What did I learn about learning in 2007?

That’s the question the Learning Circuits Blog wants answered this month.

Hmm… what did I learn this year? Or what is the most significant thing I learned this year? Well, call me a late learner, call it the blinding flash of the obvious, but I realized (rather than learned) that most of corporate training as we know it is not training. (When I use the word training, I mean it in the conventional definition of a planned, systematic, organized, and focused activity through which one imparts / acquires knowledge, skill, or behavior.) To be more accurate, it’s not just training.

A lot of corporate training is information dissemination – information about rules and regulations, information about company policy, information on where the facilities are, information about this and that…

Much of corporate training is persuasion – convincing people to adhere to the code of conduct, cajoling them into following processes, scaring them into being careful…

A fair bit of corporate training is enticement – tempting people into thinking differently, attracting them into becoming more customer-centric, dangling the carrot of a rosy future ahead…

Quite a portion of corporate training is announcement – proclaiming the new vision, ushering in the new customer focus mantra…

So what is the relevance of all this? Thinking of appropriate instructional strategies for corporate training programs is not sufficient; it’s just the first step. We need to think about information dissemination strategies, communication hooks, persuasion techniques, announcement approaches, enticement methods, and so on. Sounds obvious? Go back to your learning programs and analyze how much time you spent on framing an instructionally appropriate humdrum everyday scenario, and how much you spent on some of the other strategies listed above.

On a different note, I discovered Cathy Moore’s blog this year. (Well, considering she started it this year, I suppose I couldn’t have discovered it earlier.) It is a whiff of fresh air in the training-blogging circuit – simple, common-sensical, practical, and coming at it from a hands-on content developer’s perspective. If you don’t have it on your RSS feed, you’ll do well to get it in right away.