Another in the occasional series where I poke at the things which wind me up in L&D, HR, and work. This time, it’s learning jargon. Jargon is used to separate people; if you’re ‘in’ you understand the jargon and we us that language to separate people. As with all of this series, this is a gentle gig and I KNOW I use these too! 😀

We use TLAs for everything; LMS, LXP, ILT, OJT, LRS… Three is the magic number for these and I know L&D isn’t the only sector which does this but do we need so many TLAs? TLA, of course, means three letter acronyms.

Overcomplicating simple phrases like ‘help people learn’ and saying things like ‘micro-learning interventions designed to enhance learner-centric knowledge acquisition’.

People are people so why do we insist on calling them a learner? I get really bored reading about learner-centric, learner-focused, learner-driven, etc. Why not people focused?

Why is every day a school day? We’re not in education and the fixation on classrooms and pedagogy is both irritating and wrong. Not only are we not teaching, pedagogy is about academia. Knowing how people learn is more than pedagogy.

Similarly, if you’re leveraging the latest in pedagogical frameworks to synergize your training methodologies, you’re using new teaching methods to improve your training.

Forums are places people share. Or, the term I see, social learning platforms encouraging user-generated content and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.

If you’re future proofing, please tell me what the future will be. It seems to be really unclear so which future are you proofing?

Just a few of my favourites I’ve seen recently – what’s the jargon in L&D you dislike? Let me know in the comments.