Simples!

I'm rather fond of the meerkat adverts. And simplification has been a theme of this week. It is interesting how when a particular idea resonates with you, you find it cropping up with alarming regularity.

My thought this week has been. If you're not getting through, make it simpler. Don't blame the other person for not understanding - although heaven knows there are people you would like to slap round the face with a wet haddock - take it upon yourself to articulate better.

But making things simple is really difficult! Hence the desire to blame the other person for being stupid, lazy or both.

Making things simple takes time, which we often have not got. It takes effort, which we often have not got.

More words, more data and more opinions do not help. They hinder. If all you do is compile reports and discuss their contents at meetings, you may think you are a strategic manager where, in fact, you are merely an administrator with a pie chart. I would argue that there is one thing that defines a manager. It is making decisions and accepting responsibility for them.

Have a lovely weekend!

Pushing water uphill with a rake?

Further to a thought I had earlier this year, I have been wondering about how to raise issues about workplace learning with clients. I think it is fairly clearly established that employers have cut their spend significantly on L&D over the last 18 months. Yesterday at a networking event I was interested to see significant anecdotal evidence that one of the more common responses from L&D departments is to cut or cease spend with external suppliers but to do very little analysis of internal training teams.

Now first up I am bound to moan about this as I am an outsourced training supplier and training service provider (so please add you pinch of salt now). Equally, I know that turkeys don't tend to vote for Christmas. But I am fascinated that people still fail to consider the total cost of learning. Cutting tens of thousands of pounds from external spend whilst keeping internal trainers delivering less than 75 training days a year is absurd.

I am quite happy to get beaten up on price and quality we should all strive to be making learning happen faster, cheaper and more effectively but it galls when others are not held to the same measure.

I worry that too often in learning and development:

Those who understand and care don't have the authority and those who have the authority don't understand or care...

But this is not reason for despair. I just have to find a better way to articulate the problem...

Two wheels good, more wheels bad

Today was an excellent day for being on two wheels. I imagine that the unions will be quite content with the fuming blockage they managed to provoke on most of London's roads. It's interesting to note that much of France is on strike today so maybe there is something in the air.

Returning from a nice long holiday - so generally in a good mood already - my good mood was further enhanced by tootling past the miles of traffic on my Vespa. If you commute between five and fifteen miles in London, I seriously recommend you consider a scooter or motorbike. It just makes you happier.

It doesn't matter what you say...

it's what you do that counts...

Jane Hart is trying to get a little campaign going for why social media should be allowed in the workplace.

I am a fan of informal (social) learning.

BUT. Today I agreed that we would shut off access to Facebook at our firewall! What a hypocrite I am

We have been looking into a number of system issues this week and our event management suite has been running very slowly.

It turns out that a number of my staff had been using the thin client application on which our system is presented to get round the group wide restrictions on the Internet. Essentially although Facebook is blocked at the firewall for the whole group, they had cleverly found a back door.

This showed up on the traffic reports which spiked at lunchtime.

Having found the problem our IT people deleted over 7GB of temporary Internet cookies from the server allocated a little more virtual memory and suddenly it's like we have a whole new application.

So maybe I shouldn't be allowed to lend my support to Jane's campaign. But in my defence people can still see LinkedIn, Twitter, Slideshare, Flikr, Google Docs, Google Reader, Ning, Blogs etc. So it's not all bad.

The 10 reasons not to use social media that Jane is responding to are:

Social media is a fad.

It's about controlling the message.

Employees will goof off.

Social Media is a time waster.

Social media has no business purpose.

Employees can't be trusted.

Don't cave into the demands of the millennials.

Your teams already share knowledge effectively.

You'll get viruses.

Your competition isn't using it, so why should you?

Someone else can take up cudgels on number one and provide stats for the companies who use it. Number two is the job of the IT department. Number three is so absurd is hardly bears repeating. Numbers 4,5,6, 7 & 8 are all the same point poorly reformulated. If your employees goof off it's your fault as a manager; either give them something more interesting to do, motivate them, accept an element of goofing as part of life or find people who don't goof off. Number 9 is naive in the extreme, anyone who thinks they can control information has no job in management. And as for number 10, well that can't be answered just yet, only time will tell.

Field of dreams...

"If you build it, they will come", is the death knell of many a self obsessed business model.

I have been wondering this week why so many people persist in paying significant amounts for something pretty, polished but ultimately irrelevant when it comes to workplace learning when they could have somethings (but admittedly not all) much more relevant for free or close to free.

Why do fully grown adults still fall for, "LOOOK! Shiny!!"?

Is the issue with social learning and open source solutions that we don't place enough emphasis on the cost of engagement? The cost of getting the horse to the water. Ultimately if you can get a horse into a classroom or onto an e-learning course you can shut the door either literally or figuratively and leave it at that. A tick goes into a box on the LMS and that's that.

We get so enthusiastic about all the things that the horse can do (I know I'm wringing the life out of this analogy) that we fail to get it there in the first place.

Would it be better to start by requiring a budget of £30k pa to cover staff time to prompt, provoke, post and other things beginning with p? Rather than focusing on the open source and free nature.

Or do we take the first law of Russian economics in the 1990's, "If you can't sell something, quadruple the price". Because what people don't pay for, they don't value...

Nascent thought about roles in learning

I went to my daughter's sports day last week - a classic of the reception class "involved-not-competitive and yet just a little competitive anyway" model. I was interested by the differing attitudes of the parents from the uber-coaching (some of whom had been out on the common with stop watches the previous evening I am told) to the completely laid back.

The following day I met with Teodora's reception class teacher, who is an absolute delight, for the end of year parents' evening chat. I was immediately taken back to something that she said to me earlier in the year... When I talked about how defensive my daughter can occasionally get when I correct her reading or writing or even gently model the correct form without even correcting, her teacher just laughed and said, "What on earth are you doing trying to teach your own child? I gave up on that long ago!"

I have recently been reading Martyn Sloman's ebook soon to be published at the Training Journal website and in amongst his nine principles, number three is "disregard anything that was written in the last century". Now he is being deliberately provocative and I am sure he is not getting rid of the whole "standing on the shoulders of giants" theme. But he does have a pop at the structured approach to learning. His suggestions for replacements are dependent on the context.

Which brings me to my thought. Is the future of learner creation - since that is what I think we should be about - dependent on surrounding learners with people or networks which perform a set of appropriate roles? I don't know what these roles will be but they might include (trust, productive communication, challenge and question, etc etc) In the same way that a child builds their own model of the world from the relationships of their family and immediate environment (father, mother, lover, friend) and the healthier the role models and the environment the healthier the eventual adult.

Hmm

Size of UK market for employer L&D

I have been asked a lot recently by a number of clients for benchmarking data on the trends in learning and development. And I have to say the one trend that shows no sign of abating is the exponential growth of assertions unsupported by data...

So I thought I would share some thoughts, where possible supported by data. If anyone has better sources I'd love to hear about them.

Size of the UK market for employer L&D

There is a range of valuations here from IFLL's 2009 figure £2.95bn (which I think is a bit silly) through the CIPD's figure of £6.3bn, UKCES at £19bn to the CBI at £39bn.

Now some of the above are hard costs (cash) and some include soft costs (time off work) but non of them are particularly clear or consistent.

According to the ONS the UK's working population is currently just shy of 29 million. If you take a reasonable average spend per employee of £250 per annum you get £7.25bn.

Insource/outsourced

What percentage of employer spend on L&D is outsourced or insourced? Well it's difficult to get any figures here for the UK but in the USA there are two sources: Bersin's Corporate Learning Factbook and the ASTD's Annual Industry Report. Interesting the the former thinks there is a trend towards insourcing where the latter thinks the opposite.

In the UK one figure I am fairly comfortable (as it comes from NIACE via HMRC) with is that the number of UK companies registered for VAT that describe themselves as training providers has doubled since 2000 to almost 13,000 . This does not necessarily mean that people have left employer L&D departments to set up on their own but it would correlate.

I think that this one is actually a revolving door as L&D departments grow and then are cut back when they get too big and flabby or the economic cycle turns against them.

One source that crops up constantly is the Keynote Industry Report which I gather was set up by some former Reed employees but I happen to find the Merlin Scott report more useful in that it casts its net a bit wider and has better financial analysis. That said you can find most of the information for free if you are prepared to look and it only costs £1 to download accounts from companies house.

That'll do for today. On another day we'll look at KPIs for training delivery.