The best L&D resources of February 2023
Lavinia Mehedin?u
Co-Founder & Learning Architect @ Offbeat | Learning & Development ??
This monthly version of?Offbeat?is a curation of the curation (a bit of inception) we send each Sunday to our subscribers. Our official newsletter has tons of additional goodies you will want to check, so feel free to subscribe right?here.
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Other things we've done:
Now I'll let you enjoy the best resources of the past month ????.
There’s lots of need for more open-source resources in our industry, so I was happy to find Cyril’s article about how they thought of their mentorship program at tb.lx. From how they define a mentor, the different phases of the mentoring process, and other resources for mentors & mentees. Big thanks to Cyril!
I’ve heard so many good things about Kaospilot, I became a bit of a fangirl behind the scenes. So naturally, I was ecstatic finding this article they wrote back in 2018 about learning experience design. They cover the design process (defining meaningful outcomes, defining the emotional journey, and designing what happens) and the 5E (excitement, entry, engagement, exit, and extension). It’s a pretty unique point of view so I definitely recommend it.
As always, one short article from Srishti put more structure into how I think of learning, learning design, and this particular time, research for learning. My favorite thing is the clear distinction between building the right course - focused on the what and why and building the course right - focused on the how. But there’s more in the form of questions and methods, and it’s super short and digestible.
I’m usually pretty outspoken when a new report comes out, especially one as popular as LinkedIn’s Learning Trends. This time I stayed as quiet as a mouse. That’s because it gave me mixed feelings, to say the least. So instead of doing any sort of recap, I’d invite you to read it by keeping in mind some questions. How significant is the participants’ pool for the findings to be considered relevant? When was the research conducted? Where do quotes come from? Enjoy!
What should an L&D team that creates exciting learning experiences look like? This PDF covers eight skill sets that can improve your internal learning team. It also provides ideas on how to get these skills. If you're building or improving your learning team, this will give you some food for thought.
Well, thank you! I keep reading reports about how important skill-building is for organizations and how everyone is investing, working hard, and being very intentional about it. However, the conversations I have with L&D professionals reveal a different reality. At some point, you might start to think you're a bit crazy, and I might be. But there are indications that the discrepancy is not only perceived by us practitioners. At least that's what this article suggests.
Srishti makes an interesting point in this article. We all want to drive impact through our learning experiences. Change behaviors. Improve performance. But for that to happen, people need to feel the good feels - happiness being the top of mind. According to her, to create joyful learning experiences, you need to consider the 3 Cs: Choice, Celebration, and Conversation.
Our friends from NextArrow put together a small guide to read as a solution to our attendance problems. They explore surprise & delight, social proof, reciprocity, authority, loss aversion & scarcity, and commitment & consistency as theories that can drive up attendance. For each of them they talk about the hypothesis behind, ideas you can explore, and even point to papers you can read to better understand each theory.
Lovely guide you can go through when setting up your mentorship program that covers goal-setting, logistics like meeting cadence & program length, application creation, matching magic, matching introduction, mentorship training, and lots and lots others. It’s a very practical, hands-on tool!
More often than not our stakeholders don’t call it like that. They usually say “I want a feedback training”, “I want a time management training”. Of course, behind these requests can be anything. A process blocker, a system blocker, a lack of awareness, or a need for behavioral change.?It’s your role to pill the onion and discover the real problem. The framework says that making the new behavior possible requires removing frictions and implementing enablers, signals, and reinforcers.
I love resources that bring a new perspective! If you’re currently reflecting on your career or helping others do the same you might find this one resource extremely helpful. Bulent explores the four facets of a career, which are Career Design, Career Development, Career Operations, and Career Strategy.
Supporting junior employees through sponsorship is essential for career advancement. However, it's not a unidirectional partnership where the sponsor holds all the power. In reality, sponsees play a crucial role and their contributions are just as significant, if not more significant, than that of the sponsor. This article outlines six critical characteristics that successful sponsees possess.
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As companies bet on sponsorship to develop and retain talent, sponsees must engage wholeheartedly in the relationship. The work requires preparation, authentic presence, and patience, and at its best it should be dynamic and bidirectional.
Something nice from Amazing If that can inspire a nice learning campaign. The purpose of the Squiggly Career Calendar is to support you to design career development in your everyday. They prepared exercises and lots of inspiration for every month, covering feedback, work/life fit, building belief, and lots, lots of others.
“Organizational resilience is the ability of an organization to continue to thrive and meet its objectives in the face of adversity by adapting and transforming.” Well, since we’re facing lots of adversity, we definitely need to talk more about resilience. And LifeLabs will do just that in this 6-part series they’re launching. They started by providing a framework leaders can use to quickly diagnose their organization’s resilience strengths and gaps.
This month I was introduced to the term multipotentialite. I have always felt a bit of an odd duck at times because I’ve had multiple interests while others around me specialized very clearly in one or another domain. It’s interesting to see there’s an actual term for what I was experiencing, and this article also describes how to be an effective multipotentialiate. Lovely!
Drumrolls, please! Apparently, according to LifeLabs Learning there's a new skill companies are looking for. It's called super-learning, and it's all about being able to learn things quickly and efficiently. Instead of just memorizing facts, super-learners know how to extract insights, transfer knowledge to different contexts, and even help others learn. If you want to be a super-learner, try these three habits: schedule time to reflect on what you've learned, practice transferring your knowledge to different situations, and help others learn by explaining things to them.
So many great questions answered in this short article! From why storytelling is important, to two small frameworks for creating your story arc, 5 tips to be a better storyteller, storytelling with data, mistakes made in storytelling, and a framework for giving presentations. I loved, loved, loved how packed it is!
Not 100% L&D, but those passionate about facilitation will definitely appreciate the resource. I won’t give you all the details, but what I enjoyed most are the questions posed for food for thought, like: is facilitation a lonely profession? Are facilitation communities on the rise? Will future opportunities to learn facilitation skills emerge in the formal and nonformal education systems?
The Kinetic Method: A playbook for problem solving by Dr. Tracie Farrell , Karolina Iwa , and Zora Csalagovits
WOW! So I’m a sucker for high-quality design, good storytelling and content. And this guide has it all. It contains lots of exercises and theories for problem-solving, sparking creativity, and co-creation among others. It’s literally a book, so you’ll need to have the mental space for it, but I totally, totally recommend it!
Haven’t we talked enough about motivation, Lavinia? Why yet another article about it? Well, I learned something new from this one, so I wanted to share it with you. The difference between goodwill and utility embracing. I’ll only give you the definitions and let you explore the rest. Goodwill is the difference between the minimum amount of work you have to do to keep your job and the max you could do if you really love your job. Utility embracing ss the idea that we should go beyond what’s stated in our job descriptions, and do what’s needed in the workplace.
Green skills. Something we will probably hear more and more about in the next following years. If you’re lucky enough to already have sustainability initiatives in your organization, this paper might bring you some ideas and inspiration, and maybe a better understanding of how L&D can be brought on board to fight something I believe is very real and extremely important not only for each organization but this (still) beautiful planet we call home.
Collaboration & the future of work from Butter ?? , Miro , Mischief Makers B.V. , and nlmtd
And since we’re talking about hybrid workplaces, here’s another awesome resource to guide you. It’s the curated output of an event hosted by a team of awesome people from Butter, Miro, Mischief Makers, and nlmtd, and it covers: building connection and puting humans first, focussing on the new skills that matter, organisational policies & de-centralised culture, and visibility and effective tools.
Building psychological safety is a people manager’s day-to-day responsibility. It doesn’t have a start, it doesn’t have an end. It’s something you gain as time goes by. Here’s a nice resource, with 12 simple questions, people managers can ask about their teams to determine the level of psychological safety in their teams.
Lots and lots of resources in this article, from the Culture Design Canvas to key roles to facilitate culture transformation, techniques for facilitating courageous conversations about culture, or the key phases of culture design: mapping, assessment, and design.
I can still remember the first time I read a Dave Ulrich book. It brought so much clarity around how HR functions can be seen in big companies, it felt refreshing to read. I kept on following him and I still find his writings to be a great inspiration for HRs as time goes by. I would start by exploring the 9 recent approaches to characterize today’s HR Function.
This is not, in any way, an L&D-only resource. BUT, if you’re like me, feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the conversations about AI and eager to understand what it is, what it is not, and what it can do for the world, I received it as a recommendation so I’m spending some time with it.
The most interesting part of this article is the diagram at the bottom. It looks at 4 types of organizations and their characteristics. The type represented as the winner has a dual focus on people and performance and shows 7 characteristics: (1) empowering and challenging leadership, (2) widespread ownership and alignment with vision, (3) company-wide innovation and collaboration, (4) inclusive work environment, (5) transparent performance expectations and incentives, (6) support for entrepreneurship and initiative taking, and (7) effective on-the-job coaching and training.
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Senior Learning Facilitator at Climate-KIC | Author | Generative System Change | Collapse-aware Leadership & Collaboration |?Solarpunk Practitioner
2 年Thank you for the shout out Lavinia. Had to laugh, when I read "It’s literally a book, so you’ll need to have the mental space for it, but I totally, totally recommend it!". To anybody who prefers shorter formats, we recorded some podcasts. The introductory one is just 17 minutes and you can find it on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/kineticatwork/episode-1-introduction-to-the-kinetic-method
Speaker, Author, Professor, Thought Partner on Human Capability (talent, leadership, organization, HR)
2 年Lavinia Mehedin?u Thanks for including our article on how to build HR functional effectiveness through a value logic. We think the value logic also applied to L&D activities where the focus is not just on the L&D activity (e.g., coaching, training, mentoring, assignments, etc), but on the outcomes of thseL&D activities. The outcomes clealry included employee development from learning, but also other stakeholders including the business defines and delivers strategy, customers build long term relationships, investors have more confidence, and communities have higher imagines or reputations of the firm. When L&D creates stakeholder value (as part of the overall human capability agenda), it becomes even more central to business decisions. Thanks for curating ides that move this agenda forward.