All organizations rely on skills and competencies to survive. Today there is an increasingly important need for deep specialization among all employees, and the resulting trend toward collaborative, informal training and learning strategies. Driven by the adoption of new technologies, a younger workforce and the need to share information more quickly, informal learning has now become a critical strategy for corporate HR and business leaders.
There is a lot of buzz out there currently - however many companies are still in pilot and orientation status when it comes to the question: how can we leverage social media in the HR area for learning and talent development.
Together with Prof. Arming Trost - also an ex SAP colleague and passionate like me for learning & talent-management - I recently published a book with several articles on People Development 2.0. It deals with the next generation of Learning, Talentdevelopment and Knowledge Exchange - driven by social media, GenY, and the new emerging war for talents. We try to give inspiration and clearity with the viewpoints & 1st experiences from academics, analysts and different companies.
There is only one english article (rest is in german 🙂 - which i would like to share with the SAP Community network: It is from Josh Bersin, the “go to” source for learning and HR decision makers seeking product and market data, insight on trends and expert advice on enterprise learning and talent management. (a interesting sidenote: Josh worked at Sybase in his earlier career).
Please find here a link to the article: Formalized Informal Learning: A New Architecture for Corporate Learning
In my own experience though I have seen it much more easy to push social media and informal learning standalone and not connected/ integrated to formal learning. Like the SAP Education Community or diverse SAP internal plattforms from SAPtube to our Employee Network incl. Wikis, Social Networks, Forums etc. However I would love to see more leaders from HR & LoBs push the "formalized informal" direction Josh describes. It makes sense, although initally it sounds a bit paradox. (At SAP Education we are working on such integrated models and hope to release some soon.)
What are your opinions, experiences, ideas towards "formalized informal learning"?
