by Joan Cook
Big Question: What new skills and knowledge are required for learning professionals?
This month's Big Question at the Learning Circuits blog asks, "What new skills and knowledge are required for learning professionals?"
At the intersection of the classroom, with all its traditional tools, and the web, with its new ones, stands the learning & development professional. In a world seemingly gone mad for social media and new brain science research, how do we know what embrace and what to let go of, or indeed, what to develop and implement in terms of tools and skills?
I've come to admire Clive Shepherd's blog, Clive on Learning, and his take on the question is that while we still have the same overarching goal (to enhance organizational performance through employee learning and development), those who have sidestepped new media in the hope that it will all blow over have done themselves a disservice. Too many L&D professionals, in his opinion, have fallen behind in their development in regards to the contemporary tools of their profession in ways that would have been unimagineable back in the day. I would also suggest that from what we've seen here at JDA, a great many L&D professionals aren't proficient at presenting, either, regardless of the tools they're using. Lots of us fell into the profession and learned on the go, and the demands being created by new media and new tools are throwing those whose training skills are lacking into sharp relief. If you've never been trained as a trainer, you need to add that to your list of things to accomplish in this brave new world as well.
We're sufficiently interested in this question here that we're exploring the idea of adding social media training to our offerings. More later.
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