The job description read, “Leverage your knowledge and experience to develop learning content in written, audio, video, and other formats that will be available to workers on an enterprise wide basis through deployment on the corporate information infrastructure. This will include wiki’s, forums, and blogs, as well as both informal and formal training assets.” I heard Steven Spielberg applied for this position and was turned down. So who is this job description addressed to? To answer that question, we should probably get some perspective.
In a simpler era, when we all had a little more extra time at work, we might spend some of that extra time talking with coworkers around the water cooler, coffee machine, or lunch room. The conversation was generally light and included vacations, errant children, new cars, and a wide range of other personal matters. It was also a great opportunity to learn by informally sharing business problems and ideas with coworkers. Like those things you just couldn’t quite figure out yourself and didn’t want your manager to know you didn’t know.
This environment tended to spawn recognized individuals who always seemed to have the right answers to the common challenges many workers were facing. Whether it was corporate direction, how to make Microsoft Outlook behave, using the company’s internal HR system, or ordering supplies, there always seemed to be an individual who just naturally knew the background behind events and how to get things done.
Previously, the value and reach of this expertise was limited to those who were physically around the water cooler to hear it but things have changed. The expanding presence of companywide Blog and Wiki tools has enabled an increasing number of individuals to post information on an informal basis that is easily shared across the company. A subset of this information is the educational content called “user generated learning content” that can be in text, audio, or video format.
This has created an opportunity for what was described to me as the Corporate Content Rock star. Who are these Rock Stars? It is those workers who have two unique skills:
- First, they have the gift of identifying and communicating information other workers want to know
- Second, they have the interest and ability to present it to other workers in an engaging and effective manner
This sounds a lot like our expert at the water cooler with the support of technologies that enables them to communicate across the entire company and in the most fundamental sense, it is. Some of the most successful implementations of company Blogs and Wikis are capturing thousands of pieces of valuable learning content that is then viewed by tens of thousands of workers. Most businesses know that if they could capture and utilize the best and brightest ideas of their workers, there would be value in that information. As Blogs and Wikis are more widely utilized in business, we are seeing this potential realized.
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