Learning 2.0

The Accenture High-Performance Workforce Study demonstrated a strong correlation between an organization’s achievement of high performance and the priority it places on human capital development. Learning 2.0 can deliver rapid business results by helping organizations prepare for future challenges, continuously adapt, and drive innovation and growth on the road to high performance.

A number of pervasive marketplace, economic and competitive trends are converging today in such a way as to intensify every organization’s focus on the performance of its workforce.

Accenture’s ongoing Accenture High Performance Business research has shown a strong correlation between high-performance businesses and governments and the priority that they place on human capital development. Further, this research has demonstrated that many organizations are currently dissatisfied with the performance of their workforces.

Improving this performance will be affected in the coming years by a variety of factors including the pace of innovation and technical change as well as workforce shortages. Organizations unable to transform their human capital capabilities and respond to economic pressures are likely to fall behind the competition.

Fortunately, a number of new processes, technologies and change management strategies have arisen recently that organizations can leverage to close the performance gap.

The performance of employees depends on a number of factors: their aptitude, motivation, skills and knowledge. Employers have different levers they can pull to improve each of these factors. Traditionally, HR functions have used the recognition and rewards lever to hire and retain the best people and the training lever to equip their people with skills and knowledge.

The problem with this traditional approach is that, at most, employees learn 20 percent of what they need to do their jobs through formal training—most learning happens informally, “on the job.” Historically, organizations do not view on-the-job training as part of their learning function.

Learning 2.0, which uses many of the approaches collectively called Web 2.0, extends traditional training to include the levers of on-the-job learning and knowledge management to significantly boost employee performance. The learning department is a natural fit to own Learning 2.0, facilitating the sharing and collaboration that drives on-the-job learning and enables point-of-need knowledge acquisition.

Find out more about Web 2.0.

Moving from classroom training to e-learning drove a significant amount of cost savings. While formal e-learning courses and learning management systems will continue to play an important role, they have raised new challenges.

Web 2.0 Learning uses Web 2.0 technologies to deliver just-in-time, point-of-need, bite-sized learning delivered through the user’s device of choice, making use of free content developed directly by experts and users instead of requiring lengthy and costly course-development cycles.

The workforce is becoming more responsible for learning, with peer interaction and on-the-job experience supplementing conventional classroom tutorials. Tools such as YouTube, Flickr and Facebook are beginning to become mainstream, as is evidenced by software providers like Microsoft incorporating blog, wiki, podcasting, expertise finders and social networking components into their enterprise software offerings like SharePoint and Microsoft Office.

The rapid pace of technology and business change puts intense pressure on workers, who must consume and absorb an increasingly large volume of ever-changing information. Organizations must find better ways to support knowledge workers—both experienced workers and new hires—with the information, knowledge, access to continuous learning and collaboration that they need to achieve high performance. To deliver these capabilities, Accenture has developed an innovative solution called the Accenture Performance Workspace.

Tailored to the particular needs of an organization, this comprehensive solution delivers a workforce-centric, role-based desktop environment composed of the knowledge, content and legacy applications; productivity tools; and learning, collaboration and expert network capabilities that enable workers to increase their performance to new levels.

The performance workspace of the future will seamlessly provide self-service learning targeted to specific workforces, allowing employees to work, learn, collaborate and access experts whenever and wherever they are working.