Many enterprises face a tough time understanding what a business user needs to learn in order to perform his/her role better and grow within the organization. They provide enterprise L&D teams access to centralized/de-centralized teams, policies, tools and platforms such as authoring tools, LMS, LCMS, assessment tools and more. These systems keep growing as the organization grows or phases out old technologies with the newer ones.
Teams work closely with business group owners and managers to understand about their team performance and growth. Enterprise HR teams also work closely with business groups to identify talent from the market. They deliver as per the organizations goals, short-term and long-term plan and create organizational structures, define job roles, map competencies and create growth path for each role. HR teams have HRMS, Recruitment and Talent Management systems to name a few.
The ultimate objective of all this investment in people, process and technology is to fuel growth and sustainability for the organization.
Notably, a business user works for an enterprise at different experience levels - entry, mid-level and senior management. Depending on the role, the user works with colleagues from same or different teams, completes assignment/tasks and eventually develops a view of his/her version of the business of the enterprise. Business here means what do we make/sell, who do we sell to, where do we do it, why do we do it and how is it done? Business users are also your brand ambassadors to end clients, their family and friends.
If we were to think of the 70/20/10 model, 70% of the learning is informal, on the job, experience-based and practice; 20% is through coaching, mentoring and development through others while the remaining 10% is through formal learning interventions and structured workshops.
As an L&D team, you think of how you can make an impact on informal learning? What can be done effectively to make sure that business users have a holistic view of the enterprise, in short know more than what the business group sticks to as a part of legacy information transfer?
If you were to think of the country as an enterprise and media such as print (newspapers) as a medium to share news for people, I would say SharePoint is an interactive web newspaper with the benefit of a two-way information flow instead of one way.
One of the best examples of how you can showcase training as per job role and career path is the Microsoft Education site: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/training-and-events/it-academy/certification-roadmap/default.aspx#fbid=0TNWXer0w3c
While this was more structured before and is now revamped, it provides great clarity to the business user as to what training pertains to the current job role and for future role within different career paths.
Training mentioned within an interactive org chart, can be classroom, online or blended. The important thing for the business user is that its at one place for their professional growth. Such look and feel can easily be achieved using SharePoint without investing a huge chunk of money. Your LMS can be the backend and a simplified SharePoint site can be the front end.
In the next blog, we shall explore the benefits of using SharePoint.