L&D Articles of the Week, Just in Case You Missed Them

Hey everyone, Hope you’re having a good week thus far.  October has got me in a good mood, with new seasons of my favorite TV shows (and sadly one coming to an end), and my favorite sports teams beginning a new campaign.  I guess it gives a sense of renewal, or always getting a new chance. Isn’t that what learning is all about as well?  🙂 With that said, here are your 5 articles of the week. 12 Cool Ways to Use Scenarios (Cathy Moore’s blog) – Cathy presents 12 ideas for other ways you can use branched scenarios to help people practice solving problems, outside the training world. Time for Change: MOOCs and Learning Technology (Chief Learning Officer) – Josh Bersin examines the development of massive open online courses and the way they are  changing training.  Bersin says that the corporate learning market will use MOOC-based education as a form of accredited learning, and the the corporate investment in MOOCs will continue as the investment grows in education in as a whole.  Interesting read. On-Demand Personalized Learning: Strategic and Agile (Learning Solutions Magazine) – “Training content is moving beyond large courses, to semantically rich nuggets of information. Developers have created a whole host of specialized, next-generation performance-support apps that deliver personalized, bite-sized learning to employees at the moment-of-need on the device of their choice.” So begins Sarah Danzl in her article yesterday on learning within the flow of work.  She rightly speaks about the importance of relevance and specificity.  A great piece. Survey: Soft Skills Make Up the Biggest Competency Gap (Chief Learning Officer) – more great content from CLO this week. According to a survey from Adecco Staffing US, 92 percent of senior executives in the U.S. acknowledge there is a serious gap in workforce skills. Yet for all the traditional talk about a skills gap in technical and computer skills, 44% of respondents cited soft skills — such as communication, critical thinking, creativity and collaboration — as the area with the biggest gap. In fact, only 22% cited a lack of technical skills as the culprit for the U.S. skills gap — with leadership (14%) and computer skills (12%) following behind. How Technology Changes the Skill We Need to Learn (Forbes.com) – A look by Greg Satell at the impact of techology on learning, in the sense that computers can learn so much quicker and more than human can. As Greg writes: “The truth is that technology makes us both dumber and smarter.  In our technological age, we use machines to do many things we used to do for ourselves, so it shouldn’t be surprising that we’re getting worse at performing certain tasks.  We have been engineered by evolution to conserve our limited capacities by adapting to our environment.” Highly recommended reading.