Training Industry Magazine - May/June 2018 - 25

Communities
Communities of Practice (CoP) have
been a pillar of knowledge management
strategies for decades. CoPs are groups
usually formed around a common
theme, such as a problem to solve, area
of expertise, client, geography, gender,
race, or role, led by a committed leader
within the group. The ingredients of a
successful community include:
* A solid purpose/reason for meeting
that participants find beneficial to
them;
* A standing, dependable meeting
on the calendar, such as monthly
or quarterly;
* A facilitator or moderator to create
meeting agendas and promote
discussion;
* A scribe to capture ideas and solutions
discussed; and
* A platform to store content and enable
sharing outside of meetings.
Facilitators can rotate to distribute the
responsibility of leading a community,
and, in fact, providing those new
perspectives is very healthy for a
community. It is tempting to have
a learning professional facilitate
communities but they are usually more
successful if led from within the group.
The facilitator needs to encourage active
sharing of ideas, problems, solutions,
successes and lessons. They need to do
this activity outside of meetings as well.
Team sites are a fantastic tool to collect
and codify some of these areas but
communities must be people-focused
and therefore involve a social and
human element, not just technology.

Communities can also exist as an
extension of classroom events to keep
the attendees together for continuous
sharing and learning from one another.

THE ACT OF REFLECTING
AND DESCRIBING WHAT
HAPPENED AND WHY IS
THE CRUX OF KNOWLEDGE
MANAGEMENT.
These cohorts can extend discussion on
a topic raised in the classroom event,
provide opportunities to apply newly
learned skills in context and enable
peer coaching.
Communities can live on forever or be
temporary depending on the benefit to
the group.

User-Generated Content
Sharing tips, tricks and best practices in
social forums has been a long-standing
knowledge management technique.
L&D is taking advantage of current
technology to enable this kind of sharing
to include not only tips learned on the
job but also external content employees
wish to share with others, such as a great
TED Talk, a thought-provoking blog or
article or the latest business book.
L&D has found a way to leverage
these sharing activities to incorporate
richer and more recent content into
formal programs.
Through
social
technology
and
communities, shared content can be
flagged or "promoted" into formal
programs. For example, there are many

TED Talks on effective communication
but there may be one that a CoP
agrees is the best. This talk can be
flagged and formally integrated into
an effective communications program.
Connecting community facilitators and
L&D professionals becomes important
to continuously ensure programs
are relevant to the audience and to
efficiently source and manage content.
Sharing content without some sort of
governance model can quickly make any
learning portal an overgrown garden of
weeds leaving the "flowers," or the best
content, difficult to find.
Providing clear criteria and governance
over what gets "promoted" into a formal,
sponsored program will guarantee
the best and most relevant content is
featured. Good criteria can include the
level of relevance to role, skill, business
or industry, a leading practice, furthers
thinking on the right topic, aligns
with organizational goals, promotes
additional conversation, comes from a
credible resource, among others.

Content Curation
Providing links to the wealth of external
content that exists and continues
to grow at a remarkable rate can be
overwhelming to employees. With the
number of emails, meetings, documents
and links that come at an employee on
a daily basis, sharing more as a "nice to
know..." easily gets lost.
Oftentimes, organizations have access
to external content libraries because
they are cost-efficient resources to
provide employees access to a wide
variety of topics and learning events.
However, employees don't have the time
to sift through different portals or even
hundreds of search results when they

T R A I N I N G I N DUSTR Y MA GAZ INE - GIVING LEARNING A BOOST 20 18 I WWW. T RAININGINDU S T RY . C OM/ MAGAZ I NE

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Training Industry Magazine - May/June 2018