Group items tagged

Encouraged by Watson Sr. and his executive team, employees often formed their own study groups. One, known as the Owl Club, allowed employees to study any subject they wanted at company expense. Such programs evolved into adult learning classes, and eventually into grants for employees to pursue college credits and degrees

Today, industry specialists around the world in IBM Global Business Services use an array of e-learning tools—including podcasts and Twitter—customer on-site classes, and IBM conferences and classrooms to educate customers on everything from the use of social media and cloud computing, to how to build a smarter rail system. And IBM employees worldwide take advantage of their networked community to draw upon each other’s skills day and night to solve customer problems and develop the capabilities clients value most.

The internet has also played a big role in the more uncertain fate for modern employees as it much easier for businesses to outsource which enables them to get the best value for their money

constantly improving your skills to keep up with the ever-increasing demands of the modern employee.

Identify The Skills You Need

too many nonprofit CEOs and their boards continue to miss the answer to succession planning sitting right under their noses—the homegrown leader.

leadership development deficit.

The sector’s C-suite leaders, frustrated at the lack of opportunities and mentoring, are not staying around long enough to move up. Even CEOs are exiting because their boards aren’t supporting them and helping them to grow.

Networking will matter even more for job hunters. Employee referrals, job search engines and company career sites have caught up with job boards as employer's top picks for interviewing and hiring new workers. That means job hunters are better off working their online or real-life connections to find an in at a company they want to work for rather than scouring job board listings. When you apply or submit a résumé, include all the keywords that describe your skills and experiences, since companies that use applicant-tracking software match them against job descriptions.

The popularity of online video has led to companies switching how they offer training and career development, replacing in-person classes with on-demand curriculum that people can tune in when it suits their schedules, including on their phones.

Accenture is one company that has reconfigured learning and development to lean less on campus-based classes and more on on-demand, customized training on topics employees can choose based on their interests, not necessarily something their boss wants them to learn. I

According to the Volunteering in the United States survey, “providing professional or management assistance, including serving on a board or committee” is the second most popular form of volunteering for Americans over 55, after “collecting, preparing, distributing or serving food.”

ey’re increasingly targeting boomers with what’s known as “skills-based volunteering” opportunities whose jobs are valued at $40 to $500 an hour, far more than traditional volunteering’s $18 to $20 an hour, according to a blog post by Emily Ferstie of United Way for Southeastern Michigan.

The problem, of course, is that those students represent the precise group MOOCs are meant to serve. “MOOCs were supposed to be the device that would bring higher education to the masses,” Jonathan Rees noted. “However, the masses at San Jose State don’t appear to be ready for the commodified, impersonal higher education that MOOCs offer.” Thrun’s cavalier disregard for the SJSU students reveals his true vision of the target audience for MOOCs: students from the posh suburbs, with 10 tablets apiece and no challenges whatsoever—that is, the exact people who already have access to expensive higher education. It is more than galling that Thrun blames students for the failure of a medium that was invented to serve them, instead of blaming the medium that, in the storied history of the “correspondence” course (“TV/VCR repair”!), has never worked. For him, MOOCs don’t fail to educate the less privileged because the massive online model is itself a poor tool. No, apparently students fail MOOCs because those students have the gall to be poor, so let’s give up on them and move on to the corporate world, where we don’t have to be accountable to the hoi polloi anymore, or even have to look at them, because gross.

SG_Debug && SG_Debug.pagedebug && window.console && console.log && console.log('[' + (new Date()-SG_Debug.initialTime)/1000 + ']' + ' Bottom of header.jsp'); SlateEducationGetting schooled.Nov. 19 2013 11:43 AM The King of MOOCs Abdicates the Throne 7.3k 1.2k 101 Sebastian Thrun and Udacity’s “pivot” toward corporate training. By Rebecca Schuman &nbsp; Sebastian Thrun speaks during the Digital Life Design conference on Jan. 23, 2012, in Munich. Photo by Johannes Simon/Getty Images requirejs(["jquery"], function($) { if ($(window).width() < 640) { $(".slate_image figure").width("100%"); } }); Sebastian Thrun, godfather of the massive open online course, has quietly spread a plastic tarp on the floor, nudged his most famous educational invention into the center, and is about to pull the trigger. Thrun—former Stanford superprofessor, Silicon Valley demigod, and now CEO of online-course purveyor Udacity—just admitted to Fast Company’s openly smitten Max Chafkin that his company’s courses are often a “lousy product.” Rebecca Schuman Rebecca Schuman is an education columnist for Slate. Follow This is quite a “pivot” from the Sebastian Thrun, who less than two years ago crowed to Wired that the unstemmable tide of free online education would leave a mere 10 purveyors of higher learning in its wake, one of which would be Udacity. However, on the heels of the embarrassing failure of a loudly hyped partnership with San Jose State University, the “lousiness” of the product seems to have become apparent. The failures of massive online education come as no shock to those of us who actually educate students by being in the same room wit

nd why the answer is not the MOOC, but the tiny, for-credit, in-person seminar that has neither a sexy acronym nor a potential for huge corporate partnerships.

Skype to talk on a regular basis with my close Internet Time Alliance colleagues (Jay Cross, Charles Jennings, Harold Jarche and Clark Quinn) and I mainly use Twitter to connect with my extended set of colleagues around the world. This is the way I find out what they are up to, ask them questions, share ideas and brainstorm with them. (This is my equivalent of going to meetings and having coffee breaks or watercooler conversations, etc.)

t is true, that in some organizations it will require (organisational and individual) mindset changes to appreciate&nbsp;that workplace learning today is more than just training. In particular, managers will need to recognize the value of this form of continuous learning, and that they will need to provide time to do it, and indeed measure its success in&nbsp;other ways than through training attendance or online course completion.