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Article by Peter Cappelli, Washington Post, September 5. "Companies simply haven't invested much in training their workers. In 1979, young workers got an average of 2.5 weeks of training a year. While data is not easy to come by, around 1995, several surveys of employers found that the average amount of training workers received per year was just under 11 hours, and the most common topic was workplace safety - not building new skills. By 2011, an Accenture study showed that only about a fifth of employees reported getting on-the-job training from their employers over the past five years."

Article by Kerry Hannon, Forbes, 1.25.13 This author asserts that older workers will become more valued by employers even though they aren't making special efforts to hire or retain them now and do not want to pay for the cost of training/retraining them. These trends suggest that taking charge of one's own learning with a PLP, PLN, etc. and taking advantage of all the free opportunities will be valuable skills to have. This author only looks to community colleges for retraining and does not reference any of the online options that we know about from the work on the directory. Should we draft a comment back to Kerry Hannon on this website? "1. Who is going to pay for that training? Most labor market experts I have interviewed say the government and private employers need to ramp up more training programs for older workers and create workplaces that make it easier for them to do their jobs. Employers don't want to spend for it. They've already cut to the bone to stay competitive globally in recent years and this kind of spending is a tough sell. Conceivably, as I discussed as a panel member at a recent Federal Reserve Workforce Development conference, one way to provide the needed training is through the community college system. The coursework could be offered at an affordable cost for the worker. Depending on who foots the bill, employers or employeees could receive tax incentives to ease the tuition bill. (Please continue to next page.) "

Quote that Jane Hart found from Jane Bozarth, 12/6/14, rest of Jane Hart's post is just as interesting. well worth reading. "The thing that is going to change the game is - the learners …. They are changing the concept of training, and we are increasingly moving toward an age in which the adult worker will not sit still for training that just looks like more "school". They're becoming more sophisticated in their understanding of how learning looks and how it happens. We're going to have to figure out how to provide better performance support, in smaller bites, in places easy for them to access. And we'll need to offer time and space and support so they can create the user-generated help that others need. And if we don't? They won't wait for us. They'll find the means to do it anyway.""

Interesting blog post by Jane Hart on building an enterprise learning network within an enterprise social network. Is the WLS going to be an enterprise learning network? Perhaps not in the usual sense of an organization with employees comprising a workforce. But perhaps it can use some of the same techniques advocated by Hart below: Under Part Two 1. new social approaches to training and online learning--backchannel learning, online social workshops ("participants with a lot of autonomy, so that they participate in the ways that they feel more comfortable and best suits them..." ); tiny training aka microlearning--short bursts of learning ten minutes long... 2. Innovative Learning Initiatives--social onboarding, social mentoring 3. Continuous series of learning activities and events 10 minutes a day - provide a daily link to a place where individuals can spend just 10 minutes learning something new. Note: 10 minutes a day, each weekday adds up to around 6 days of training in a year! Live chats - run regular live Twitter-like live chat sessions on different topics. They might just take place over 1 hour or be a longer all-day event that people can join in at any time. Hot seats - put one of your people (e.g. CEO or a leading expert) in the hot seat for a period of time, and encourage employees to ask them questions. Book club - organise a monthly time for conversation around a book of interest. Lunch'n'Learns - ask someone to lead a short informal session on a topic of interest to them. This might be purely conversational or involve a web meeting or face-to-face meeting, with the ELN used as a backchannel. 4 - SUPPORT OTHER PEOPLE-BASED LEARNING SERVICES Your ESN provides the opportunity to set up and support other learning activities in private group spaces. A Learning Help Desk service (aka Learning Concierge service) which provides an advice centre for ad hoc learning and performance problems. - See more at:

Although ten years old, interesting blog post by Dave Kovaleski, July 1, 2004, Meetingsnet, makes some good points about what kinds of learning and when. Excerpt The key to an effective blended learning program lies in the mix of media used to deliver the training. Bersin identifies 16 different media, including classroom instruction, webinars, conference calls, CD-ROM courseware, study manuals, Web pages, online simulations, on-site labs, Web-based discussion groups, mentoring programs, and videos. To create a successful blended program, it's not necessary to incorporate many or all of them; in fact, two or three should suffice. Typically, a blended-learning program has several steps. The first might be a conference call, introducing students to the trainer and subject. Next is the self-directed portion, in which students are asked to study for the live session. The self-directed portion is best delivered through asynchronous means, such as webcasts or some kind of simulated, virtual exercises. Experts suggest follow-up testing on the pre-work to make sure students are prepared to move on to the live, or synchronous, session. "The self-directed portion of the blend is critical," says Jennifer Hofmann, president of InSync Training LLC, Branford, Conn., and author of The Synchronous Trainer's Survival Guide (Jossey-Bass). "It's a huge culture change." ... Post-meetings, or asynchronous evaluations, are frequently the final components of blended-learning programs. Coaching modules, online tutorials, tests, and simulations reinforce the classroom work. They also allow companies to make sure that employees are applying the new information to their jobs. In addition, testing allows employers to identify knowledge gaps so that follow-up training is well-focused.

great article in the Atlantic on how employee training has evolved to include much more self-directed, outside-in kinds of learning

2500+ training providers offering over 35,000 courses covering 100,s of course subjects across the UK We help businesses and individuals like you! To find the training providers and courses you need....

Although written in 2011, it forecasts nicely how LMSs are being revamped/enhanced/integrated with business performance & business transformation. Really it's about boundary management, too, in terms of formal employer led/sponsored training/learning and what employees may learn and apply on their own.

has interesting stats on training and finding skilled employees, up to 1/3 of employees are contingent workers, 2013

Bascuas on workers' desire for training and development

blows training out of the water with this infographic

blog post by Clay Johnson, Information Diet author, Lifehacker, Excerpt: "First, let's define notification. In the context of our discussion, a notification is something that comes from a service that the service deems worthy of your attention: The scarlet box at the top of every Google page notifying you of things happening in Google+. The messages you get from Twitter telling you that you have a new message. The email icon that shows up in your system tray telling you that you have a new email. Facebook letting you know what you're missing out on Facebook. Your sister's latest move in Words with Friends." Besides being disrespectful to your attention, notifications like this do something else that's much more nefarious: they train you to be a passive consumer of information rather than an active one. If we don't control the notifications we're receiving, we're forced to react to them: from Google's big red box, to Living Social's notification for a deal on backwaxing." Besides being disrespectful to your attention, notifications like this do something else that's much more nefarious: they train you to be a passive consumer of information rather than an active one. If we don't control the notifications we're receiving, we're forced to react to them: from Google's big red box, to Living Social's notification for a deal on backwaxing."

From Arun Pradhan on LinkedIn based on the work of Jane Hart, Harold Jarche, and others. Explores the why and how of work and learning, and bursting the training bubble that positions learning as a separate event from the workflow.

Blog by Matthew forti on Measuring Leadership Development, November 28, 2011 Neighborhood Builders by Bank of America builds high performing community-based nonprofits and gives them multiple three-day sessions of leadership training for the ED and emerging leader. Excerpts: "1. Develop a detailed theory of change. It isn't worth spending a dime on measurement until you've carefully defined which leaders you intend to target, what specific training and other programming they need, what they will gain, how those gains will be applied, and what should ultimately result." 2. Measure with mixed methods. 3. Continuously measure to improve impact. 4.Build rigor over time. Leadership programs don't need to build a full-scale measurement system right from the start. The best programs are intentional about whether and how to improve the rigor of their measurement over time, based partly on what they want to do with the results.

Interesting article published 1/6/2014 on Second Acts for baby boomers. Quotes Marc Freedman, Elizabeth Isele (who lived in ME for a long time), and mentions Bevan Rogel. The Boomerworks online service for matching BBs with work opportunities is very interesting--wonder how they are doing? And whether we should try to ally with them? "In 1998, living in Maine, Isele created CyberSeniors, a multilingual nonprofit computer training company that eventually trained more than 28,000 seniors in 24 states. She's led numerous nonprofits over the decades and is now pushing public policy changes and forging connections between organizations to create an "entrepreneur ecosystem." That ecosystem is flourishing in Sarasota. Sarasota's Institute for the Ages, established in 2009 to change the conversation about aging as one of deficit and decline to one about enhancing lives, is a lab for companies and services that want to tap into the needs of older adults. In late 2013, the Institute launched Boomerswork.com, a web-based network to connect freelancers with companies seeking seasoned professionals for project-based work. The program started in Canada and the Institute is the first organization to bring it to the U.S. When the Institute convenes a national convention here in February, entrepreneurship and encore careers will be a large part of the agenda. In addition to a keynote address by Freedman, Isele is leading a workshop on entrepreneurship with Bevon Rogel, who runs a Freedman-related Encore Academy in St. Petersburg to help seniors find meaningful work. For Southwest Florida, which has one of the highest concentrations of seniors in the nation, the idea of an "encore" seems natural. As the rest of the country and world grays, branding this life stage as one that brings years, or potentially decades, more productivity and meaning to life has become an imperative."

Amazing paper by the Berkana Institute on how networks serve as incubators for CoPs, leaders, new ideas and ways of doing to emerge. It makes me think about leadership training programs vs. networks/forums for growing leadership in the collective. This aspect of emergence has profound implications for social entrepreneurs. Instead of developing them individually as leaders and skillful practitioners, we would do better to connect them to like-minded others and create the conditions for emergence. The skills and capacities needed by them will be found in the system that emerges, not in better training programs.

blog post by Daniel Newman, author of Millennial CEO on need to learn continuously and quickly.  Find the reference to IBM asking employees to acquire tech skills.  could be reference in ECO Byte #1. 

Another global initiative to help women become leaders, advocate for rights, democracy and peace as well as economic development. Interesting to us is the use of stories as the core of some trainings.

Story telling as an integral part of some of the training described to develop leadership skills.

Beautiful cartoon infograph capturing John Seely Brown's early work at Xerox. Love it!

Jane Hart speaks to the context behind her upcoming workshop (starts April 6) on updating our approaches to helping people learn based on what many are already choosing to do. Food for thought ... MAEA and learning design? Blog post?