Aug
5
Written by:
Chris Osborn
8/5/2011 2:08 PM
If you believe everything you read, social learning is the latest and greatest thing to hit the employee learning and training field in – well – ever! Okay – maybe I’m overstating it a bit, but you really can’t escape the barrage of information, webinars, new products, articles, blog posts (and – yes – this IS another one) about social learning. What got me thinking about this again is a post I read today at Elearning! about Sharepoint – Microsoft’s collaboration tool. http://www.2elearning.com/lead-news/article/the-challenges-of-sharepoint-collaboration.html There seems to be no shortage of products and vendors lining up to serve the enterprise market, but for small and mid-sized organizations looking to get into the social learning space, the choices are limited to either free web-based applications, vendors with vertical tools or trying to latch onto things like Sharepoint.
Social learning isn’t really new, and it’s not a passing fad or trend. It’s here to stay, and even small and mid-sized organizations need to find ways to open social learning tools and opportunities to their employees. So, how can small and mid-sized organizations get into the act? Here’s a quick start-up guide to move you forward:
1. Focus on vendors with experience in the small and mid-sized business market. Employee development and training has some common traits, attributes and challenges – regardless of organizational size. But there are specific challenges smaller organizations face when trying to build, launch and then manage training and employee development or learning initiatives. For instance, how many large organizations have HR Departments of one? Or two? Or even three? You want to make sure you work with a partner who gets what those challenges are like.
2. Get references. It’s important to look for testimonials on websites, but ask for phone numbers. When you are seeking references, you might want to ask just one question – will you renew? If the answer is yes, you can rest assured the vendor meets the reference's needs and delivers value.
3. Get a demo. Test the product or service you plan to buy. If you can’t test it for free for at least 30 days, walk away.
4. Compare the marketing message to the reality of the product. One great point the author made about Sharepoint in the article linked above is that the marketing materials are great. But the author questioned whether the product lived up to the marketing pitch. So make sure you compare carefully the claims about the service to the actual service or product you test.
5. Find a platform truly linked to employee learning. In the end, this might be the most important single element to an effective social learning platform. The social part of many of the current tools can be very impressive. After all, there are great social media tools already modeling excellent engagement and interactive methodologies and techniques. But if you only want social, there isn’t any need to look for a social learning platform. You’re going to want to make sure your product of choice is secure, accessible only to your employees, tied to learning resources and content, searchable for both content and expertise, and contains some ability to report activity and usage.
Social learning platforms are new to the market – very new. It might be difficult to find many choices out there with a long track record of client success. But you can find a lot of great marketing messages, vendors trying to enter the space and many free web-based applications. I’d like to invite you to watch BizLibrary very closely over the next few weeks. Like you, we’ve been watching this market very closely, and we just might have something really interesting to talk about sooner rather than later.