an order of magnitude above merely customizing the course curriculum, requires the program to provide such a rich experience that we intuitively pick and choose the 5% to 10% of skills and information we need.

Personal experiences tend to be self-driven, relying on discovery and invention. They teach at the intuitive, not just the intellectual, level. They matter. That's the biggest challenge for E-learning during the next 18 months.

Today, most decision-makers have to optimize their formal learning programs around one or the other approach--broad or personal--but they can't have both. Even second-generation E-learning options don't achieve both goals well, except in a few rare circumstances.

Ironically, in this E-everything age, the benchmark for learning that matters is still the legends that float around the water coolers. The formal learning industry will succeed when programs challenge these prevalent apocryphal tales tying employees together across a global enterprise.

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Clark Aldrich is E-learning analyst emeritus at Gartner and co-founder of XBoundary. Reach him at clark.aldrich@xboundary.com.

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Illustration by Lorraine Tuson

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