The future of work and the digital era is getting a lot of attention in today’s learning and performance space. New workforce dynamics, end-to-end digital technologies, and internal/external organizational transparency all are aspects of the future of work and digital era that organizations are confronting today. We can’t be lulled into thinking that the future of work is something not yet happening. It is here now! The need for increased relevancy and improved performance within this transforming environment has created the need for learning organizations to rethink how they bring value to the organization. Content curation is one very important component of an overall learning transformation strategy.
In our recent webinar, Kerry Hearns-Smith spoke about the importance of having a content curation strategy that is anchored in business outcomes. By working with the end users in the business to better understand the day-to-day challenges being faced and the demand for specific knowledge and skills, you can build a content curation strategy that supports actual needs rather than perceived needs. Another aspect of building an effective content curation strategy is ensuring that it is supporting the desired learner experience. Curation plays a critical role in establishing the desired learner experience. Being able to have the right content, in the right modality, accessible at the right moment for the learner drives that relevancy and improved performance. Curation plays a key role in this. A content curation strategy that has strong governance in terms of the quality, type, standards, and maintenance of the right content facilitates learning in a way that can bring maximum engagement, leading to improved performance.
Some key considerations when creating your content strategy include the following:
- Be anchored in business outcomes.
- Take the complex and filter to the contextually relevant, preventing wasting people’s time wading through irrelevant content and delivering at the moment of need.
- Help build self-directed journeys that include context to the employee’s role and function and push learning into the workflow…blurring the lines between work and learning.
- Identify the most relevant content and use enabling technologies to create a learning ecosystem that provides a frictionless, all-access point for the learner to acquire knowledge and skills.
- Reduce the requirements for new content development by leveraging existing internal and external content in order to provide a truly blended experience.
Below are responses to a couple of the questions we did not have time to cover completely during the webinar.
Q: How do you get started with a curation strategy with a heavy risk/governance model to go through?
A: In a heavy risk/governance model, curation can be used as a good supplemental option to help support growth and reinforcement of the topic and skills. It helps to provide alternate mediums and perspectives that can be used to broaden applicability of the skills being focused on.
Q: What are the biggest mistakes you see people make in creating a content curation strategy?
A: The biggest mistake we see is that the content curation strategy is not connected to a broader transformation strategy that addresses the change in approach to learning, how the learning is accessible for the end learner. Another mistake is how the learning organization ensures that the learning professionals have the right mindsets and skills to effectively curate. Ensuring the content curation strategy is connected to a broader learning transformation strategy with strong governance and change management approach helps to avoid many of the common mistakes made in creating and implementing an effective content curation strategy.
Q: What business challenge is not good for content curation?
A: Curation works best when the focus is on building awareness around a topic or a skill area. When proficiency in a complex, precision-type skill, such deep statistical analysis or how to perform a surgery, is the focus, curation can be something that supplements but should not be the primary approach to building the learning and assessing the proficiency level.
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