Serendipity and Learning

 I recently read a report on the future of l&d and I must I am disappointed. To sum up, here were the broad points.  Digital learning will grow:  My take: Yes, but getting access to good content is more and more difficult. Companies want to sell you a billion licences. Employees want learning only at the point where they need it and dont want to waste time searching through dozens on videos, learning and unlearning digital frameworks. So, digital learning will grow - but where is the quality?  In future I hope, Digital learning is relevant, shorter (minus the preambles), crisp and very very context specific. I personally think companies are better off investing in making their own content especially if the content has to be repeated - standard frameworks, relevant to the values and so on.  L&D will be key to talent retention: My take: Not in India. Not in tech. I cant think where else. L&D was never and is never the key to talent retention, except in...

It has been a great year of learning... Learning from about 15 different companies...Different cultures..working styles...levels of leadership and maturity...business...challenges...people... Putting myself into, no, out of my own comfort zone and working in very diverse environments - from students to startups to established global tech firms to large format workshops to introducing new concepts into the market... What did I learn? The biggest learning for me has been the learning of how to design better. This is no small learning because I am used to a typical school of designing learning interactions - so to be able to throw what I have learnt out of the window (well, not really) and learn another way of looking into it, has been, both, difficult and interesting. Difficult because I really have to activate Type 2 thinking and interesting because once you go that path, I need to still have my divergent thinking hat ON. Having worked with different people, firms as a consulta...

Here is a disruptive idea for the LnD world. Make that two. How does one make the coordinatosaurus extinct? Exactly the same way that the internet eliminated middlemen. What if we had a marketplace of Learning and Development consultants, vendors, content creators and the like available at one place? Imagine this. A marketplace of Learning partners. With ratings by their users. Searchable by Speciality. Feedback from the companies who have used them. Like Amazon.com. Transparent pricing. Transparent usage. (I know that transparent prices may not exactly be to everybodys liking, but bear with me.) If Redbus can do it and Bookmyshow can do it, why not a Learning portal to sell training and learning to companies (mainly) and employees? As we speak, companies are trying to reduce cost by either outsourcing the entire LnD or hiring cheaper program managers  - whose only job is coordinate trainings. And this is the apt kind of job that should be eliminated – because algorithm a...

A typical coordinatosaurus response to the nature of their work is, “Hey, but I manage many senior business relations – or I am into relationship management”. What is relationship management, especially in the context of service groups like Learning and Development? For a lot of people, their understanding of relationship management is that of a cargo cult science. It means, to drop by someone’s desk, chat a little, asking how things are going and then go underground until the next meeting. It could mean, once in a while, meeting them for tea, taking their opinion on world events or recipes or vacation spots (sarcasm alert). I once met a Business Unit head who told me quite candidly, “Can you ask your team to stop setting meetings with me. I see no value out of them. Just do the work with the assigned coordinator and let me know when you have achieved something. Don't wait for my permission, get going on a business problem and let me know when you have solved it. At that time...

A few years ago, I used to work in the IT industry as a Project Manager. My role was to manage the team. It was my dream job at that time. But the truth was that I was a people manager. I did no real work. Honestly, I had very little idea on what my team exactly did. Somewhere along the way, I realized that I was more and more of an administrator than contributing in any real way to the team and the organization. A series of career moves, mostly out of serendipity, I found myself in the Learning and Development space. And discovered that it is my passion. And over the years, continue to build my skills, bit by bit – and yet remain ‘hands-on’ simply because there is no other way to get better at what you do than by doing it. So, from the point where I should have been happy ‘managing people in IT’ to the point where I became ‘hands-on in LnD’ is the story of the IT and the LnD industry – where the delivery part of IT is facing a crisis. The IT industry today does not want pure peo...