Technology Learning
Learning partnerships are highly effective because they leverage people’s inherent preference and skill for socially based development methods. Most people prefer to learn from other people instead of reading books or attending classes. The strength of learning partnerships is inherently tied to their human nature. Technology cannot effectively replace learning partnerships, but it does help with establishing and managing these partnerships within an organization. The following are some ways technology can be leveraged to enable learning partnerships:
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Finding and matching learning partners
In larger organizations, finding appropriate matches for learning partnerships can be very difficult. Technology can help employees find potential learning partners by creating a means for partners with similar interests or characteristics to automatically be matched with one another.
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Figure 1. Partner Matching Technology
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Managing Learning Partnership Activities
Technology can help learning partners structure their relationships, define objectives, keep track of ongoing meetings, and track progress toward partnership goals. It can also provide reminders and other forms of alerts to keep partnership activities on track.
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Figure 2. Partnership Management Technology.
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Sharing learning partnership expertise. Technology can enable employees to share ideas and materials across different learning partnerships. For example, if a mentor developed a particularly effective development exercise for a protégé they could easily share this with other mentors in the company.
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Figure 3. Learning Collaboration Technology
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Tracking partnership utilization and impact. Technology can help organizations track the number of learning partnerships and analyze relationships between partnership participation and organization outcomes such as retention, promotion and career advancement. This can be used to measure and improve learning partnership programs over time.
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Figure 4. Learning Partnership Analytics Technology
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These are just a few ways human capital management technology can support greater use of learning partnerships. Perhaps the greatest strength of using technology in this manner is to enable the creation of formal programs that encourage and help employees to form these partnerships rather than having employees just wait and hope that such partnerships will form on their own.
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