Learning Goes Social

Deanna Hartley - 9/16/12

New technology is empowering employees more than ever to control their own learning and development.

As corporate America continues to embrace social tools for learning and development, social learning has shed its reputation as a transient industry buzzword. The ability to collaborate, innovate and gain expertise in real time has never been easier — and vendors in the learning industry who believe the sky’s the limit are working to ensure this is just the beginning of the social collaboration era. With a laser-like focus on the end user, emerging technologies are shifting some of the power and onus from the learning function to the individual learner.

“[What] people have used both in their personal and professional lives is bleeding into a learning overtone or context — like using discussion forums, groups or communities of interest,” said Jason Corsello, vice president of corporate development and strategy for Cornerstone OnDemand, a talent management software company. “Many organizations see this as an opportunity to augment informal development. Since employees are doing it already, it makes sense to provide tools for the entire enterprise to do so.”

Now, instead of placing all their eggs in the formal learning basket — typically characterized as top-down and corporate driven — organizations are seeing the benefits of the employee-driven, learning-in-real-time approach, he said.

These are by no means mutually exclusive worlds: The sweet spot appears to lie in a harmonious blend of the two.

Formal Versus Informal: Room to Coexist
Organizations today are recognizing the business value of social learning — the use of various social media and collaboration technologies to facilitate learning — to, in many cases, drive informal learning, though it can be used to drive formal learning as well.

Some of the most common social networking tools organizations are using for formal and informal learning are internal blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook, according to Chief Learning Officer magazine’s 2012 Learning Technology survey, conducted by the Human Capital Media Advisory Group (Figure 1).

What’s key to many organizations’ learning strategy is to formulate the right balance between formal and informal learning methodologies.