(Continuing my science-themed post title habit.)

An interesting question is how these innovations will be accepted, and how these methods compare with standard operating practices (SOP) in the business today.

There are no standards.

The current situation at all the large businesses I have worked for, or benchmarked with, can be summarized as “hodge-podge”. There are several reasons for this:

1. Most large businesses (including my own employer) are the results of mergers. They inherit bits and pieces of “Talent Development” (to quote the new name of the former American Society for Training and Development [ATD]) from their ancestors and try to combine them in a harmonious way. It’s difficult.
2. There is no accepted standard for most industries.
3. Top management, as mentioned in my previous blog post, often does not consider employee development a priority and as a corollary, the strongest leaders in management don’t tend to run the training/development group. Without strong leadership, efforts tend to be scattered.

(There are of course exceptions to every general statement above.)

This site is specifically considering management training. The closest thing to a “standard” would be the curricula of business groups like the American Management Association and the ATD. These groups tend to offer short (up to one week) classroom training sessions for managers, sometimes with online prework. They’ve begun to move into slight variations, like offering their standard classroom work as video conference instead of F2F.

Online courses exist at both organizations, but in my experience few large companies use them. (I’m restricting this discussion to large businesses.) They seem to cater to companies too small to have their own training departments–big companies will have their own course catalogs with curricular for particular job roles, and restrict employees from going outside the prescribed listings.

Neither organization seems that interested in innovation. It’s interesting that ATD’s “Learning Circuits” newsletter (for which I have written) was still treating web video as a new technology in 2012.

Almost any large company has a formal curriculum based on job title. Generally it’s economically stratified. That is, expensive classroom training that might require travel is restricted to senior management (VP or Director level), where lower-level managers and individual contributors are much more likely to be given less-expensive e-learning. The decision far too often is baldly based on money, as I have written, rather than effectiveness or appropriateness.

There’s also the fact that in most large organizations, various departments will independently create courses or initiatives that ignore the experts in the development field. For instance, Safety may decide to independently create a traffic accident avoidance course.

So to summarize: the standard for large companies is a lack of standardization. There are of course governmental and regulatory standards for specific areas (e.g. welding or accounting) but no overall standards for talent development of all employees at large organizations.

On a personal note, I work for a utility. Utilities tend to be very conservative, even compared to other large businesses. We don’t have the pressure to innovate in some ways that manufacturing or consumer businesses do, because our revenue is pre-set by the regulators.

Side note: some organizations are sterling exceptions to this generalization. Two very different companies, McDonald’s and Disney, do a tremendous jobs of making sure their employees know everything they need to and have rehearsed every skill before they are expected to do them for real, and have surprisingly good mentoring programs as well. As I say, though, they are the exceptions.

The use of the phrase “one-stop shop” on this site is key. It’s meant to imply that, with full executive support, the group running this site will handle all development requirements for the company, inclusive. Furthermore, it’s meant to imply that this group will have a single, straightforward philosophy that will apply across the board to all programs.

So the biggest innovation here might be to create a standard. None currently exists.

One thing this site (and the implied policies it embodies) would add to the corporate environment would be just-in-time support, which is sorely lacking at most non-aerospace companies. Another would be flexibility, allowing people to work on areas not covered in the formal curriculum. Finally, through time I would hope to add features like asynchronous video-based training and coaching for interpersonal skills, regular web seminars and tutorials, and user-created content and a social media component.