The Performance Improvement Blog

New Learning Professionals for a New Economy

Given the current economy, the role of L&D departments and learning professionals must change dramatically.  Elliott Masie, one of the great thinkers about learning and workplace productivity, writes in a recent issue of Chief Learning Officer:

It is time for the learning field to have a deep and open conversation about how we re-engineer our craft, our skills and our careers. The workforce and our world need agile, innovative and business-aligned learning colleagues to face the changing workplace of the future. Let’s step up to the challenge.

This is the same challenge that David Grebow and I address in our new book, Minds at Work: Managing for Success in the Knowledge Economy. We lay out the case for managers taking on responsibility for employee learning and learning professionals helping managers learn to be effective in facilitating learning at the individual, team, and whole organization levels.

In an article we wrote for TD Magazine titled, Engaging Managers to Support Continual Learning, we write:

The learning practices and principles most of us use today are no longer effective. They were developed for the 19th- and 20th-century industrial economy in response to the need to teach many people how to produce many things. People worked with their hands. They built railroads, strung telephone lines, shoveled coal, and made washing machines. The work that was done during that era was relatively simple and slow to change. We had time. Time to learn, to practice on the job, to become the subject matter expert. Whatever we knew when we landed a job was enough. We could learn the rest as we worked.

That way of working has all changed. In today's knowledge economy, most of us no longer work with our hands; we produce work with our minds, using the latest technology. We need to radically change the way people learn and are managed, and take a new approach that has already proved successful in companies around the world.

Learning professionals must change because the world of work has changed. Designing and delivering training programs was okay for the Industrial Economy but inadequate for the world in which we live today. Patricia McLagan, author of a number of books about the workplace and learning, in an article titled, Changing World of Work Requires New Learning Mindset, writes about this new world:

We are moving into an era where technology will make almost anything possible, and where very powerful tools and knowledge will be available to everybody. It’s an era of self-service that will continue to expand and where the most empowered, industrious, and—we hope—ethical and moral will thrive.

Today we are hand typing email and text messages; tomorrow we will be doing this with our minds. It’s a fast paced, on-demand, hyper-competitive world in which we live and there are no signs that things are slowing down. What people know today is not sufficient for tomorrow. The way we learn in organizations has to keep up with this change which means that learning professionals and their departments must transform themselves into a function that is more relevant, more responsive, and more effective.

Learning for a Rapidly Changing World

The safest prediction is that reality will outstrip our imaginations. So let us craft our policies not just for what we expect but for what will surely surprise us. –Sendhil Mullainathan, professor of economics, Harvard University

Professor Mullainathan argues that, in this age of disruption when constant innovation results in creative destruction of businesses, we need to think differently about the education of people throughout their careers. He writes:

… in a rapidly changing world, the fundamentals that were useful decades ago may be obsolete now; more important, new essential skills may have arisen. Anyone helping a grandparent navigate a computer has experienced this problem.

Once we recognize that human capital, like technology, needs refreshing, we have to restructure our institutions so people acquire education later in life. We don’t merely need training programs for niche populations or circumstances, expensive and short executive-education programs or brief excursions like TED talks. Instead we need the kind of in-depth education and training people receive routinely at age 13.

I don’t think we want to subject adults to the kind of learning experiences typical of a 13-year-old’s classroom. But I do agree that all workers today need to be continually learning and our institutions need to recognize and support this learning.

In the Knowledge Economy, learning cannot end with school. Learning at the individual, team, and whole organization levels must be continuous. Training programs are not sufficient. E-learning programs are not sufficient. On-the-job coaching and mentoring are not sufficient. Workplace learning must be all of these and more.

Former mine workers are learning coding. Car prototype builders who used to build clay models are learning how to use a 3D printer. Teams that previously took years to develop a new product are learning to be agile and develop new products within weeks or months. Organizations are learning to experiment with new structures, without the controls that bureaucracy and hierarchy have provided.

The economy depends on people learning throughout their careers. A special report in The Economist titled, Lifelong learning is becoming an economic imperative, concludes:

To remain competitive, and to give low- and high-skilled workers alike the best chance of success, economies need to offer training and career-focused education throughout people’s working lives.

We need to prepare people for jobs that don’t currently exist. Tom Friedman, in an interview for Deloitte Review, said:

If work is being extracted from jobs, and if jobs and work are being extracted from companies...then learning has to become lifelong. We have to provide both the learning tools and the learning resources for lifelong learning when your job becomes work and your company becomes a platform. So I'm not sure what the work of the future is, but I know that the future of companies is to be hiring people and constantly training people to be prepared for a job that has not been invented yet. If you, as a company, are not providing both the resources and the opportunity for lifelong learning, [you're sunk], because you simply cannot be a lifelong employee anymore unless you are a lifelong learner.

Companies have a responsibility to provide resources and opportunities for learning but people have a responsibility to learn how to learn lifelong. The mindset and skills that K-12 students need to learn in school and then in college are not the same as the mindset and skills needed to learn in the workplace, and these are not the mindset and skills needed post-employment. Lifelong learners move from teacher-centered learning to learner-centered learning over the course of a career. In the workplace and beyond, learning in the Knowledge Economy has to be self-directed. People must pull the learning they need, when and where they need it and faster than they ever have before. In this age, ability of individuals to learn fast and learn well is critical to organizational survival.