My Learning Blog

I have primarily worked in custom project environment. I moved to organizational learning environment - a support function only last year. The transition from seemingly efficient custom project environment to a support function can be tough. One of my biggest issue is having to remind people all the time - remind the business managers to respond to mails or about a meeting, remind the trainees to attend the training sessions, remind team members to complete their tasks, remind vendors to include all hidden costs or send faculty profiles. Sending reminders is such a waste of time and mindspace! If this post sounds like I am complaining...well I am.

I passed my certification examination today...it feels great!

Yesterday, I was reminded of an hilarious but powerful lesson on learning solutions design that I learned many years ago at my workplace. At that time, I had a habit of changing my computer wallpaper on a daily basis. My wallpapers or probably my habit typically attracted a lot of attention. One day a team member told me that she too wanted to learn how to place personal pictures as wallpaper. To keep it simple, I told her verbally--select a picture, right click the mouse, select Set as Wallpaper option... that's all! A couple of minutes later, I sensed frustration from my colleague's desk and so I went by to check out. She had taken a physical picture of her family, placed the mouse physically on top of the picture, right clicked the mouse and wondered why it didn't work! After digesting what I saw, I demonstrated the steps for her. I returned back to my seat with an experience that besides making me smile every time also compels me to remove any scope of content misinte...

Most organizations seem to have minimal linkage between the employee development goals agreed at the end of the performance review and talent management handled by the training teams throughout the year. Any attempt to link the two is either met with resistance from the employees (for example, line managers might not consider this activity important enough to allocate time) or is too complex to handle operationally (for example, it might be tough to come to an agreement on various overlapping human resources and training policies). I find this situation surprising. Development goals seem to be one of the most viable inputs for drawing up training plans especially since employees are typically more motivated to pursue these goals. To the set of trainings thus identified, if we map the trainings specific to the account competency development plan, we have a unified training plan for an employee for that year (or any duration specific to the organization). The above training plan integrat...

Planning Determine the recruitment objectives. Identify the required and desired candidate profile. Determine the required personal attributes of the candidates (I place weightage on willingness to learn and share). Design and Develop Components of the training (or induction) program: Corporate orientation: Corporate values, vision, goals, structure, teams, market and competitors. Organization orientation: Various teams within the organization that the employee will work in (for example, project management, quality, engineering services, learning strategy, visual strategy), organizational structure, values, vision, goals, structure, market and competitors of the organization. #1 and #2 could be merged for smaller companies. Team orientation: Reporting structure , team interaction, roles and responsibilities and expectations. Project orientation: Customer orientation , introduction and usage of tools (content management system, authoring tools, time tracking, bug tracking, graphical e...

This post is in response to a request from elearningtyro. I hope you find it useful. What is seat time? Seat time is variously described as: * Amount to time a learner spends to read through each page within the course (Does that include all the related tools and supplementary document? Does the learner need to read every glossary term? What if the learner already knows the terms?) * Amount of time taken by a learner to click every link within the course (What if the learner clicks the link but does not read it? ) * Amount of time a learner takes to complete the course How is it calculated? One of the ways I know (If you know any other, please feel free to leave a comment): A sample from the target audience is selected to complete the course. The time taken by each is recorded. Seat time is the percentile time that approximately 80 percent of the learners take to complete the course. When was it used? In early elearning days, seat time was taken as a metric to charge the cl...

While watching Young Turks on CNBC, I found a profile particularly fascinating- Ayyappa Nagubandi, 28, started his professional life as a security guard. He joined Satyam Computers as a receptionist but soon discovered his talent for web design. He was provided opportunities within Satyam to grow as a web designer. By the time he left the cafter six years, he was a team lead and had supported clients in the US, Singapore and Europe. He left Satyam to launch his own company, TrulyIntelligent Technologies. NowPos Online Services (shortened form of Now Possible), the company’s first subsidiary, offers free voicemail over the Internet, aimed at users in developing countries with connectivity but little literacy. Tens of thousands of users in countries like Vietnam, China, and South Korea have already registered for the NowPos service (www.NowPos.com). NowPos was rated by Frost and Sullivan as one of the top 20 Broadband Innovations in Asia Pacific. Ayyappa Nagubandi’s journey from being an...