At the coalface

I’ve said before that the role of learning and development is to support the people in our organisations who do the actual work. This isn’t to dismiss our work as unimportant but:

We’re not on the phones speaking to clients.

We’re not working outside in all weather conditions.

We’re not growing the number of new customers to our business.

We’re not on the production line in a factory.

However, we’re attempting to create learning experiences and support tools for them. Our goal is to improve their performance, but we often don’t understand what their job is like because we work at a distance from them. At the security of our desks. Behind our computers.

Working in an L&D team within an organisation presents an opportunity for us to find out more about what our end users do. More importantly, how they do it in the context of their day-to-day.

Let’s step away from our desks and spend some time with those at the coalface. If we invest our time with the people in our organisations, we might better understand how effective our ‘solutions’ really are.