In a knowledge economy within which the skills we have access to are often what sets us apart, you would imagine that there would be no shortage of learning and development opportunities available to employees.

Alas, that’s often not the case.  For instance, last year a study from Stanford found that whilst 100% of professionals surveyed by the researchers would like to be receiving some form of professional coaching, only 1/3 of them actually were.

It’s a gap that the learning and development platform WeCommend is trying to plug.  WeCommend is a new platform that aims to help in-house L&D folks find the best people to help deliver the training and coaching to their employees.

The hope is that the platform will provide a level of transparency to the whole process by allowing buyers to select the best suppliers based upon the recommendations of their peers in related industries.

I caught up with co-founder of the site, David James, recently to learn a bit more about the site and how he hoped it will help facilitate a boom in professional learning and development.

“WeCommend.com is a peer-to-peer recommendation platform where in company Learning & Development professionals share recommendations of their most trusted providers and search for new providers based on recommendations from their peers in other companies. The providers (facilitators, trainers, coaches, etc) benefit from amplified word-of-mouth where potential new clients can find them,” he said.

James himself arrives at WeCommend via a long and successful career in learning and development that culminated in a happy stint at Disney.

The hope is that the knowledge and experience from that career will uniquely position WeCommend to make a difference in the workplace.

The site is free to use, and you can easily acquire commendations for your work from those you have engaged with.

Suffice to say, the site is operating in an environment within which employees frequently complain about a lack of training and development opportunities.

Whilst the site can’t really overcome that seemingly cultural lack of appreciation of the importance of learning at an organizational level, they can at least make it easier to find the right help when you’ve made the decision to invest.

On that score, the site appears to do a superb job and I wish it the best of luck in the future.