Resources I read an interesting article by Steve King on the New Knowledge Artisans. The article succinctly summarizes some of the changes happening in the workforce today, driven by the growth of the Millenials or GenY and their need for knowledge collaboration in the workforce. This is particularly relevant considering the baby boomer generation are approaching retirement age and taking with them key knowledge, expertise and insights gleaned through years of experience. What does that say to organizations that are looking to build true learning organizations and believe that the true area of sustainable advantage lies in the knowledge that lies within an organization? If that knowledge is walking out the door as a generation of the workforce approaches retirement, how best do organizations retain this key knowledge and impart that in a manner that is going to prove meaningful to the next workplace entrants?
The Milennials are more demanding, more collaborative and have grown up accustomed to the use of technology. They actually have access to more sophisticated technology outside their working environment and feel limited and even restricted with anything less. So the question remains, how do organizations best appeal and engage with the new young talent entering the workforce and how do they appropriately manage and map to their motivations and provide them the best tools to learn and collaborate on the job to retain and grow intellectual capital?
Facebook is a really interesting public facing social tool, not only because it has amassed a large follower audience but how it has appealed to this new demanding generation. What makes Facebook so interesting is how it draws people in to constantly throughout the day. It’s a platform that draws people in and through the power of collaboration and community and is like a drug to many. Now imagine the typical organization software application and the usual challenges with growing user adoption. Many a software company could well learn from the Facebook example when it comes to user adoption, use and reuse. So what’s the real point of this? Learning within organizations is in a state of flux. This is being driven by an entirely new demographic who have different needs. To thrive in this new world order, organizations need to rethink how they appeal to this new talent and how they capture and disseminate knowledge in a manner that appeals to the collaborative thirst of these NetGens. But they need to do this in a manner that appeals to the organizational requirements as well. Organizations have to strike the right balance between nurturing the free form collaborative nature of networks yet continue to maintain the quality and accuracy of knowledge that is created and disseminated. It’s a fine line and not all social web 2.0 tools are applicable to an enterprise as a result. At the end of the day, enterprises are toiled with seeking ways to drive higher organization performance through their talent, motivating and nurturing them to improve themselves and their organizations as well and develop the till now the informal learning that has been so challenging to address, until now.
Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Networking, Enterprise Social Software, Informal Learning, Information Management, Knowledge Management, Knowledgebase, Learning Management, Sales 2.0, Training, Training Reinforcement, Tribal Knowledge, Web 2.0 Learning
Wow, finally someone that gets it!!! I like what you said about how “millennials” learn. This is good food for thought of how to share informaiton with my clients in a collaborative way. Thank you!!!
We have been collaborating at several peer-networking events — we probably could devote an entire conference to these topics. Other balancing act organizations (i.e., for-profit businesses) must be careful to balance is CONFIDENTIALLY. Yes, quality and accuracy of knowledge that is created and disseminated is important and Yes, “if Millennia’s” like to collaborate using social networking, the challenge will involve how to balance protecting the sensitive data while providing collaboration platforms (this would be impossible using public websites such as facebook). We will likely cover some of this at our Chicagoland Learning Leaders Conference on Oct 30th.
e-learning 2.0, collaboration via social networking, whatever you want to call it — is a paradigm shift for the corporate world. These types of paradigm shifts in the corporate learning environment have historically come from a “pull” from the business to overcome some business challenge, not a “push” from the learning field. (Incremental advancements have effectively been “pushed” from the learning field.)
Considering today’s complex business ecosystems, the speed of change, ubiquitous technology, and the increasing millenial percentage of the worforce — e-learning 2.0 will happen as a “pull” because that will just be the way that work must be done. It won’t look like it does in the non-commercial world. It will be adopted and adapted just like other learning approaches have that were originated outside of the corporate landscape -to include the important point Dirk makes above.
The challenge for the learning field will be tracking to this — and being open and ready to obsolete some things in order to create the new paradigm. This is really just how innovation happens.
Great points. This change is coming like a freight train and as John Mayer says, “honestly, you’ll never stop this train.” The netgens are clearly demanding better collaborative tools. It starts with WebKinz and other pre-tween social network/game platforms. Games are more fun and easier to learn when you play them online with other kids.
Other forces are at play also including globalization and distributed enterprises that force more collaboration. As Tapscott discusses in Wikinomics, economic forces that drive cost out of production are forcing collaborative development and joint ventures as ways to increase output at a lower cost. But how can you control all the informal learning and collaboration? In much of corporate America, the answer is SharePoint and a lot of custom development. Is SharePoint robust enough out of the box? Is there something better that doesn’t require all this expensive custom development? How many rogue wikis and blogs are running at my firm and how many of these sites are violating my SAS70 controls. These are questions myslef and a lot of my clleagues wrestle with by day.
Amen, Dave. Understanding how this group’s other-directed approach to acquiring knowledge plays in the real world is a key element to long-term cultural relevancy for us all.