Owning our own Learning but let’s start by getting it right!

Less Training more learning

Thank you for all those that came over for a chat at the World of Learning and listened to our CEO Kevin and our client Garrick, from HSBC, talk about the ‘Future of Learning’.

We gave some insight into our thoughts about learning becoming more personalised and adaptable for us as individuals not just the organisations we work for, and we shared how our thinking is being put into practice in the workplace. We believe learning will be completely user led and will be owned solely by us as the user…possibly outside and beyond your current organisation. We truly believe in replacing training with learning. Learning wanted and owned by us. Yes, we’ve heard this all before and we’re not claiming to be trailblazers here but we want to ask the question;

“How do we get this right and what is even right?”

Let’s get this right for everyone!

Well, we want to get this right for our clients and us. We all have busy lives, and we are all involved in the modern world with unrelenting change and pressures, so we are taking on the challenge to get people learning in the right way, about the right content and doing the right things in the workplace and of course at the right time. We want to relieve the pressures some of our clients feel by reducing time to competence for their team members, by enabling them to drive their own individual learning journey at their own pace and the way they want to learn. It’s going to be a long and winding road just like the world around us, so as a result, we have created a sort of inner mantra of ‘What we do today won’t necessarily drive what we do tomorrow’.

Time for a health check!

With this in mind, we wanted to have a quick health check, if you will, of where you are in your journeys. We wanted to hear your thoughts of how you’re engaging your workforce with regards to learning and what the challenges you are currently facing are. After all, whilst we have the belief and the appetite to help our clients achieve success through their people, we don’t necessarily have all the answers and of course no one size fits all.  We believe in asking challenging questions that provoke thinking to highlight what is a hot and relevant topic in the worlds of our clients.

We have to start somewhere so we placed a couple of iPads on our stands with a short survey for gaining insight into what’s happening, in your world, with regards to learning.

For those who came to chat to us, thank you and we loved it. However, we REALLY loved it when you completed the short survey, which we politely shepherded you towards! Let’s have a look at some of the highlights.

What you thought

Let’s start with some positive news

• 84% of you were confident, or very confident, of embracing new learning technologies. This may indicate that technology is becoming, or has become, part of our everyday lives. We all use intuitive technology all of the time, so why not use this in the workplace for people to learn?

Intuitive and easy is engaging!

• 38% however still saw a challenge to adoption for reasons like; resistance to change, culture and not technologically savvy enough. Why was this? Could it be that people still think that learning is something that is being done to them? Are we doing enough to enable, communicate and engage our people, to able to own and pull learning to match their needs? We need to personalise learning and make it an added value to them instead of directing and pushing content.

Other challenges to adoption were senior management, time and L&D letting go. This begs the question if we are doing enough to create the right environment and giving our people the tools to enable to learn independently? We can all independently watch what we want when we want, we can all shop at the click of a button, and we can all independently track our own exercise. We use easy and intuitive tools to do so, let’s make learning just as easy, engaging and intuitive.

Innovative and inspiring

• 54% feel you had invested in learning that is inspirational and innovative, which is great, but just over half indicate we aren’t really there yet. We asked you to give three examples of what you think makes learning inspirational and/or innovative (Remember we are not just talking about digital learning here). The most common words were “challenging, engaging, collaboration and personal” which align to many studies of the way adults like to learn.

All great but another 46% of you responded that you cannot accurately identify, in financial terms, the return on investment on learning. So, is this eternal challenge still muddying the waters in L&D? Are we still looking for hard figures to demonstrate success in developing people, and is this perhaps the slight tug on the collar that is stopping us from providing the right environment for our people to truly learn?

Now for the nit-pickers, this was by no means a large survey, but it was interesting nonetheless to hear about your insights and challenges (once again, thank you all, and for one lucky winner there was a year’s supply of doughnuts!). We are planning to do a broader white paper on this project and asking more questions of how people like to learn in organisations in 2018 so watch this space! If you would like to be involved in the paper, please do get in touch.

We are up for the challenge and we want to drive learning for us all as individuals. We all know the future is here and we all know how we like to learn so let’s do it together and of course do it right?