Last week we held another LearnOps Customer Roundtable on the topic of working with Subject Matter Experts (SME). These roundtable sessions aim to give our customers a space to engage, discuss and share ideas on topics that are important to them as L&D professionals. So we sat back and listened to what’s been top of mind and wanted to share some of our key takeaways.
We wanted to keep the conversation open and general as we know that it’s a topic that can be looked at from a variety of perspectives. We were curious to learn more about the ways teams are leveraging SMEs, what challenges come up and how L&D professionals are working through those.
We wanted to dive deeper into these themes and here are some key points our customers shared:
🔑 Finding unique ways to incentivize SMEs for their collaboration is key. An idea that the group really liked was recognizing your SMEs for their collaboration via platforms like LinkedIn using the kudos feature.
📩 Supporting your SMEs through scoping and understanding the true training need is an important step. Enabling them through a form or document to consider things like the learning outcome and audience can result in more effective content downstream.
⏰ Tracking SME time is a hot topic! When your collaborators also have other “day jobs” finding ways to communicate the ask, the time commitment and keep everyone aligned is important.
🔄 Lastly, and this one I found interesting, not every SME is a good SME! Often L&D teams see the shortcomings of any collaboration as a result of their project management, but sometimes even though they are a great expert in the organization they might not be the right collaborator for your project.
Interested in joining us for more conversations that are important to you as L&D leaders? Sign up here to receive future invitations!
