L&D professionals are spread out across organisations, states, and even countries. While you get helpful advice from your vendor, it’s not the same as really talking to other people in your industry, and asking them how they do things. 

In this article, we talk about why embracing community in L&D is important and the benefits of meeting with other learning people in your industry.

Improve your technical skills

If you’re a professional in Learning and Development, you might find that sometimes your own learning can fall by the wayside. We can easily get stuck in our own ways of doing things and miss out on different ways that might end up serving us better.

Forming communities with other L&D professionals using similar tools allows you to get a sense of how other organisations in your sector are doing things. Are other organisations doing things better? Or can you teach them a more efficient way of doing things? 

When you chat regularly with other L&D experts, you learn from each other in a symbiotic way where everybody wins. We know that by teaching others we remember much more than just by learning things by ourselves. So why not apply that to your own work?

Lobby for changes that are important to you

Is there an existing plugin that you really want to see made compatible with your LMS? Are you itching for functionality specific to your sector that you can’t find anywhere?

As a community, you have a much stronger voice than just on your own. When you band together with other L&D professionals in your industry, you can pull together to lobby your vendors or service providers to develop the functionality you need. 

One of the benefits of open source software is that communities can work together to ensure that the functionality you want to see in your learning technologies is prioritised. Open-source learning management systems like Moodle and Totara Learn have voting systems, where you can vote for the functionality you’d like to see next. 

By banding together, you and others in your industry can ensure that you are on the cutting edge of LMS functionality. If your vendor allows, you can even split the costs between you. Everyone wins!

Androgogic’s Client-Partner Totara Community Groups

 If you’re interested in seeking community, Androgogic provides the opportunity for our client-partners in the Healthcare and Government sectors the opportunity to join sector-specific Community Groups. Each community group meets every second month to discuss issues important to them, share ideas, and make their voices heard. 

 Interested in joining? Contact your Androgogic Educational Technologist today!