This is an excellent and very needed debate – for my part I can say that the learning itself has been marginalized and as a result so have the learning trades. Its funny to hear that leaders are offended when learning professionals assume they know the business but are then happy to move on with on the job learning as if they know the business of learning… the amount of times (and orgs) I’ve heard ‘lack of training’ mentioned as a cause of frustration is higher than should be these days.

Who are we expecting to create the ‘institutions and architectures of relationships’ which enable ‘scalable learning’ other than those in the learning trades? Everybody else in the organization is busy doing their day-to-day job.
If anything we need to legitimize enquiry – the learning trades need to make is ‘OK to learn, to grow…. to develop’ otherwise the business will die – Kodak and even Microsoft (and maybe tomorrow apple) are examples that businesses that are constantly looking in the mirror learn very little. Learning is the best engine to deal with change – and constant change requires constant learning.

I think challenging the marginalization is much much harder than actually doing the day-to-day job of empowering people to be more than they are. At the end of the day those very people who marginalize learning are those who are happy with the way things are “the best learning they can get is from other professionals on the job”…. Really?

The strange thing is that we’ve been through this before – the face-to-face course was meant to die when learning technologies started appearing. People learn naturally and they will bridge the gap if there is no one from the learning trade but you could say that probably about anything that happens in an organization.

We all eat everyday and are conscious of what we’re eating and yet nutritional and dietary advice is a bigger industry than it has even been.

Bottom line – learning is too important to be left to amateurs.