Reluctant SME's

I am interested to find out about how other L&D professionals manage the potential 'push back' from SME's who have in the past been responsible for deliverying all product 'training'.  They seem to object to sharing their training role with a 'e-learning' product.

 

Any thoughts?

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Replies

  • Hi Juliette

    Mohive have produced this helpful guide to working with SME's - might be a good starting point.

    Thanks
    Jo

    Working with SMEs.pdf

  • Hi Juliette

    I don't see that this has to be a conflict. How about if the elearning option provided the SMEs with a space to continue sharing their expertise? Why reinvent the wheel with a topped and tailed 'elearning course', if the potential exists to harness the knowledge that's already in the business direct from the horse's mouth? This is a great opportunity to start leveraging some user generated content and social media with direct contributions from these SMEs! This might be in the form of video clips or screen capture videos, or blog posts, or wikis, or.... let your creativity run wild ;o)

    You could also consider including an 'ask an expert' feature in your elearning that identifies the SMEs with the knowledge on a particular topic, so that users can contact them if necessary. If your system allows the creation of user profiles, you can link to these.

    One thing that Google is doing very successfully in-house is to have a 'rating' system for their staff, where people are tagged as having certain skills, and other users can tag them to confirm that this is the case. The more times a person is tagged with a particular skill, the greater the perceived skill in that area. Then, when a user is looking for someone who knows who to extract a list of unique records from an Excel spreadsheet, or how to bowl a left-handed googly, they can run a search on the user database.

    There is no need for an us and them mentality. After all, we're all just us.
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