Ruth Levine
Director of Evaluation, Policy & Learning
U.S. Agency for International Development
Tony Pryor
Senior Manager
International Resources Group
Thom Sinclair
Deputy Chief of Party, USAID’s Knowledge Driven Microenterprise Development (KDMD)
The QED Group
Stacey Young
Senior KM Advisor, Microenterprise Development Office
U.S. Agency for International Development
Building on What Works in KM, Part 1, this Part 2 session focuses in on one single federal agency, the US Agency for International Development, where a KM initiative was launched to overcome its most significant workforce migration challenge. AID is the US Government’s primary institution supporting development assistance overseas. It is now embarking on an unprecedented tripling of its staff, and by 2015 the majority of its employees will have joined the Agency after this conference. Traditional methods of training are simply not enough for effective and non-disruptive skills transfer to happen. As a result, AID decided to use KM tools and processes to more successfully capture what the agency and its partners know, and transform itself into an effective learning organization. In this session, a range of panelists from AID will explain how the agency is embracing learning, how that affects organizational structure, how it teaches its staff, and even how work is accomplished.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN:
> Better understand the constraints faced by a federal agency in trying to retain institutional knowledge
> The approach being tried by USAID to impart tacit knowledge to new staff
> How social media, KM approaches, and the concept of "continuous learning" can assist in this transformation to a learning organization