Clarity of purpose and planning
One of the challenges in developing a workforce is to ensure that skills and knowledge meet performance needs in a fast changing environment. Planning for e-learning has tended in many organisations to be based on short-term goals to meet today's specific needs (eg a specific requirement to urgently get all staff up to speed on compliance requirements). In other words, e-learning tends to replace one way of training with another, with the objective of making it cheaper, faster and more enjoyably for the learner.
However, a small number of organisations have recognised that technology offers a way of completely re-thinking the role and contribution of learning to the organisation's performance. These organisations view technology for learning within a longer-term, more innovative perspective - built around supporting organisational business and performance processes and based on an infrastructure and environment that can scale and extend as needs change. This requires a longer-term investment perspective, hard to justify when many organisations have no systems that link learning and performance and when the business case for investment in training tends to work on short-term cycles rather than longer-term strategic goals. Planning therefore becomes more difficult and clarity of purpose and outcomes can change from year to year.
While it's clear that senior management and university staff have a long-term vision for learning and performance in the organisation, a number of the staff interviewed express the view that the bank works on rather too short-term a perspective in its planning, setting of objectives and expectations of outcomes in terms of investment in learning. This dissonance between vision and actual practice during a time of significant change is not unusual among many similar organisations and the University staff and senior e-learning champions clearly recognise this. What it means however is that staff are not hearing a single coherent message about the changes which involve e-learning investment and why this investment is occurring and, to a large extent, they perceive that the investment and e-learning initiatives is 'outside' mainstream organisational strategic development. University management anticipate that the investment in the PLMS and moves to improve links between learning and performance will help to drive a change towards learning that is more embedded in performance, and towards gaining buy-in across the organisation. However, they also recognise that this will require a significant cultural (and systems) changes.
Many organisations also face the challenge of stimulating local ownership of globally set targets and requirements within a fast-moving and highly competitive environment. The University management knows that the approach adopted in the rollout of the proposed PLMS will need to be holistic in systems change management if it is to go some way towards resolving this challenge. It is clear from the pilot that local stakeholders perceive a top down imposition of new learning approaches and could act as a significant barrier to adoption. Engaging and developing practices among line managers will be one of the greatest challenges but may, with the clever use of technology, also help to resolve tensions between the need for local ownership and efficiencies offered in central planning.
...continue to lessons learned (p3)
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