Learning Factories: Leveraging Hidden Learning Heroes in Your Organization
Customer Spotlight, eLearning, LMS, News | December 15, 2019
Through their LMS, the State of Arizona has developed over 7,000 mini learning factories—led by supervisors—that build and track custom learning paths for over 63,000 staff, interns, and volunteers. In addition to offering courses produced by L&D, supervisors can publish custom content for their teams and request permission to share it with other groups. This approach empowers the organization to implement action-oriented learning opportunities that promote problem solving and address team and department-specific demands.
Regardless of industry, many L&D departments and professionals are being asked to deliver more training using fewer development resources as organizations try to keep up with:
If this sounds familiar, you may be left wondering how you can continue to implement effective training that improves employee and organizational performance and still meet these increased demands.
After all, even learning heroes have their limits.
In many mid-to-large scale organizations, learning assets are produced by a central unit (typically L&D) and then pushed down to target audiences. This is an effective approach for implementing large-scale training initiatives and ensuring staff receives consistent messaging; however, what about those smaller but still time sensitive training needs that are sitting in the production pipeline – or that never make it to the pipeline in the first place?
Is it possible that there are other learning heroes in the organization—on team and department levels—who are addressing those training needs now, under the radar?
One way to address increasing demands without adding L&D staff is to empower supervisors and managers—those undercover learning heroes—to supplement your offerings by running their own mini learning factories via the LMS. Such learning factories could be considered informal branches of L&D that:
This approach blends the value of a top-down learning organization (e.g. professionally developed learning assets, consistent messaging) with the need to offer training that addresses your organization’s changing needs at a department, team, and individual level.
You’ve heard the saying “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” The same concept applies to supervisor-led learning factories.
First, it is important to recognize that learning factories “are based on a didactical concept emphasizing experimental and problem-based learning. The continuous improvement philosophy is facilitated by own actions and interactive involvement of the participants.”2
If you want supervisors to be able to deliver effective training, you need to:
In short, if you define competencies, offer a “train-the-trainer” session to supervisors, and implement a LMS that supports learning factories, supervisors will be better able to offer training that triggers fast problem solving and helps their teams address challenges and adapt to change.
Through their LMS, The State of Arizona has developed over 7,000 mini learning factories—led by supervisors—that build and track custom learning paths for over 63,000 staff. In addition to offering courses produced by L&D, supervisors publish custom content for their teams and request permission to share it with other groups. This approach empowers The State of Arizona to implement action-oriented learning opportunities that address individual department needs and promote problem solving at the department, team, and individual level.
To accomplish this, The State of Arizona partnered TraCorp, their LMS provider, to:
The State of Arizona implemented this system within 30 days and it is managed by three LMS administrators. In one year they delivered over 366,000 hours of training, including 2,900 e-learning courses and 19,000 instructor-led training courses facilitated across the state.
TraCorp would be happy to meet with you to discuss how you can leverage your LMS to support learning factories throughout your organization.
Together, we’ll find answers to these questions:
In short, if you define competencies, offer a “train-the-trainer” session to supervisors, and implement a LMS that supports learning factories, supervisors will be better able to offer training that triggers fast problem solving and helps their teams address challenges and adapt to change.