Group items tagged

"Done well, on-line professional development is as effective as face-to-face professional development.  These results are promising for our CSLearning4U project. In particular, the benefit that Barry Fishman saw is what we were most hoping for, based on our studies with Klara Benda - it's all about fitting into the teachers' lives."

HR and IT are not working together in ways the workforce needs, and L&D professionals are hard pressed to demonstrate the impact of their efforts on individual performance and bottom-line results. The professionals of the incoming generation, Gen Y, are demanding a complete overhaul of how you connect with them, coach them and teach them, but only about one-quarter of new managers get the effective coaching or training they need when assuming their new role. What do your learners find outside of your company? They find that IT and training play together quite well. For example, Apple's store has over 300,000 apps, thousands of which deliver on-the-fly tutorials plus developmental and assessment tools tailored to every need, many of which are free.

"Alongside this, we wanted to gauge wider views across the sector into charities' use of digital and how else they think it could help them. So today we're launching the results of our Charity Digital Survey at our sold out Charity Digital Summit, part of our Google funded programme of technology events for charities. Many of the 334 charity sector professionals who responded to the survey view digital as essential to their work, but fear they could miss out on opportunities for fundraising and income generation due to a lack of digital skills."

"The old saying "fake it until you make it" might actually be sound professional advice, with new University of Melbourne research finding self-confidence is a key determinant of workplace success"

Two new reports released from Forrester explore the state of video in the enterprise. "Information Workers Are Not Quite Ready For Desktop Videoconferencing" tells us that most workers polled do not want to use desktop video conferencing. Meanwhile, the "TechRadar For Content & Collaboration Professionals: Enterprise Video, Q1 2011" report looks at video in general across the enterprise. "Although video hasn't yet taken hold as the way we communicate or work, it will play an important role in connecting the increasingly distributed workforce," says the Radar report. The reports authors cite research showing that 46% of information workers are expected to be telecommuters by 1016.

While i don't really agree with Lynda's assertion that the job of middle manager will "disappear," i do agree that the nature of the job is already changing, because some of the original reasons for the necessity of professional managers has changed. I've written about this here: http://www.socialens.com/2009/11/12/recalibratingrule-of-thumb-vs-scientific-management/

"GIVEN the widespread adoption of smartphones, text messaging, video calling and social media, today's professionals mean it when they brag about staying connected to work 24/7." Too much connectivity can damage the quality of one's work, says Robert Sutton, author of "Good Boss, Bad Boss" and a professor at Stanford. Because of devices, he says, 'nobody seems to actually pay full attention; everybody is doing a worse job because they are doing more things." Mobile devices and social media, he says, "make us a little more oblivious, a little more incompetent." Just recall those pilots who overshot their destination two years ago because they were using computers, he adds.

Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It's written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don't have a clue about the daily necessity of keeping your team professionally content because they've either never done the work or have forgotten how it's done. These are the people who show up when your single best engineer casually and unexpectedly announces, "I'm quitting. I'm joining my good friend to found a start-up. This is my two weeks' notice." You call on the motivation and retention police because you believe they can perform the legendary "diving save". Whether it's HR or a well-intentioned manager with a distinguished title, these people scurry impressively. Meetings that go long into the evening are instantly scheduled with the disenfranchised employee. It's an impressive show of force, and it sometimes works, but even if they stay, the damage has been done. They've quit, and when someone quits they are effectively saying, "I no longer believe in this company". What's worse is that what they were originally thinking was, "I'm bored". Boredom is easier to fix than an absence of belief.