David James is CLO at 360Learning, host of The Learning & Development Podcast and former Director of L&D for The Walt Disney Company.
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Curation has been a hot topic for years, and the phrase "curate, don’t create" has become a prominent tagline on L&D’s social channels. But what does it really mean?
In the wider world, curation can mean:
• The selection of objects to be shown in a museum or a collection of art for an exhibition;
• The selection of films, performers or events to be included in a festival; or
• The selection of something such as documents, music or internet content to be included as part of a collection or on a website.
L&D’s interpretation of curation falls most neatly into the third of these examples of digital content curation. The problem is that, as has happened before, some are rebranding an existing practice as an emerging one, thus diluting the practices. In recent months, I’ve seen the term "curation" used to describe the simple act of making generic content available on a learning platform. So, we're doing the same thing we’ve been doing with notoriously low engagement and next-to-no demonstrable impact for the past 25 years, then?
If we’re going to improve the efficacy of L&D, then we can’t just keep absorbing emerging trends into established practices by simply rebranding them. We have to do more.
Curating For Vendors Or For Users?
Curation, as a term, emerged as a legitimate response to an over-reliance on L&D creating new programs and supplementing these with off-the-shelf digital content. It has since morphed into "managing off-the-shelf digital content." It’s easy to see why this happened: There is a lot of money in providing vast suites of digital content. The market wants to educate you into thinking that doing content admin is an emerging role. But that’s mainly because, in my experience, L&D leaders do very little task analysis, and so we don’t always know what employees actually need—and when they need it—to perform.
Not long ago, we were told that employees wanted choices when it came to digital content. Then we found out that they didn’t (because they didn’t use it when we provided it), and vendors told us to curate that same content for them. A couple of years from now, vendors will likely tell us to do something different with the same old content because employees are still not engaging with "curated" content libraries—and we still won’t know what they need if we don’t do the analysis.
Curation is a very useful skill to have, but it’s no more important than analysis. So figuring out what’s really needed and providing the right context for each organization and each role will more likely make more of an impact.
Less 'Learning Provision' And More 'Performance Enhancement'
Curation, as a practice, emerged because what L&D leaders were doing wasn’t enough, but this quickly became shorthand for keeping generic content libraries up-to-date. This useful stuff was just as likely to reside inside the organization, if not in peoples’ heads then in PDFs, user guides, process flows and shared drives. It seems quite simple as a principle.
But making off-the-shelf content available to employees will likely never lead to predictable and demonstrable impact—and certainly not in a way that impacts actual upskilling and reskilling. In fact, applying the term "curation" to this activity means keeping things the same as they have been for nearly three decades with the same limited impact. In other words, we still can’t demonstrate our value.
If we in L&D switched our mindset from "providing learning" to "solving real problems," and from "enhancing the employee experience" to "enhancing organizational capability," then we will find that we can move at pace to make a demonstrable difference. But it has to start with more analysis.
How To Curate For Impact
As with any initiative that is intended to make a meaningful impact on learners, we need to define what we’re trying to achieve first. Finding and filtering "useful stuff" is too vague an activity to add value without a defined purpose—and the purpose must improve what people do predictably, reliably and efficiently.
"Training requests" become "assumptions" that are only validated with data and evidence, which are sought from those who are to be influenced and developed. Once we define problems, then we can create or curate the right solutions. But arriving at solutions before doing the analysis is foolhardy. It’s also likely to be more extensive, more costly and riskier than solutions that address defined performance needs.
Once we complete the analysis, we can get a clearer grip on what’s needed. Maybe it will require bespoke instruction. Maybe it will require documented know-how. Or maybe it will require contextualized insights from outside the organization. If we need insights from outside our organization, these can be researched or procured. But it’s still not curation to simply provide content. What’s required is context. The curator needs to do as much of the work as possible to let the beneficiaries know:
• Why and how it should be important to them;
• The situations and challenges they face in the context of their work that this content can help with; and
• What they should do right now to turn passive consumption of content into an active performance enhancement exercise.
None of this is possible if L&D merely tries to provide—or filter—content. That’s why we can’t determine value without the right analysis.
So don’t fall for the marketing spin. Curation doesn’t mean filtering off-the-shelf content for groups of learners. Curation means finding real solutions to known problems—from within an organization or from outside—with the context people need for better performance and results.
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