As a Learning & Development manager, you wear many hats. You must work with business partners to understand company goals and needs, while keeping in touch with your learners to design and develop effective training. But one thing that might not always be an obvious step: content curation.
Once you have created your stellar content, you need to store it somewhere. It’s not as simple as just dropping in an LMS or storing it in your documents folder. What if you have a group of new hires that needs historical data? Or, management that wants to go through old eLearnings to see what could be improved? How will they find the right information on their own? And most importantly, what will they find? If you’re doing your job right, they’ll find everything they need in one spot.
Content Curation is the process of sorting through vast amounts of web and enterprise based content and presenting it in an organized and meaningful format. – The Training Industry
Because information can be created and shared so easily in this age of mobile technology, there’s a lot of it! With social learning on the rise, people are learning faster on their phones. They can share information in chat rooms or on message boards, forward webinar recordings, and participate in interactive virtual trainings. That information is valuable!
Content curation will help your learners experience constant learning through forums, discussions, and chats for peer level collaboration. It also provides the choice for learners to build paths and share content. Furthermore, it facilitates creation of strong relationships between experts and learners. – Asha Pandey of eLearning Industry
You want a place where your employees can go to access the information they are looking for no matter what the form. Whether it be a quick tip, a full training video or a series of articles they can download and read on their own time, information should be readily available, current, accurate and easily searchable. Content curation consists of a good amount of organization, but it’s also making sure your content is relevant and hasn’t been rendered obsolete.
Some of your content may be custom made for internal use, and some may be ready made content for programs we almost all use, like MS Office, or Google Docs. Providing a one-stop shop for any type of learning is a motivational way to engage your learners.
Having all your learning and development information in one place can make things easier on management in the long run, too. It’s not just about your learners. You can easily archive old material, make adjustments on the fly to message boards or chat rooms if things change. Plus, you will be ready for any sort of software updates that might be necessary. For example, Adobe Flash will not be supported anymore after 2020, so materials should be converted to HTML5. If you have it all in one place, your task just got much easier.
Your ultimate goal as a learning professional should always be to provide the best and most engaging material to those who need it based on your business goals. A robust and informative library of curated content is a great place to start.
-L&D thoughts
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