Content Curation For Learning: A New Learning And Development Mindset And Skill Set
One of the biggest challenges for Learning and Development (L&D) is the changing needs of business that requires employees to have the capabilities and mindset to quickly learn, and unlearn, to keep up with the pace of change. While there is a deluge of content over the internet, this problem of plenty challenges learning professionals to:
- Use this widely available information to meet the organizational learning requirements.
- Manage the information and cognitive overload at the organizational, and personal level for learners.
- Extract, and package information in a manner that is relevant, timely, and concise.
Our recent survey on our upcoming LearningCafe webinar highlights how learning strategies are evolving, so as to lift business performance, and drive continuous learning. We surveyed 100+ L&D professionals.
Survey Insights
- Content curation's growing popularity is undisputed, with most respondents indicating it to be a part of their learning strategy.
- The accelerating speed of business, and the growing challenge to do more with less, certainly implies the need for L&D to acquire skills like content curation that helps to distill useful content.
- Content curation has given Learning and Development a new way to keep up with the ever-increasing pace of learning delivery goals, by curating high-quality content in a short period of time.
- The first step to effective content curation is to think of learners as consumers, so as to curate the right learning resources that deliver the most value.
- While finding meaningful learning effectiveness, measures will always be L&D's top priority, since tracking learner engagement is considered to be the most robust metric for curated content.
Webinar Statistics
Nearly all surveyed respondents, 81% report that they have made a significant start by adopting content curation as part of their learning strategy reflecting a tremendous progress in this area. While 12% said they were unsure, 7 % said they were yet to implement.
L&D sees itself amid a role change, with 78% indicating L&D should take up content curation as a new skill. 18 % said they were unsure, while only 4% expressed the need to outsource it.
Our stats reflect the various benefits of content curation where 42% believe it drives employees towards continuous learning, and 38% felt it provides high-quality content in a short span of time. The remaining 15% said it can bring about a diversity of thoughts, and establish thought leadership, while only 5% felt it could help overcome budget and time constraints.
Among the top best practices for effective content curation, 71% indicated that understanding their employees was most critical, followed by 21% who felt content selection is the second most important practice. Only 5 % said content distribution is important, while 3% said it is important to customize, and contextualize the learning experience by annotating content.
While Learning and Development teams move to newer methods of learning delivery, evaluating success by different metrics becomes equally important. 79% of our respondents felt tracking employee engagement can help decide if the curated content was useful and compelling to learners. 14% said the increase in time spent can help measure the success of the program, while 7% said the frequency of visits to the curated site, and the number of views and clicks it receives could be some of the key metrics.
Summary
While curation is almost as old as human civilization itself and has been central to the media industry (newspapers) for quite sometime, it is now rapidly becoming one of the key L&D skills. L&D is at the beginning of the content curation journey and may not be tapping into its existing body of knowledge, and skills. Being heavily reliant on designing, and building new content is faced by many learning teams in large organizations, creating training, and development programs, and solutions for changing business needs. Most companies are moving towards curating existing and open source content to drive continuous learning around experience, education, exposure, and environment for the development of strategic capabilities that are more aligned to their organizational strategy.
From a standalone function delivering mostly classroom, and compliance, or technical learning, L&D is now becoming a sophisticated function incorporating newer methods to keep the workforce ready for the accelerating speed of business. Is L&D ready to "sell" this concept to stakeholders addicted to bespoke?
