Professional Education

Those of us who have influential mentors in our lives understand the importance of wisdom passed down from those who share their personal or professional experiences. The importance of mentorship is particularly relevant to today’s government employees. Especially as the Baby Boomer generation prepares to retire, agencies must help capture their decades of institutional and subject matter expertise while passing it on to the upcoming generation of government leaders.

This practice of knowledge transfer, where a group’s knowledge is captured and shared with future users, sounds easy enough to do. But with the increasing use of technology by younger employees and other divides in today’s multi-generational workforce, agencies have a unique opportunity to find creative ways to foster a culture of knowledge sharing.

Here are three strategies that government agencies of all sizes can use to help facilitate knowledge transfer:

1.)  Provide opportunities for observation: Many of today’s new government employees are used to an interactive, hand-on learning experience. By providing opportunities for intra-agency internships and shadowing, they can learn by observing and working with more experienced employees. These opportunities can also show new employees the larger mission of their agency, which is a proven method to retain future leaders.

One of the greatest challenges for today’s military is maintaining high levels of cybersecurity while also leveraging the latest online technologies. With the release of Federal Cloud Computing Initiative, for example, all government organizations—including the military—were tasked with adopting cloud computing strategies to reduce costs and increase internal collaboration without sacrificing security.

At Blackboard, we are excited to be playing an active role in helping the U.S. Army reach these cloud computing goals. As discussed in a recent DefenseNews article by Joe Gould, Blackboard is managing a pilot program to take some of the Army’s nonsensitive educational material to the cloud through this safe, mobile-friendly platform.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of Blackboard’s role this pilot program has been making Army learning more accessible, as the article states:

“You’re seeing more students bringing their own mobile devices to class, and they are used to accessing their class materials wherever they’re at, whether it’s a soccer game, the library or waiting for the bus,” said Lt. Col. Ben Ring, who leads the program at CGSC. “But when students came here, we were restricting them.”

The Army Distributed Learning Program is considering plans to place nonsensitive educational material for noncommissioned officers in a dot-com environment. It may also duplicate the CGSC effort at other institutions, like the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., and the Army Sergeants Major Academy at Fort Bliss, Texas, said Helen Remily, the ADLP capability manager.

“The bottom line is the Army’s training and education is no longer episodic at brick and mortar institutions. It’s a continuum of learning that occurs throughout an individual’s Army career, leveraging distributed learning technology,” Remily said.

Leading the way as an early-adopter into the cloud, the Army can spend less time with technical oversight of their server hardware and more valuable time on their “24/7 mission” from anywhere anytime. You can read the rest of Gould’s article “Army’s learning cloud means accessible class materials” by clicking here, and visit our website learn more about Blackboard’s military learning solutions.

As we prepare for another great year on the Next Level Learning blog, we wanted to look back at some of your favorite posts from 2012.  So, without further ado, here is a list of some of our most popular blog posts from the past year:

 

Career Colleges
Mulgrew: “The lecture does not work.” Do you agree? At this year’s Professional Colleges and Universities Summit, Frank Mulgrew of Post University discussed the disadvantages of passive learning at career colleges. This post explores his arguments as well as the important role active learning plays in professional education.

Next week, the Human Capital Management Federal (HCMF) Training Event will kick off a three-day series of panels and discussions on the future of federal government training. Our own Paul Terry will be speaking on the “Training And Development Best Practices” panel to discuss topics including social learning and effectively leveraging technology in the face of federal budget cuts.

HCMF is a great forum for agency leaders and human resource professionals to share best practices in HR strategies, talent management, and even innovative recruitment.   I’m particularly excited that this year’s event will cover technology-focused strategies to improve training, such as best practices in cloud computing and social networking.

Are you interested in learning more about HCMF and the Training And Development Best Practices panel?  Here are the details:

Lately, those of us in the military and government space have been hearing more about sequestration and the impact it could have in Washington and beyond. But what exactly is sequestration, and what impact could it have on government training?

According to Politico, sequestration is:

“The formal term for mandatory cuts to federal programs – the process of cordoning off money that may have been authorized by Congress but is now prohibited from being spent. Literally, the money is being ‘sequestered’ – taken away from the federal agencies affected.”

Today’s round of sequestration is aimed at cutting the federal deficit, and and totals about $1.2 trillion in mandatory cuts ($500 billion from the military alone).

As always, budget cuts mean that programs will be cut across the board within federal agencies, and for many, learning and training programs are some of the first to see significant spending reductions.  However, as a proponent of the benefits learning can bring to government, I believe it is critical for government agencies to understand the value of training when these budget cuts are being considered.

Here are five reasons why government learning and development professionals should make a business case for training in the face of sequestration:

1. Improve work quality and efficiency: Simply put, effective learning and training makes employees better at their jobs.  This can boost efficiency, decrease the likelihood of making costly errors, and even improve safety on the job – all of which will save money in the long run.