What We Say

Welcome to The Learning Workforce, a blog about workplace education. Before we delve into the topic, you may want to know a bit more about how we came to these viewpoints and opinions.

Avis and Vincent met during the sunniest days of the Internet explosion and discovered similarities in their views about education that led them to collaborate on a variety of projects. Both firmly believe that workplace education is only valuable when we maintain a focus on the end result: The learner leaves the room better able to do her or his job. That's it! If we're not doing that, we're wasting someone's money and the learner's valuable time.

In these times, the importance and the challenges of workforce education are amplified in a critical way. We see several forces that contribute to this:

• Companies are attempting to achieve their goals with fewer workers.
• Companies face an incoming workforce with new habits, skills and approaches to work.
• Companies engage a workforce that is geographically distributed, that crosses cultural boundaries and continuously need new workplace skills.
• Companies are attempting to meet these demands with dramatically reduced financial resources.

This merits a conversation for new approaches. The old way of doing things just will not work.

In the coming weeks we will explore topics that include:

• ways to maintain investment in workplace education without spending more money;
• creating authentic effectiveness in virtual delivery and remote delivery of education (eLearning);
• giving up old ways of thinking about education delivery and embracing new approaches that amplify effectiveness and reduce costs; and
• accelerating your approach to creation of curriculum to meet your needs on time and within budget.

Join us on Converge Online to hear what we have to say. Be sure to give us your feedback, tell us your perspective or send us your hate mail. We use it all to pursue our passion — empowering your employees to do their jobs more effectively so that your company thrives.

Avis Beiden
Avis is a long-tenured fixture in the workplace education scene in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area in California. She's designed, managed or impacted educational programs for a handful of companies. Avis has delivered innovation and effectiveness to enterprise workplace education in the form of successful distance-learning programs, and rapid development of course content for employees, partners and customers. She directs her company Adept Minds to bring education into the workforce. She balances that with her family life: two children, a supportive husband, a cat, two goats and a crazy dog.
avis@adeptminds.com

Vincent Lowe
Vincent has been delivering technical education in classrooms around the world for more than 15 years. He's written numerous courses for technology firms and has advised education professionals in pursuit of effectiveness in workplace education. Vincent is also a nationally recognized public speaker, a filmmaker and the city producer for the world's largest time-based filmmaking competition The San Jose 48 Hour Film Project. You can find him at Schoolhouse Earth or follow him on Twitter. Oh, or you might find him around the ballpark at 24 Willie Mays Plaza.
vincentlowe@schoolhouseearth.org