Human Capital Management: Keys to Successfully Creating Competency-Based Training Curriculum

Human Capital Management: Keys to Successfully Creating Competency-Based Training Curriculum

Interesting Point of View...Competency-based Training

Click on the title above to go to a brief article on successful comptency-based training and development--at the core of my work over the last 70 days that has pulled me away from regularly blogging.

I'll be back soon. Reformulating my ideas... To preview, I'm think CBT is the link to proactive change management in highly structured organizations. Nothing new there, but what is new is the idea that "development" and its richer sister "training" are now the most important organizational elements in the modern firm. Ironic since they are all but ignored when one thinks skills are readily available in an open market. Trouble is...they are not.

Interactive Information Visualization: UN's release of millions of data records.

UN data

Robert Kosara, author of the Eager Eyes blog, recently posted information about the United Nation's release of data records for public download and use:

"Data is being set free: the United Nations have started a new website called UN Data to share the data collected by a number of UN agencies. 55 million data records are waiting to be explored and visualized. The search interface is very nice and usable, but still lacks power."

Why is the release of this data important?

Every day, people in leadership positions must make decisions based on the accurate interpretation of data. If the data is difficult to understand or presented in a way that might be confusing to some, the likelihood of negative consequences is high.

Those in leadership positions historically have had access to data, collected with public funds, but often inaccessible to the public. Publicly available data is often in a format that is not easy to organize, manipulate, or understand. As a result, many people do not have a means to fully scrutinize, or question, the decisions made by business, health, education, and government leaders.

The Gapminder website is one example of the movement to make data accessible and easier to understand. Hans Rosling, the director of Gapminder, provides an interesting overview about this in the video below, from his presentation at TED:



"This software unveils the beauty of statistical time series by converting boring numbers into enjoyable, animated and interactive graphics. The current beta version of Trendalyzer is available since March 2006 as Gapminder World, a web-service displaying a few time series of development statistics for all countries."

"Gapminder is a non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualize human development. This is done in collaboration with universities, UN organizations, public agencies and non-governmental organizations."

High resolution Gapcasts and video lectures can be and found on the Gapminder website. Gapcasts are also available on YouTube.

Information and Data Visualization for the People:

"Many Eyesis a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis."

"Swivel: Where Curious People Explore Data"

Related:
Breathrough Analysis: Make Your Data Tell a Story (Seth Grimes)

-Lynn Marentette

Risk and success

One wonders about the following: The most successful people are those willing to risk failure.

Of course such statements focus all attention on the meaning of success and thus become almost tautological. Rather, one would like to say that to be interesting, a learner must engage in areas without clear answers. But there is an arrogance to this statement as well.

One person's clarity...

There is something about evidence and risk that we admire in learning/science. It is also present in moral conundrums. A life well-lived is evidential. Self evident. Obvious? Or is it.

Knowledge and Information

Other than the ubiquitous classification of knowledge as having tacit and explicit components, there is much talk about codified knowledge, embedded knowledge, and embodied knowledge. Codification essentially implies that knowledge can be documented, embedding holds that knowledge can be built into machines and embodiment means that knowledge can be contained in routines, rituals and the like. This implies that knowledge can exist independently even when there are no humans.

My view is different: knowledge only exists in the human brain. It is created when a person uses information to shape expectations. These expectations provide a tool to predict, influence and make sense of the world. When this knowledge is transferred to someone else by lecturing, documenting or showing, it is converted into information which the receiver must convert back into own knowledge. Without conversion on the receiver side, there is no understanding, no knowledge, but only information acquired in parrot fashion. Books are filled with information, not knowledge.

There is one caveat: perhaps animals or spacemen also have knowledge, but that is not the point.