Monday, January 18, 2010

New Year's Resolutions

I’ve always been a big New Year’s resolution guy. I’m not sure why I don’t muster up the same determination and focus throughout the year, but there’s something about that “clean slate” feeling of turning another page in the calendar to get me going. Although 2009 CLEARLY had its challenges, it was an amazing year for Performer Support and the growth of this community. We doubled in size and now have over 600 member companies visiting the site on a fairly regular basis. The conversations and energy around the many PS solutions occurring across this community are overwhelming. Both Con and I are anxious to see the many exciting things 2010 holds for this community and PS as a discipline. We both firmly believe that as we begin to come out of this recession that the training as we once knew it will never be the same, and are anticipating that PS will play a major role in how we serve our learners going forward.

With that said, I would like to share my Professional New Year’s Resolutions with you and see what you may be thinking about for 2010. PLEASE click on the comment “envelop” at the end of this post and add your two cents. We’d love to hear and share how this community sees training and Performer Support progressing in the upcoming calendar year.

New Year's Resolutions:
1. To continue to grow this community by over 500 new members this year. This may be a bit aggressiveJ but as the energy continues to grow we feel that this number is possible. Please feel free to invite any of your colleagues from within your company or those you know in your network. The more we add, the stronger and more helpful the community becomes. If you’d like to send them our email addresses so they can be added to the e-mailing list that would be fine.
2. Redesign and expand the PS Blog and community experience. Con and I have been hosting this blog for over 2 years now. Although we have enjoyed the dialogue, it’s time to take this discussion to a whole new level. We will be moving the blog to the NING platform in the first quarter of this year. This new technology platform will allow us to add other social networking capabilities which will enable us to serve each other better. We’d love to hear your feedback on what features/functionality you would like to see us add first. If you'd like to take our online survey please click here.
3. Explore, and continue to expand, new form factors such as mobile support – Having worked on a few mobile support projects in 2009, this platform seems to be perfectly positioned to play a strong role in performer support going forward. I’d like to see this community become a testing ground for the best ways and tools with which to deliver PS.
4. Single Source will explode in 2010 – Singe-Source publishing seems to be the tie that binds when it comes to effectively designing and integrating PS into an already vibrant learning strategy. Most organizations already use too many tools with redundant outputs and out-of-date content. Single-Source publishing has finally come of age and can do an amazing job of serving outputs for all 5 moments of need. I’m anxious to continue exploring this area and would love to see us share our collective experiences.
5. Elevate the moment of Apply – In these difficult economic times, and frankly any work environment I’ve ever known, the moment of Apply is where it all comes together. I would like to see the training/learning industry better recognize this all too critical moment of need for what it truly is and begin shifting our attention and efforts toward supporting it better. As a colleague of mine recently said, “If all we do isn’t about apply. Why even begin the journey”. For too many years we have been mired in formal instruction and helping our learner stall at only acquiring knowledge, or the first two moments of need. I hope we see 2010 as the year of Apply where we move beyond old models, tools, and strategies to an approach that is first and foremost performance driven, not simply knowledge driven.

Again, we’d love to hear your PS resolutions for 2010!! Please feel free to contribute a comment as we’ll post them to be shared across the community.

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