D Foster Associates

Last night I happened to be cooking in a large commercial kitchen helping my wife get a large order ready for her company Indigo Rabbit. I noticed that at the top of the large white board in the kitchen they had written “What have you done today to make yourself a better chef?” They then recommended that if you spend one hour a day reading or learning a new technique, it might only improve your cooking by 1/2% per week, but that improvement in a two year period will lead to a more than 100% improvement in your overall performance. It ended by challenging everyone to set specific goals for their improvements and to track their success.

This reminded me how life-long learning and continuous improvement need to be an important part of both our personal goals and our corporate culture.

For the learning at a corporate level to be effective, it needs to be integrated into the corporate culture and become part of the normal workflow. If an employee sees reviewing their training requirements or taking specific training as an event that “takes them away from their jobs” then they will continue to fight it and not take it seriously. If, on the other hand, they see it as just being part of their job, no different then how they would use other corporate tools and resources such as e-mail, team calendaring, etc. then the process and the learning become natural.

As part of this process, consider including the ability to set personal goals and track additional learning activities within the corporate learning management system. By doing this, the company is showing employees how they value life-long learning and that it is part of the corporate culture.

My specific goals in learning are to continue to post weekly on this blog. I am a firm believer that someone does not fully understand a concept until they can teach others. So stay tuned as I continue to learn and teach, and feel free to comment or question me if I am not clear on any specific topics. That is the only way I will know if this is working.

More blogs about continuous+learning.

Mr. Foster is a frequent speaker on technology-based training, and has been invited to present at numerous venues, including ASTD, Online Learning, Training, Knowledge Management World, Documentation and Training, the ICD Corporate Portal Conference, several Universities, and the Massachusetts Interactive Media Council.

Presentation topics have included:

• “Costs and Benefits of e-Learning”
• “Creating Enterprise Wide Learning Solutions”
• “Getting Started with Online Learning”, all day pre-conference seminar
• “IT Involvement: Is It Necessary?”
• “The Convergence of Knowledge Management and E-Learning”
• “The E-Learning Portal: Linking Partners, Customers, and Knowledge Workers Worldwide”
• “The Convergence of Knowledge Management and E-Learning”
• “Building an infrastructure for OnLine Learning”, all day post-conference seminar
• “Laying the foundation of a Corporate University”

This blog is the full website for D Foster Associates. After much discussion with colleagues and thought-leaders, I decided that using a blog as the basis of our company website would be the best overall tool.

I will be posting to this site to discuss not only the work of D Foster Associates, but also my ongoing research into knowledge management, eLearning, blended learning, and many of the new Internet based collaboration and learning tools. You will also see from time to time my passion and interest in entrepreneurial activities, as well as a few other topics that I may decide warrant discussion from time to time.

My goal is to post at least weekly with information that I find interesting and feel that my clients and colleagues could benefit from. I will also be using this site as my personal knowledge management tool, so from time to time I may post some of my old notes, presentations, articles and links that I want to keep track of.

Hopefully it will all make sense. As I go, I will try to improve my categories and develop a true taxonomy, as well as develop a few “tours” or other ways to navigate around the site. If you have some suggestions, or examples of sites that I should look at please let me know.