Social Learning Unleashed

Reinvented, redefined and reimagined, social learning has the potential not only to shape tomorrow’s enterprise, but also to powerfully enhance workforce performance.

Victor Restrepo, a technical sales professional at Sun Microsystems, completes sales training during his 90-minute commute each day from New Jersey to New York City. He simply searches Sun’s Social Learning eXchange (SLX) for videos from his peers, who share best practices on how to sell a particular product or service, and downloads them to his iPod Touch.

“In the past, I had to flip through about a hundred slides of a marketing presentation to learn about a new product or service. Now I just download the highest-rated 10- to 15-minute-long videos from salespeople who actually sold the product,” Restrepo said.

Analogous to a corporate YouTube, SLX allows Sun employees to record and post any type of content, from documents to videos, which can be viewed on anything from a desktop computer to Restrepo’s iPod.

Welcome to the new world of learning, where answering the question, “How are you helping me learn?” may be the secret to competitive advantage. According to a 2003 study by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian from the University of California at Berkeley, knowledge is now doubling every three years, and the interval for doubling appears to be getting even shorter. As if that weren’t enough, analyst firm IDC reported in a recent study that knowledge workers spend on average 2.3 hours per day — 25 percent of work time — searching for critical job information.

For a growing number of companies, the way to help employees keep their skills up to date is social learning — collaborative, immediate, relevant and presented in the context of an individual’s unique work environment. The heart of social learning is usually a social computing platform that includes many of the capabilities of social networking sites that employees use outside of work, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to tag, rate, comment and network. Sun’s platform is just one example of how companies are reinventing and reimagining learning on the job.