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Fail to Learn, Learn to Fail: The Upcoming Trends in Knowledge Management

3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

September 03, 2015

Fail to Learn, Learn to Fail: The Upcoming Trends in Knowledge Management

By Steve Anderson, Contributing TMCnet Writer

While most of us would simply like to be able to hire people who already know right out of the gate and understand the “what and how” of any current business, there's usually some level of gap in between current and needed skill sets. If nothing else, individual projects have particular quirks that require specific means of address. To that end, knowledge management becomes important, and BPA Quality trainer and director of people development Yvette Renda recently took a look at the wider field of learning and development.


Renda's look at the field focused on a report from the Brandon Hall Group, and discovered that those organizations that aren't keeping up with trends in learning are most likely to have trouble with growth and productivity alike. Thus, more successful firms are finding value in using those learning methods that improve performance and develop natural talent.

Some key points immediately stood out: one company in three in the Brandon Hall Group study was looking to increase budgets for learning and development. But 41 percent of firms considered the corporate culture to be “controlling,” yet 59 percent are looking to put social learning activities to work. This makes for something of a dichotomy at work; about the same proportion of respondents that aren't leveraging social learning also consider corporate culture to be “controlling”. That's not to say there's not overlap between the two pools, of course—indeed, it's possible that all the “controlling” responses came from the social learning pool—but it's a safe bet that the lesser controlling firms are also using social learning.

Increasingly, companies appear to be putting value on the individual, and are reconsidering the whole issue of how employees are trained and developed. That's good news; some have suggested that that lack of training and individual consideration can be a contributing cause of employee turnover. The more employees can be retained, the less training will need to be done down the line, so putting a little  extra budget into employee training now may well save money down the line as there are fewer new hires needing training. But by like token, keeping the budget approximately where it is can be a valuable concept too, as companies invest in current employees, which is picked up on by employees with a new feeling of value.

There will always be those who prefer employees just a little untrained; the untrained need to be paid less and are less likely to get better jobs elsewhere. There's a reason the phrase “overqualified” exists in job interviews, after all. But companies that put investment in employees are a lot more likely to be repaid in loyalty and better effort, traits which tend to produce positive bottom line impact. While it's likely to mean change for the company—frequent reexamination of learning principles, changes to the budget—it's also likely to mean value, and that's not easily ignored.

So in the end, a focus on the value of the individual and the value of learning isn't arming an employee to jump ship, it's giving the employee the tools to be a real success right where that employee is. It's hard to turn away from that kind of benefit, so those who look at the trends in learning are likely to come out ahead.




Edited by Rory J. Thompson
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