Read Up! Look at the World of Research

Here's an excerpt from my February Nuts & Bolts column for Learning Solutions Magazine. Reading broadly in your field will help you expand your surface area and shore up your professional credibility. 

"I thought I knew a lot about my field—I’d been there a decade, after all, and was a voracious reader of trade journals and business books  and a member of a very active community of practice (CoP) for trainers. But grad school, in what I recall as often exhilarating moments, also introduced me to a whole world of academic writing I didn’t know existed. There were studies that shed light on my unease with popular things like personality type-assessments. There was a whole body of literature that explained my sense of breathing better air when at a CoP gathering. There were research-based explanations from Richard Mayer that helped me articulate—finally—why we didn’t want to narrate every word in every online learning program. There were entire books on evaluating training programs and initiatives—like those beloved and institutionalized by my then-employer without any real rationale—and not just single classes. While I’m not interested in arguing about whether people need to get degrees to work effectively, I would argue that a practitioner can benefit from learning more about the academic work in their chosen field." 

The article ends with suggestions for professional reading for those in L&D and similar fields. You can access it here.