Crucial Reminder By Kirkpatrick

Nowadays I hardly ever buy books because I spend a lot of time reading from a number of sites such as HBR Blogs, Learning Solution Magazine, Chief Learning Officer, Entrepreneur, Inc and Harvard Business Review. That is not to say that I won't be buying and reading books. I have a number of instructional design books in my Amazon learning and development wishlist that I really want to read, but I need to get a kindle first. No more killing trees for me.
One of the sites I also learn from is Kirkpatrick Partners. Offcourse the name sounds familiar because Kirkpatrick is the evaluation guy.
I routinely receive a newsletter from the Kirkpatrick website with lots of useful information. Just this week I was reading the Quick Tip series from the site. Currently I think they are at Quick Tip 3. After reading the three articles I came up with a list of learning points which I feel are important to any learning and development practitioner and here they are:

1. When discussing learning and development with your stakeholders use business language that they understand not your own industry jargon.
2. Create a robust evaluation framework that can identify the impact of training in the workplace and on the organisation (he would say that wouldn't he?).
3. Provide on the job support tools possibly after a learning programme to encourage application of learning back at work.
4. Create knowledge sharing communities, either physical or virtual.
5. Learning does not end after a classroom training course or an e-learning course completion.
6. Identify what factors affect the application of learning back in the workplace and how to monitor them.
7. From the onset before any learning programme discuss possible barriers to application of learning in the workplace with necessary stakeholders.
8. Work with stakeholders to overcome barriers to effective learning application.
9. Make sure you identify clearly that learning is the right solution for a problem that needs to be tackled.
10. Be assertive enough to tell stakeholders that training alone will not lead to improved performance results.

That's it, summary of my learning from the first three kirkpatrick's quick tips. You might want to have a read of the tips yourself. Here's the website:

http://www.kirkpatrickpartners.com/Blog/tabid/135/Default.aspx