Get a (Learning) Room: How can SuccessFactors Learning Rooms help you?

In this second blog in our Get a (Learning) Room series, Kate Wilson from our SuccessFactors team explains how using a SuccessFactors learning room can help you succeed.

• Recent college graduate who is new to consulting and ready to learn
• Experienced consultant specializing in on-premise HCM who is transitioning to Cloud HCM
• Subject matter expert in one Cloud HCM product who is learning a second Cloud HCM product
• None of the above

My name is Kate Wilson, I’m an Education Consultant at SAP, and I’m here to explain why Learning Rooms on the SAP Learning Hub are the goldmine of resources and support during e-learning courses you’ve always wanted.

In 2014, Learning Rooms were created to breathe life into e-learning courses. The hallmark of a learning room is the ability to connect with experts and peers anytime, and anywhere you feel like it. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) that truly care about your success monitor each Learning Room; I can speak to this from personal experience moderating my own learning room, Performance Management Goal Management HCM Academy, a member of the SuccessFactors suite of products.

A little bit of everything. You will find curated libraries of tutorial videos, documents created specifically for questions you or your peers have asked, sample CSV, DTD, and XML files to test configurations, quarterly release ‘Delta’ information, and anything else the moderating expert thinks would help you understand a product to the best of your ability. Each learning room has its own personality, so content may vary between rooms. I encourage you to ask your resident learning room expert for material(s) that would help you master a product, because we don’t know what you need unless you ask!

Information overload. This is how I feel after learning a new product, every time. You are bound to run into a few error messages here and there; this is when resourcefulness comes into play. Given what you know, what could be causing the problem? Once you have identified a potential cause, where might you find resources to help solve the problem? The SuccessFactors learning rooms are designed not only to help you collaborate with peers and instructors on solving configuration challenges, but also walk you through an expert’s thought process when troubleshooting tricky configurations. For example, this is what I do when stuck on a configuration: 

1. General assessment: Did I follow the instructions for this configuration correctly? Did I skip a step? Are permissions missing? What is this error message trying to tell me?
2. Based on the general assessment, I try a few different variations of the configuration in my instance.
3. If that does not work, it’s time to check the learning room to see what my peers are doing to troubleshoot their configurations, and what the resident moderating expert suggests.
4. In the learning room, I search through questions and answers postedin the forum for the unit I am currently working through, watch relevant tutorial videos, read job aids and supplemental documents, and follow instructions provided by the resident expert.
5. After collecting resources from the learning room, I test, test, and test my configuration a few more times.
6. If I’m still stuck, it’s back to the learning room to continue collaborating with my peers and the expert moderating questions. While waiting for an answer, I will either continue troubleshooting independently or carry on learning with the next lesson.

Learning rooms are not static collections of information; they are living communities where you can talk to genuine people. As a moderator, I use Learning Rooms to share the latest and greatest information as soon as I have it – I want you to be successful! As a learner, I leverage the community of peers, experts, and resources to take configurations beyond course exercises with application to common business challenges. Whether in a Learning Room as a moderator or student, I always gain new perspectives from the multi-dimensional array of shared experiences. 

After becoming a Subject Matter Expert in a particular area, it can be easy to forget how you got there. I find it humbling to start over with a new product and remember what it’s like to be the opposite of an expert. It can be difficult to know questions to ask or areas to focus on when you don’t know what you don’t know. I hope you find the SuccessFactors learning rooms enable you to navigate the labyrinth of information that comes with each new product, and encourage you totackle more!

Biography:
Kate Wilson joined SAP through SuccessFactors as an Education Consultant in 2013 and regularly teaches partner-facing implementation courses and customer-facing administration courses in the SAP Knowledge Transfer & Education (KT&E) department. She also managed the creation of the SuccessFactors Learning Rooms and continues to maintain the general structure of all rooms, while primarily supporting Performance and Goal Management. Kate received an M.A. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Minnesota State University, Mankato.