This morning I had some thoughts about what to do for my upcoming presentation for LearnTec2020 in Germany on 28-30 January so here are my thought in a screen dump of tweets. I didn’t want them to get lost in cyberspace so putting them into my blog.  I will be teasing out this session over the weekend.

The Activity Outline within my Session

I’ve continued working on my presentation for LearnTec 2020 and decided it will be less of a presentation by me and more of a facilitated activity session for 1.5 hours where the participants will have to come up with the learning activities themselves (however, I will also add some of my own too).

Activity:

1. Participants will be grouped into specific tables around their particular industries (telecommunications, manufacturing, finance etc) NOT their Learning and Development role.  The reason for this is that I anticipate that people who are in similar industries usually work in similar conditions, constraints, environments and use similar technologies and tools.  (The preference is to MIX these groups up for NEW and DIFFERENT ideas however, I’m going to group them into SAME industries so they all have a level playing field by which to start the discussion at the tables).
2. I’ll ask them to introduce themselves to each other and then come up with a typical work scenario for their industry and to make it as specific as possible.  For example, a work scenario may be that their sales team is a nationally remote team and they have inconsistent work processes across different areas.
3. I’ll then ask them to ASSUME that role.  That is, they’ll need to pretend that they are NOT L&D but instead are the people they usually service. They’ll have to consider the:
   1. Tools and technology available to that worker (NOT the LMS as the first choice)
   2. The environment constraints and opportunities of that worker at work
   3. The current knowledge, skills and experiences of that worker
   4. Define what it is they will need to be able to do
4. The activity will then explore the following questions:(15 mins on each)
   1. How can this worker (the role they’re playing) build new capabilities at work?
   2. How can this worker create context and meaning in their work?
   3. How can this worker cultivate community and collaboration in their work?
5. End it with a debrief around the activity – and how to encourage managers to support learning at work.

The whole idea is to assume that they are NOT L&D but instead put them into the position of the workers and take a more reflective and empathetic approach to co-creating solutions with their workers as opposed to offering stock standard typical L&D solutions (eg. Refer to the LMS; undertake a course).

Throughout the activity, I’ll post the above three questions for people to work on and brainstorm at their tables; and then allocate time for them to talk through these as a group.  They can pick the top 3 to report back to the wider group.

In effect, I’d like to have a general discussion about each one and then ADD some of my own ideas to each – some case studies and examples.

The more I thought about this topic of “Integrating Learning into Work” the more I realised that it’s such a HUGE area.  Everything can be justified as learning as long as the worker makes meaning from it, shares it, gets feedback from it, recreates new value from it, improves their work or applies it to other areas of work.

I have a presentation of different ways to integrate learning into the workplace but I figure that as Learning and Development professionals, technically they SHOULD know these but I want THEM to do the work and share ideas and examples to each other – who are in similar fields so they go back with some ideas they can incorporate straight away.

In the meantime, I have created a Wakelet where I will encourage them to take photos of their work and upload to the collaborative board that they can use and build out as a resource.