Knowledge Management Development Programs for Enhanced Organizational Learning

Skills, Competencies, and Behaviors to Develop

The development program will include lectures, discussions, presentations, and workshops, as well as team-building activities. The program will include two assessments that will take place in the middle and at the end of the program. The effectiveness of the program will be evaluated after the completion of the sessions with the focus on the replenishment of the organization’s knowledge base and ways knowledge is shared. When developing effective knowledge sharing practices, it is critical to focus on the development of proper relationships between employees. Trust and willingness to collaborate are central to effective knowledge sharing within an organization (Chen & Cheng, 2012). These characteristics should be achieved, and the corresponding behavior should be developed. Hence, team-building activities will be a part of the development program.

Apart from trusting relationships, employees should have particular skills and competencies to share knowledge effectively. Thus, employees should be able to express explicit and tacit knowledge. They should also share it effectively and learn from shared knowledge. Reports completion can be one of the tools to facilitate the process so employees should understand how to complete these forms. The reports will be standardized ways to share knowledge, which will help employees share information and learn from it. To train employees’ ability to learn from new information shared, employees will discuss their ideas and present particular innovations.

Furthermore, employees should also be able to turn the tacit knowledge into the explicit one. The training sessions will address the development of competencies associated with generating ideas that could be beneficial for the organization’s performance. Making notes, creating graphs, and tables can help employees in this endeavor. Distilling information is essential in this process. The employees will brainstorm to come up with a checklist of characteristics of valuable knowledge as compared to irrelevant data. This checklist will be later available alongside with the reports and other guiding documents.

The delivery of knowledge should also be effective, which means that employees should know how to use ICT technology available in the organization. There should be a particular framework for sharing. Completion of reports, placing data in the database, and discussion during regular meetings should be steps of knowledge sharing. Employees should know the peculiarities of the database and ways to add information. Importantly, the software is constantly updating, which means that training can be rather regular.

Different Levels of Development

The development of skills concerning knowledge sharing is essential for all levels as knowledge sharing occurs at different organizational levels. Importantly, supervisors and managers should be able to share knowledge with their subordinates, which is easy to manage within the transformational leadership paradigm (Mittal & Dhar, 2015). At that, the training does not have to differ as knowledge sharing abilities are quite similar to all employees. The major difference can be related to the nature of knowledge employees are likely to share. For instance, leaders will be able to share some leadership skills while some employees will share specific skills necessary to complete particular tasks.

Timeline

The development program can take up to two months. It is necessary to note that the program should embrace all the employees of the organization. At that, training sessions should be held with cross-functional teams that include employees of different levels (subordinates, supervisors, and executives). This approach will be instrumental in developing the necessary atmosphere in the working place. It is critical to have two assessment sessions and have a session where the gaps revealed can be addressed. Thus, the training sessions will be carried out twice a week.

After the completion of the development program, discussion of new ideas, reports with new information, ways to learn from such novelties should regularly be held (for example, monthly in each department and quarterly across the entire organization). The training program can later be transformed into a policy for novice employees to cover with their supervisors’ guidance. As has been mentioned above, employees will receive updates on the use of the corresponding software. These updates can be discussed if necessary.