Remember the Days

Are you a calendar watcher? If so, you’ll note that we have two important national holidays coming up: Memorial Day and Independence Day.

Unlike many holidays that may have worldwide religious significance or are based on an ancient heritage, these two are uniquely American days of remembrance. We set aside time each year to remember those who have died to keep our country safe and free.

It’s an honor to recount their deeds and sacrifices.

But without discounting the efforts of those fine men and women, the days leading up to those holidays could serve as a time for other victories (smaller victories, I’ll grant you, but victories nonetheless).

Why not use the days leading up to Memorial Day to form an alliance with champion project managers to make you a lean, mean, fighting machine through your projects?

Why not seize the days between Memorial Day and Independence Day to gain freedom from the verbose jargon and common errors that have crept into your communication?

Fighting the good fight

Sure, you’d like to beat back the enemies of disorganization and win the war against improper grammar and usage, but how? There are two key methods: assistance and training. ProEdit can help you with both.

Assistance is easy, whatever it is you need. Our in-house team excels in making your projects be the best they can be. Our services include:

• Editing
• Technical writing
• Marcom writing
• Proposal writing
• Instructional design
• Project management
• Graphic design
• Proofreading
• Web content writing

Our hard-working staff has extensive industry experience to put to work for you. For more information about our staff and referrals from former and current clients, go here to learn more about ProEdit's talented staff.

If you prefer to have on-site workers under your direct management, our staffing service can help you put the right people on your team. ProEdit is the largest and most experienced staffing firm in the writing and editing industry. Whether you are looking for a temporary contract worker or a permanent hire, we have more than 50,000 qualified candidates in our stable of trained professionals.

As for training, keep your eyes glued to this blog as our staff shares wisdom gained from years of experience to bring you helpful hints and practical tidbits, whether you’re a professional editor or not. We’ll be sure to cover frequent grammatical errors and various ways to improve your copy, as well as guidelines for everything from instructional design to technical writing.

Another less obvious way of retraining your editorial eye is simply to pay attention to the tracked changes in the documents you receive from your editors. Just watching the types of errors that are being corrected and what kind of word choices are being tweaked can help you create far better drafts for the next project. Just think of it as an independent study (even if you don’t get the course credit). 

Celebrate your independence

Prior to leaving the office for your multiple family reunions and cookouts during the upcoming holidays, make a mental note to celebrate your freedom of speech that our forebearers fought so hard to preserve by making your spoken and written communication as good and as correct as it can possible be.

When you’re ready to make that step, just let us know. We’ll have your back.  

Written by: Sean Taylor, ProEdit

For more information about ProEdit's services, contact us via the web or call 1-888-776-3348.  Need to add creative talent to your team?  Check out our nationwide candidate profiles.

School’s Out (Of the Classroom): The Rise of Informal and Social Learning

Ah, those last days of the school year when kids of any era go running down the halls singing one of Alice Cooper’s classic lines: “School’s out for summer!” (Don’t even pretend you didn’t. We know better.)

Perhaps though, Vincent Damon Furnier (Alice Cooper’s real name) was on to something. In many ways, particularly in business and corporate learning, school is out. While some formal classroom learning is still needed, estimates now say that 70 percent of learning is self-guided and informal (http://derekstockley.com.au/articles/informal-learning.html).

The learning needs of organizations have changed. Gone are the days of requiring a one-time event to prepare employees or students for a job or new tasks. Instead, the focus has shifted to ongoing, continuous training, with employees and clients being regularly updated with new learning and additional modules of knowledge.

As those needs have changed and grown, so have the methods for meeting them. 

What is Informal and Social Learning?

For starters, informal learning doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to dress for it in a “casual Friday” sort of way. Nor does it mean you should organize a get-together at the local sports bar with your friends in order to prepare for it.

Some proponents of informal learning have described it as anything that doesn’t involve classrooms or curriculum, and for a broad-stroke definition, that’s not a bad place to start.

But at its heart, informal learning primarily has to do with who controls the delivery of information. If formal learning is defined by having an instructor and a curriculum that is delivered the same way at the same place to each learner, then informal learning can be described as being controlled by the student and delivered at his or her pace through a variety of means—ranging from on-the-job training to audio and video to eLearning.

Why the informality?

The simple answer is just this—because it works. Informal learning works for learners, and it works for organizations. But let’s dig deeper to examine why it works.

For learners, it works because it puts them in control of the learning environment and pace. A survey at the University of Pittsburgh found that the top three reasons learners would rather learn on their own include:

• Desire to set my own learning pace
• Desire to use my own style of learning
• Desire to keep the learning strategy flexible and easy-to-change http://www.knowledgejump.com/learning/characteristics.html) 

In short, it feels more natural to them. It meets them where they are and in the way they learn. To draw from the cliché, it doesn’t force a bunch of square pegs into round holes.

For organizations, the benefits are primarily driven by the bottom line—especially in regard to time and money. Putting together major training events is expensive when you have to get a large group of people together, house them, feed them, and manage them. Even if you cut much of the costs by arranging virtual events, getting a large group to free up the same set of hours is about as easy as catching water in a net.

Informal options, such as eLearning courses, offer a cheaper and more adaptable option that enables each member of that large group to get the same training when it fits his or her schedule and without the expense of having a live, flesh-and-blood classroom meeting.

But it goes beyond that.

Today’s companies move faster than ever before and face changes on a day-in and day-out (and often hour-by-hour) time frame. It’s just not practical to constantly bring people back in every day or every week for updates as goals, tasks, or deliverables change. However, a quick update to an online interactive course followed by a targeted email, and poof, everyone who needs to be updated can be in a quick time frame and at minimal expense.

Old school, new school, e-school, your school

Learning still happens in a variety of ways. There’s still an occasional need for formal, classroom learning, but more and more there’s a growing need for informal delivery methods that enable your learners to work in a way that is most effective for them.

As the world becomes more electronically connected, such learning will continue to become e-focused and delivered through intranets and the Internet. But what will help you more than anything else is this—think of your learners first and what will make the knowledge you want to teach them move from their heads and into practice, even if it requires you to consider alternatives you may never have before.

Written by:  Sean Taylor, ProEdit

Learn more about ProEdit's services.