Informal Training – Developing Hidden Talent

In order to uncover hidden talent in your organization there are two main ingredients you need.  First your company must engender an atmosphere of collaboration, the team environment critical to many operations today.  This even in light of the reality that employees are in fact competing with each other, for bonuses and promotions.  We will talk more about that later, the second key ingredient is access to tools which empower workers to express not only new ways of doing things your doing already, but also the capture of new ideas – new venues that may be in fact the next step in the evolution of your company or key insights to avoid pitfalls that may only be observed at close range.

Blogs – the free writing of ideas for public or private consumption.  It is no accident that many news organizations often refer to many different blogs for stories and ideas that a thin organization cannot hope to possible cover completely.  Fact checking is essential to the function of using these blogs but in the end some sources prove themselves to be reliable and fact oriented.  Your teammates each have unique experiences and skills that are the result of many years of refinement and the school of hard knocks.  Not everyone is a skilled writer and so wide means of expression including diagrams, video, and audio should be supported by the toolset you choose.

Wiki’s – Hawaiian for quick these customizable web pages should not be underestimated.  The printing press in many historians minds caused the Renaissance, the wiki is a jump in the next stage of communication.  Empowering many collaborative authors a wiki is best used when describing objective reality, this limits the back and forth that one can experience in a discussion forum.  While your employees can write volumes on their personal blog – proving their expertise in areas which some will be directly related to your business; the wiki’s can be used as a place for brief abstracts of blogs, so that other employees and management can review the abstracts to determine which blogs to further explore.

Just these two Web 2.0 tools: blogs and wikis can begin to document much of the informal trading of information which is done and re-done and re-done in your company everyday.  To reinforce these two the ability to follow or become a fan of particular blogs and wiki pages can utilize the same social forces which are prevalent in the external social media buzz today.

In short using several of the social networking tools but installed behind your firewall or in a private hosted cloud can begin to bring the untapped skills and knowledge of your knowledge workers to help your company profit more.

Framework for Informal Training

In today’s fast paced business environment it is widely recognized that most training in the corporate environment is done informally. Employees are sent to follow others around to observe the details of the proficient or those labeled trainer. Rarely is there documentation or even reference guides that the employee can refer to for additional clarity. Research has found that between 67% and 73% of all training in business is done informally.

Clearly lack of time is a contributing factor, but tools available in the Web 2.0 toolbox can help.

The strategic usage of blogs, wiki’s and other social media tools can provide a framework so while the training remains informal, documentation and cross training can become a natural outgrowth of practices put in place to develop in-house expertise. In the following entries we will discuss how to provide the framework, initiate its germination, and cultivate its continued growth.