As 2012 begins, workplaces everywhere are ringing with the usual sound of noble New Year’s resolutions. In our heads at least we are all jogging more, gorging less, quitting smoking, taking up yoga and generally conducting our lives in a more harmonious manner.

For learning and development professionals, that long term resolution to ‘facilitate more social learning’ is sounding out once again. And this year it will be louder than ever.  Jane Hart in the excellent Centre for Learning & Performance blog joins many others in predicting that 2012 is set to be the year of the ‘social business’.  That’s how IBM has branded its internal social networking software, and ‘social business’ means social learning. In the new hooked-up world, traditional top-down training models will lose their importance as companies build networks to enable continuous, social learning. Jane Hart envisions L&D professionals adapting to new roles as learning facilitators in this environment.

There’s no question that Web 2.0 is now decisively changing the way that many businesses operate. Some companies have already implemented large scale internal social networks to facilitate better communications and skill-sharing between employees. Other organisations have based entirely new business models on the 2.0 world. CrowdFlower, for example, offers an ‘enterprise crowdsourcing platform,’ which brings together over 1.5 million online workers as an instantly accessible labour force to generate sales leads, conduct market research and much more.

But not all organisations and companies easily fit into the ‘social business’ model.  For organisations with dispersed workforces who are largely non-office based and increasingly on temporary contracts, introducing widely used internal social networks is neither particularly feasible nor efficacious.  Nevertheless, there is no reason why employees in the social care, hospitality and public sectors cannot benefit from a more socially interactive learning experience.

As several learning experts for the charity sector acknowledged, 2011 saw significant buy-in to elearning (helped along by a few passionate advocates!). In 2012 the trend towards the adoption of elearning technologies is only set to continue, but how ‘social’ can these technologies be?

Here’s what we think a more ‘social’ learning model might look like for these sectors. Whilst introducing complete internal social networks is inappropriate for care homes and hospitality organisations at this stage, we’ve built features into our Functional Skills solution that steadily encourage learners to engage with our Learning Support Managers and with each other.

It begins with the e-portfolio system, which allows the learner to interact continuously with his or her Learning Support Manager. Step by step, we’re then going to add more community elements to build up an increasingly social learning experience. The MindLeaders resolution for 2012 is not only to drive Functional Skills forward, but also to bring social learning technologies to sectors where they haven’t been seen before.