I am promising to myself to read more and blog more in 2012.
Here are some of the questions I want to explore in 2012.
- What’s
changed in the learning and development industry? I will be completing 20
years in the industry and yet I feel the more things change, the more they
remain the same.
- How are the
CxOs and Business Heads really viewing talent development? While most CxOs say
that talent development is a key driver to the growth of their organizations,
what are they really doing about it?
- What’s keeping
the training managers awake? What are the training managers’ performance
drivers, their goals and the challenges they are facing.
- What are the
expectations from Social Learning? While social learning is being talked
about in the learning blogger circles, are the on-ground managers in synch with
it? What is their understanding and expectations from it?
- What are
the learner’s expectations from talent development interventions? While the
focus is on seeking the managers’ views, what about the people who are actual recipients
of the talent development interventions? What do they look for?
- What’s
the new ROI/ROE mantra? With tightening budgets, everyone wants to know the
“ROI” of their training spend. ROI has been the holy grail of training,
everyone is seeking it, but there are no clear cut answers to this.
Would love to hear from you on these and other things on
your mind. Looking forward to your comments and conversations here.
Wishing you and your loved ones a Very Happy New Year.
It’s been a rather quiet 2011 on this blog. Thanks to a
couple of guest posts, there were 12 real posts in the whole year. As I reflect
on last year, the usual excuse of getting very little time was the first one
that sprung to mind. But in reality, I think I just didn't make enough effort. There
were many blog posts that crossed my mind that didn’t get written. Many reflections
that I wanted to share, many questions that I wanted to explore. Hopefully 2012
will be a better year for this blog. With renewed vigor in the New Year, I am
hoping that I will post a lot more frequently in 2012.
Here’s a summary of blog posts of 2011:
- I
explored the question of whether an organization/business unit should be delivery led or sales led. I am still struggling to find
the right balance.
- Taking
a stab at rants, I make a case that It's Not This Or That, It's This AND That.
- A
sponsored guest post by Ronnie Friedmann on Painless way to get and give employee feedback.
- Picking
up a question on Twitter, I share some of the lies I have heard by people while quiting their job.
- In
a guest post by Puja Anand, she shares her categorization of Clients from Hell.
- A
video presentation talk by Sir Ken Robinson triggered my thoughts on driving divergent thinking in our children.
- Rupa
Rajagopalan has been instrumental in running the Instructional Designers
Community of India for the last few years along with some other enthusiastic
members of the profession published my interview in their newsletter IDConnect.
- Another
guest post by Puja Anand in which she shares her experiences of dealing with clients from different cultures.
- An experience sharing event at work triggered this post in which I share my defining customer moments.
- I
explore the question Is changing jobs the best way of getting a raise.
- In
the quest for learning something “new” all the time, the younger people are
losing the quest to hone and improve what they know and keep struggling with “I am not learning anything new”.
- A
call from a recruiter who had not checked my LinkedIn public profile made me
wonder why recruiters aren’t using social networking to hire.
In a recent post,
RWW reports that “In a study of 300 hiring managers and
recruiters, Palo Alto-based social networking monitoring service Reppler
reports that 76% of hiring managers look at applicants' Facebook profiles. An
additional 56% are looking at Twitter, and 48% check out LinkedIn.”
The fact that recruiters should be checking out basic info
on social networks makes perfect sense to me. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem
true, at least for Indian recruiters. I recently got a call from a recruiter,
apparently someone involved in senior level recruitment in a reputed
recruitment firm in India. So this guy starts with introducing himself and how
he is specifically focused on senior level recruitment and how they carefully handpick
the candidates for select senior level jobs. He goes on to say that he got my
reference through someone (he wouldn’t reveal his ‘source’).
After the pleasantries, he asks me about my career background.
I said my career profile is listed on LinkedIn and asked him if he had checked
that before calling me.
Oh we don’t check LinkedIn profiles, we are required identify
candidates from independent sources, he says to my surprise.
Sure, that’s okay but having identified me from independent
sources, why haven’t you checked my public profile before calling me?
Oh no, we aren’t supposed to do that.
Duh!!!!!!!!
Why don’t the recruiters realize that they are wasting the
candidate’s and their own time by not reviewing the profile on social networking
sites? Surely they will be able to find a better job-candidate match by
reviewing the profile before they approach the candidates.
I am not learning anything new.
I am still doing what I did
years ago.
There is no “growth” for me.
I have heard this a few times lately. It seems there’s a
quest for continuous learning. And there’s the quest for learning something “new”
all the time. Unfortunately there’s no quest to hone and improve what we know.
There’s a quest to spread ourselves thin without learning in depth about
anything. If I have done something once, it seems I know everything there is to
know about it. And “growth” is only a rung in the corporate ladder, a
designation change.
Huh!!!
Pandit Jasraj is still singing after years and years of
singing. I wonder if he says I am not learning anything new and that I have singing
for all these years. I am still a singer, what I was 20 years ago, there’s no “growth”
for me.
If the quest is for continuous learning something new each
time, what are we doing about it? Are we reading new things? Are we spending
time networking with other knowledgeable people and engaging in a conversation
with them? Are we writing and speaking about what we are learning?
And are we actually willing to learn? How can we be willing
to learn anything new if we believe that we know it all? Where is the space for
new learning in this situation?
