Use LEARNING to align IT and ‘the business’ better.

I was at a meeting yesterday which focused on the difference between training and learning from an IT perspective….
The remarkable thing was the difference in perception that the 2 words put in the minds of the participants and the significant shift in thinking that can be generated from looking from these 2 different perspective…
Training was seen as the responsibility of IT to provide to ‘the business’ when new systems are introduced.
However it was seen as ‘the businesses’ responsibility to ensure that their users were offered the learning processes to ensure they can do their jobs properly ……
Surely, these are one and the same thing and the only thing that matters is that the person at the end of the process can fulfill their role at the highest performance level.
So, as I did to the people in the meeting, who were project focused guys with responsibility to the CIO function; STOP TALKING TRAINING and ALWAYS TALK LEARNING.
As I have seen in the past and through many transition processes, Learning Strategies and Approaches bring a much better and more involved approach from ‘the business’ than anything labeled TRAINING which tends to be the last to get budgeted, is generally resourced poorly, the first to lose budget, the seemingly easiest to reduce the delivery timescales on.
So convert your role and thought processes from one of ‘Training’ to one of ‘Learning’ and see what a difference it makes.