Changing Learning Organization Priorities

In my book, Strategic Organizational Learning, I emphasized the importance of creating a learning organization culture. If your organization is going to remain competitive, knowledge is your most valuable competitive asset. Thus, the goal of a learning organization is continuous learning by every organizational member.

While the goal of the learning organization has not changed, the priorities for creating and maintaining a learning organization culture have shifted. I have mentioned these changes in previous blog entries. And now I have research to support my claims.

Josh Bersin’s organization, Bersin & Associates (B&A) recently completed a study of 800 corporate learning and development (L&D) leaders that indicates shifting priorities for learning organizations.

Back in 2003, B&A’s study of L&D leaders found these leaders focused on learning technologies and learning management systems (software), implementation of e-learning, and managing the proliferation of technology. Clearly technology was foremost in the minds of these leaders.

Five years later, B&A’s 2008 research revealed L&D leader top priorities to be:

1. Improving business alignment.
2. Reducing costs.
3. Improving program effectiveness.

While technology is still a concern, of course, business issues now dominate the thinking of these L&D leaders.

So, as I have said in previous articles, if L&D professionals want to be invited to the strategic planning meetings they must develop business acumen.

David Beitler, CCNA, MCSA (my eldest son), has been predicting for many years that technology for any particular field would become ever more transparent. He was clearly right.

In the past, we had to train our people on the technology before we could train them with the technology.

Now, technology has become so user-friendly and pervasive that technology is no longer the focus. Technology has become transparent. Now, we can focus on creating strategically relevant content.

To read B&A’s findings in detail, take a look at the August 2008 issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine.

To learn more about organizational effectiveness topics use the Search function on my blog and read my book, Strategic Organizational Learning (available at Amazon.com or my website http://www.mikebeitler.com/).

There are also many free resources on the Free Stuff page on my website.