During last week’s educational webinar, “Workplace Learning Revolution: How the Internet is Changing the Way we Learn at Work,“ Jane Hart referred to a Forbes article, “It’s the End of an Era – Enter the Knowledgeable Networker.”
The article suggests organizations will continue to need the services of knowledge workers; however, given the speed of change and the amount of information being generated, it’s too much to expect an individual or organization to stay on top of it all. Thus we need to transition toward knowledgeable networkers who can quickly tap into decentralized knowledge networks to crowd-source ideas, problems and issues.
We need to bring people in who can contribute to solutions, even when they may work outside our organization. Recently, an Extension educator shared with me their subject matter team could no longer produce all the content needed to meet clientele demands; therefore, they were relying increasingly on the contributions of an expanding network of experts and finding themselves spending more time curating information; they said, “it’s the only way I can keep up.”
My key takeaway is don’t be afraid to open up and use colleague networks. For more information please refer to the Forbes article. To view a recording of Jane Hart’s webinar, please see https://learn.extension.org/events/1305.
-- Dan Cotton