The August 2012 Chief Learning Officer has an article near and dear to my heart.  I have mentioned before that learning is moving away from the centralized, corporate dictatorship to a more learner-driven model.  Randy Emelo’s article reinforces that “internal drivers, such as your own personal desire to learn, rather than external drivers, such as someone telling you what to learn” are taking precedence.  People are taking their experience and “applying new insights immediately to solve problems.”

And guess what?  As a learning leader your job is to help people exchange their knowledge!  Instead of learning folks holding all the knowledge, they are facilitators of making sure employees that know find others that know or need to know.  In other words, “people come together to solve problems.”  In the past (and even the present in many organizations) there is a focus on information management but instead, we need to focus on knowledge management.

The article’s closing thought could not be better said:  “It has been said that many companies hire the smartest people they find and then they treat them like idiots but if we simply give them the opportunity to guide their own learning and their careers, they will produce amazing results.”  Check out the complete article.