Training Industry Magazine - September/October 2019 - 26

In a nutshell, organizations must try to
preserve this unique information, so that
it is accessible to other employees seeking
similar solutions. Thus, eliminating the
risk of wasting employees' time and effort
because they cannot access the unique,
meaningful knowledge available to them.

New Role of L&D in EmployeeGenerated Learning Model
So, how can L&D enable knowledge
sharing? It is L&D's responsibility to gear
up for the future as a curator, facilitator,
community manager, and marketing and
communication expert alike. Let's combine
the best traits of all these roles and refer
to them as an enterprise knowledge
catalyst, someone who oversees business,
employees and knowledge with the
following core jobs:
* Consulting the business in identifying
performance gaps.

classes, they can solve problems without
disrupting workflow. Secondly, they don't
need to wade through hoards of courses.
They instantly refer to the tested and tried
knowledge and apply it straight away.
L&D can partner with employees to create
a pool of collective wisdom that serves
the rest of the organization and helps
maintain an up-to-date knowledge base -
an internal Google! 

Case Study
In today's fast-paced, competitive telecom
industry with ever-growing learning
requests, T-Mobile's L&D department
faced a significant reduction in resources.
How could T-Mobile fulfill increasing
numbers of training requests with fewer
L&D staff?

Challenge: Fulfilling More
Training Requests with Only
25% of the Previous Staff

* Collaborating with employees to
drive content creation; they inspire,
guide and empower them to share
their expertise.

T-Mobile's situation is very common in the
L&D field; budget cuts reduced the L&D
team from 14 trainers to four while the
demand for training kept increasing.

* Maintaining and monitoring the
knowledge base; they facilitate the
source and structure for preserving
the knowledge.

Training requests were accelerating
because new products were launching
rapidly, the amount of regulation was
increasing and consumers expected
better customer service. Staff cuts forced
the L&D team to reject training requests.
The L&D team knew they needed to find
a way to scale training output while using
only 25% of the previous resources. 

This process is facilitated by L&D and
driven by the employees who create
and share knowledge. We termed this
democratic and collaborative approach
employee-generated learning (EGL),
and here are the cornerstones of
the approach:
* Strategy: Move from top-down to
bottom-up.
* Design and Delivery: Move from
courses to resources.
* Impact: Move from metrics to data.
EGL is a method to capture tacit
knowledge and use this information to
support the performance of employees
in the workflow. Primarily because
employees don't need to step away to
fill knowledge gaps through training

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Solution: Scaling Output by
Enabling Business Units to
Create Training Under the
Guidance of L&D
They knew that the L&D department alone
would never be able to meet the high
demand for training resources. Training
requests would remain unfulfilled and time
to market for training resources would be
too time consuming. For example, Apple
announces its new products very shortly
before they launch. Their resources need
to be tailored to T-Mobile's needs quickly
to ensure sales and marketing staff are

properly trained. The L&D team knew
they needed significantly more people
to create content than a centralized L&D
department could ever facilitate.

Employee-generated Learning
After identifying user-generated content
as the most suitable solution, the L&D
team started a trial of EGL and chose
support tools that had a low learning
curve to suit people who do not have an
e-learning or didactical background.

ORGANIZATIONS MUST
TRY TO PRESERVE UNIQUE
INFORMATION.
Instead of creating training, the L&D
department's main responsibility became
enabling employees to create their
own training. They offered guidance on
questions such as:
* Is there a large enough audience to
create a training resource?
* Does the training resource address a
learning goal?
* Is the training output didactically
sound? For instance, is it visually
appealing, did the creator use the
minimum amount of text needed and
does it include interactive elements?
The responsibility for fulfilling training
requests shifted from the L&D department
to the business units. L&D became
responsible for quality assurance and
guidance, shifting away from content
creation. This transition to EGL resulted in
five times more training, increased delivery
of training resources and eliminated
unfulfilled training requests.

Employees, SMEs and
Knowledge Sharing Tools
This said, if you are taking the route of EGL,
then our industry must envision an SME-
Training Industry Magazine - September/October 2019

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