During a recent conversation with a Learning & Development Head of a large corporation, she posed an interesting question: “Who, do you think, can evolve into a better L&D Manager—a trainer or an instructional designer?” The more I contemplated the SWOT of each role, the harder it was for me to hazard a black-and-white answer.
The [...]
Archive for the ‘Optimizing costs & resources’ Category
Trainer vs. Instructional Designer
Posted in Optimizing costs & resources on September 25, 2008 | 1 Comment »
From R&D to L&D – Optimizing cost and resources (7)
Posted in Optimizing costs & resources on August 25, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Bob took all the benefits of this L&D initiative to the Board at the annual general meeting to review the entire project. All key stakeholders were present at this meeting. Over the review, the team identified many benefits, such as rise in sales by 13%, increase in repeat orders, improvement in customer satisfaction index, and [...]
Instructors 2.0 (3)
Posted in Delivering for business results, Optimizing costs & resources on July 31, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
(With inputs from Nilesh Vani, Executive Vice President, Aptech Learning Services)
Blended Training
With so many factors conspiring against the instructor, how could we have effective training in organizations?
In his classic 1954 article, The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching, B.F. Skinner—the father of operant conditioning—described the conditions of the typical classroom as particularly adverse [...]
Instructors 2.0 (2)
Posted in Delivering for business results, Optimizing costs & resources on July 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
(With inputs from Nilesh Vani, Executive Vice President, Aptech Learning Services)
Adults need to be involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction
School and college students, by design, do not have a say in what they have to learn. Learned collegiums of wizened educators decide what should and should not go into the textbooks. The [...]
Instructors 2.0 (1)
Posted in Delivering for business results, Optimizing costs & resources on July 10, 2008 | 1 Comment »
(With inputs from Nilesh Vani, Executive Vice President, Aptech Learning Services)
“Instructors are indispensable”—the factoid has been drilled into our collective consciousness over millennia. From the gurukuls of ancient India to the Lyceums of the West, this practice of face-to-face instruction to wide-eyed pupils—technically called “pedagogy”—has prevailed through the annals of time.
However, Knowles’ “andragogy” (teaching to [...]
Learning Efficiency @ Work
Posted in Optimizing costs & resources on July 4, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
If your performance as a CLO is in the red this fiscal, you may be wondering how you can possibly convince your Board not to squeeze your budgets any further for the next fiscal, if not worse. At the Board meeting this April, make a bold statement, “By the end of this fiscal, I will [...]
Getting started with eLearning 2.0
Posted in Developing quality content, Optimizing costs & resources on June 26, 2008 | 1 Comment »
The second generation of eLearning design, development, and delivery (called eLearning 2.0) are a far cry from the traditional eLearning courseware the world has gotten used to (and, not infrequently, abused on).
Today, learning organizations (read as Learning & Development department of your company) can offer to their in-house subject matter experts (read as Senior Staff) [...]
HR – Key to Quality Manpower
Posted in Aligning to corporate strategies, Optimizing costs & resources on April 11, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Today, paucity of talented resources is a key issue the corporate world is struggling to overcome. Companies recruit employees just to add up the numbers. If you ask any organisation, they will say they are short of “N” hundred/ thousand resources. The widely used corporate parameter to measure erosion in resources is: percentage attrition – again just another number. [...]
Achieving L&D Efficiency in One Year
Posted in Aligning to corporate strategies, Delivering for business results, Developing quality content, Managing resistance to change, Measuring bottom-line impact, Optimizing costs & resources on April 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The Head of Human Resources of a leading ISP company asked me not so long ago what could be the least possible time in which his organization could transition into a “lean, mean, and hard” L&D machine. I thought for a moment and said, “One year, at best.” Of course, as a consultant, I cannot [...]
From R&D to L&D (1)
Posted in Aligning to corporate strategies, Delivering for business results, Developing quality content, General, Managing resistance to change, Measuring bottom-line impact, Optimizing costs & resources, tagged Business Challenge, Failing Marketing strategies, HR concerns, People Differentiation on April 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The Business Case
It’s the end of the first quarter, and the conference room of Acme Corporation was buzzing with activity with “Channel Partners Meet”. Channel partners were generally displeased with the products and services of the company. They were unable to sustain competitive advantages through product differentiators. Though the company kept innovating to offer world-class [...]
