NOT the kind you might expect as we increasingly work cross-culturally, but within our native tongue!

I confess, I’m on a rather steep learning path right now. I’m part-way through a course (though I use the term loosely) to learn a lot more about marketing, conversions, data, analytics and automation.

It’s something I need to do to grow my business, and I want to do it.

But that doesn’t make it easy!

When I was at school, computers were not in common use (yes, I AM that old!) so I’ve just worked out technical stuff as I’ve needed to. It means that I’ve probably picked up bad habits, have missed out some fundamental principles and am (in some cases) clinging on to outdated methods.

But I’m getting there – through my own determination and my guide’s (seemingly) unlimited patience.

This week, I realised what one of the biggest obstacles to my learning was…

TERMINOLOGY

There are far too many new words, labels and phrases for me to get my head around. I get easily confused about what we’re talking about – and it doesn’t help that even experts use different words to mean the same thing.

No wonder I’ve been lost more than once!

So naturally I wondered if we in L&D are also sometimes guilty of this. Terminology that is clear to us may be confusing to those we train. Words that we’re very familiar with may be brand new to others.

There’s a danger that by trying to be correct and succinct to aid learning, we may actually be making learning more difficult.

We use a LOT of psychology based words for a start, and many people are not going to be brave enough to raise their hand and say they don’t understand, so that whole piece of learning may just pass them by.

We aren’t impressing our audience by our fancy words if they have no clue what they mean – we are putting up unnecessary obstacles.

And at a time when so many of us are trying to simply and streamline L&D, perhaps it’s important to not only think about the systems we use, but also our own language.