What do you mean by “Content”?

Thought-leaders in the training and development field have a new mantra: “It’s not your job to develop learning content.”

By that, they suggest that practitioners in the field spend too much time packaging – or repackaging – information that the learner could instead access at-need from existing corporate documents, using a search functionality.

If all that’s required is this type of information on-demand, the audience is truly better served by a strong search tool and access to all documents on their company’s network; even a wiki is overkill.

Now here’s the But you’ve been expecting…

Right now I’m updating my skills with the Adobe Creative Suite applications. Especially on tools where I have little experience, like Illustrator, I very much appreciate the structured training presented by experts in online classes, such as Lynda.com, as well as various printed books. With scant contextual knowledge, I wouldn’t know where to begin – wouldn’t know what to search for. I need an on-ramp.

A colleague provides another good example: A career changer, she’s starting over in a field where she has a lot of potential but not much background. It is also a new-ish field where formal training, and even best practices, are not fully developed. Gathering resources to create her own knowledge base, she is feeling the lack of an organized flow of information that would help her to get her bearings more quickly.

This seems to be the critical difference – the watershed: The needs of existing staff learning a new task or protocol, versus the needs of an outsider being on-boarded.

As humans, we naturally balk at being forced down a narrow training-tunnel with no adaption for the individual. But swinging to the opposite end of the pendulum – abandoning trainees to meander directionless across the learning landscape – is no better, and could send the message that it’s not important to learn one’s job, or that one is being set up to fail.

What about creating a curriculum – isn’t that enough? If by curriculum we only mean a sequence of topics that the person is to look up and study on their own, my answer would have to be No.

Learning by trial-and-error is great at the task level, but at anything higher it’s just a waste of time, and I don’t know many businesses that have a lot of time to waste.

Sorry, thought-leaders, but it is my job (sometimes) to develop content.