L&D Communication Strategy
​Implementing a collaborative culture to support organizational L&D
Overview of Experience
In eLearning as a Collaborative Profession, the signature assignment was a team effort, and my partner and I were tasked with acting as consultants for a fictional manufacturing company struggling with an impending skills gap and a very small training department. We created a plan for building a culture of collaboration at Manufacturing International (MI) and outlined our recommendations to ensure a successful knowledge transfer project. We recognized that MI had a strong commitment to its employees and an informal organizational culture and proposed that MI utilize its strengths of people and purpose to manufacture progress. Highlights of the plan included actionable solutions for developing talent within the organization (mentoring program), attracting outside talent (trade school partnerships), implementing a learning management system, and communicating a core values initiative (people, purpose, progress).
Importance
Graduate school is a blend of students from different ages, stages of life and cultures and my project partner and I shared very little in common personally. Our differences made the plan for MI comprehensive and if it had been enacted, very likely effective. My partner’s academic tone of writing for this project influenced me, and when I tried to adapt my own for coherence, I recognized that my writing was better for it. We were both respectful of each other’s contributions, kept the workload fair, and remained task-focused throughout.
Skills ​​
This project taught me how to collaborate intergenerationally, to be responsive to an organization and a project’s culture and to embrace that varied contributions often yield better results.
Impact
The assignment required my partner and I to learn about interpersonal dynamics within a multi-generational workforce at Manufacturing International. An equally important lesson was finding our common ground and building skill as collaborators to achieve results.