Content curation for learning helps teams stay smart, harnesses collective intelligence and creates an environment that supports sharing and continuous learning. If done properly it can create a valuable, lasting resource which leads to creative innovation and can forge closer relationships with clients. This is essential in today’s world of fast-paced change and disruptive businesses.
Continuous professional development is key to both personal development and driving a business forward. As a recent survey on the future of work notes, for businesses and individuals alike, “adopting an approach of ongoing learning is critical to adapt”. Formal courses can be expensive to create and deliver and can quickly become irrelevant. Content curation keeps resources fresh and up to date. As learners are involved in the process it helps them develop their own critical thinking skills as well.
There are ten important questions regarding business drivers that should be considered when deciding if or how to create a content curation strategy. Once you have the answers to these questions it will become clear whether there is a serious business case for content curation.
Defining business drivers for content curation:
- Are there groups, audiences, or job roles in the organisation who need to stay up to date on external news, trends, and developments?
- Do teams have a culture of reading or sharing external content? For example, are team members active on social networks, do they share links to external articles via email, or via another channel?
- Is there a business risk if target audiences are not kept up to date? For example, can the competition make more headway, would sales go down, will there be an impact on reputation or credibility?
- Is there a structured approach to helping teams stay up to date?
- Is there budget pressure on learning? Content curation is considerably lower cost than commissioning or producing formal courses.
- Is there currently a channel for sharing content? If one already exists it can be beneficial to use it to ensure greater engagement from the outset.
- Are there any key formal learning programmes that are out of date and would benefit from recent and relevant content to keep them fresh?
- Has there been any feedback that our learning offering could be more up to date?
- Are there any candidates who could help curate content for a specific team? For example, a subject-matter expert or ‘seekers’ who actively bring in external content?
- Is there a good pilot candidate team that content could be curated for initially? Learning and development teams often make good ones.
Once there is a business case for content curation the process needs to be managed properly and approached in a systematic way to get the best results. Harold Jarche’s ‘seek, sense, share’ model describes the process of knowledge mastery and is relevant to how content curators support learning. The first step is seeking the right knowledge. For more information on ways to do this, read our blog Curating Content For Sales Teams: 15 Questions To Ask To Ensure You Get It Right.
Please get in touch if you think you might have a business case for content curation, or if we can help you in any way with your content curation questions. We’d love to hear from you.