Dive Brief:
- Currently, corporate learning and development (L&D) is still skewed heavily toward building courses and content, according to an article from the Association of Talent Development (formerly ASTD).
- That traditional approach is not really in sync with the exponential rate of knowledge change and today's knowledge-heavy work processes
- Consequently, L&D is dangerously close to becoming irrelevant in many organizations, writes Patti Shank, a learning designer and analyst at Learning Peaks, which provides learning and performance consulting.
Dive Insight:
Today's exponential knowledge growth rate has far-reaching implications for supporting learning in the workplace. The current way to build instructional content may be adding to the problem—not helping it.
Typical training processes do not work for the most of the tasks and work that people do in today's workplace, Shank says. Organizational leaders do not understand this fact, and that's why they continue to ask L&D to build instructional piecework.
Shank believes when employees have to learn continually, they also need to control their own learning process and destiny; there is not enough time to wait for Learning & Development to do it. If learning professionals don't want to become dinosaurs, they can't simply rely on e-learning, she says, they must understand how to support rapid knowledge and skill adoption.
