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We live in a fast changing world, driven by digital ‘kit’. Around 2.5 billion people are online today. Whilst it might see a lot, there are another 5 billion people yet to be connected.
Technology has become an integral part of our lives:
- We used to go online – now we live our lives online
- Britons spend one in every four waking minutes online - that’s over 4 hours a day (study by Ofcom)
- By 2020, 5bn people will be online - double the number now
In business this means we need to find smarter ways to communicate and collaborate, and this is especially true when it comes to learning and sharing what we learn with others.
We have a huge opportunity to use social tools to help our teams develop together by using different mediums like presentations, blogs, SPOCs (small private online community) – all these will help us to rapidly advance bonding in our teams, in addition to learning and cognitive growth.
Most organisations invest in training but not many provide a way to social collaborate over what has been learnt. A training room isn’t always the best place to learn ironically – it’s a great place to get the information and get to grips with understanding it – but the discovery of the practical knowledge and everyday ‘tricks’ that top performers use to be effective, are learnt away from the training room. New technology is making it easier to share this knowledge with new, current and future employees.
When you consider how much time and money can be spent on training, it’s crucial that we find effective ways to share what we learn with others.
According to Bloomfire (a social learning company), there are many benefits to sharing and collaborating together on learning, by using various social learning methods:
- 39% of people said there isn’t enough collaboration on learning in their workplace, AND
- 31% said they’d be willing to pay for social tools themselves to help foster more collaboration
This clearly evidences that people want to find new ways of learning!
- 82% of businesses that use social technologies want to use more of them in the future!
On average, companies with a collaboration strategy for sharing learning had a:
- 131% annual increase in operational efficiency
- 122% increase in delivering projects on time
- 55% increase in revenue
So what’s stopping you? Grab that smartphone and start learning!
#Learnsharesucceed
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Jennie Marshall
Jennie Marshall is an award winning learning professional (Winner of the 2016 Learning Performance Institute, Learning Professional of the Year Bronze Award), who joined QA in 2010 as a Learning Consultant in the Leadership, Management and Business Skills team. She has gone on to progress through various positions to her current role of Learning Programme Director where she now designs, develops and manages the delivery of end to end learning programmes. She is an experienced and dedicated learning professional, with expertise including management, leadership and talent, and training and facilitation developed within a variety of environments. Jennie has a proven track record of delivering blended, multi modal learning programmes using Learning Management System platforms and in a more traditional face to face setting, is at home with small and large audiences. She is a proven developer of people and is accredited in the use of a variety of tools including Strength Deployment Inventory®, Emergenetics®, Hogan®, Prism® and Worldsview™ as well as being an NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) Master Practitioner and Kirkpatrick Certified Professional (Bronze).
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