Get Rid of Job Descriptions
April 9, 2013
I read a rather provocative blog post the other day titled “get rid of job descriptions and you’ll hire better people”. Lou Adler, who wrote the blog, advocates a performance profile rather than a job/candidate description. For him a performance profile is a description of the work that a person needs to successfully accomplish in [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Tips for your learnscape this spring
March 13, 2013
The term learnscape was coined during the 1970s to denote areas set aside in schools where pupils could interact with the environment and learn from that interaction. It could have been a special plot in the grounds where they planted seeds, a frog pond to observe the frog’s life cycle, or an ant farm in [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Does practice make perfect?
November 15, 2012
Actually, it is not the practice that makes us better at things. Let me explain. If we practice something, that is, we do it repeatedly, we reinforce the neural networks that support that action. It gets easier for us to do. What also happens is that each time we do it, we notice the results [...]
Read the rest of this entry »A vital distinction
October 16, 2012
We just had another article published in the Training Journal (UK) October issue This is based on a Best Practice Guide I wrote some time ago about the difference between eLearning and eReference. When we started doing our market research many years ago prior to building our online management support tool, I noticed that a [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Leadership is not a panacea
October 11, 2012
In a recent opinion piece for ILM’s The Edge Online I discussed why leadership alone won’t solve every organisational problem. It’s clear that developing better leaders is a sure-fire way to improve organisational success. But that’s not all that is needed. If leadership is seen as “the only way out of this mess” and so [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Should leaders be specialists?
October 4, 2012
I got into a discussion online on that age old question as to whether a leader needs to be a specialist in the technical areas worked on by the team they are leading. I certainly know at first hand several situations where a generalist took over a department and did a better job than their [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Social Learning = Social Media? Really?
September 22, 2012
As I near publication of my book on Informal Learning, I notice that there is a lot of misleading information and misconceptions floating about. Just yesterday I commented on a blog which was quite rightly extolling the virtues of Social Learning, but had a very narrow view of just what it is. Social Learning is [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Leadership and learning are linked
September 5, 2012
I was speaking with Elizabeth Eyre, the editor of Training Journal (UK) about some ideas I had been musing over concerning how leadership and learning are interlinked. She got quite excited and asked me to write an article for the magazine. So I thought some more and added to the concepts. I am not sure [...]
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