Blog #6 - Community of Practice

Communities of practice offer broad assistance to those seeking to connect and learn from others in areas specific to their business or interests. These solutions range from linkedin.com, which offers networking with a broad base of individuals and businesses, to facebook.com or myspace.com, which are made up personal profile webpages. Though these are primarily personal services many corporations and businesses are noticing the positive impacts of changing the atmosphere or culture of their environments so the employees are encouraged and empowered to cooperate on project.

Caterpillar has found that engineers working on projects can find solutions to issues through cooperation with other engineers who might have faced similar problems on earlier projects. Not only does this improve the time spent solving issues, but can also improve build quality and raise the standard for the engineering. In the following video the former president of Caterpillar discusses the environment of their company and how it has impacted their employees.



A piece of the implementation of a community of practice in an organization is the question, "How can we make sure the community of practice actually improves the atmosphere of information sharing?" Or, "What principles does the organization need to adopt in order to foster healthy sharing and how do you implement the forthcoming solutions?"

The following video provides a few important principles and offers a few examples of companies using these innovations of sharing practice.



Learning from these corporate solutions can aid any person in understanding how joining and investing in a community of practice can give them a boost in the competitive job market, improve their understanding of their chosen field and assist in the projects. Educators, engineers, practitioners, business owners, nearly any area can benefit from the experience of others, and the more connected a person can become the more knowledge they can gather and offer to their employers.