The Problems of Sustaining Learning and Development

It wasn’t too long ago when I was confronted with the idea that training doesn’t work. Of course it works, I said to myself. But the nagging feeling that perhaps everything I was doing was incorrect or insufficient continue to bug me.

If you’ve been in learning and development for some time, you would come to the conclusion that the answer to employee development is all about training. However, there are other areas which are not necessarily about training that can still develop employees effectively. One of them includes the use of innovation to create future oriented think tank projects. Another might include the use of facilitation and coaching in order to bring performance to a higher level.

Throughout all of these strategies for developing people within organizations, corporate training has become one of the most sought after, but also one that is plagued by many problems. First, most trainees aren’t even told why they are attending a training. This is an issue. The key is about once ability to frame the need to an employee. Whether or not it’s a 360 degree assessment or just the part of a process of development, it’s essential for learning and development professionals and employers in general to highlight why it’s important for training to be done.

Now, what’s training is done at least the second problem. Memory. Not everybody is able to remember whatever was discussed in a training session. If I were to record and transcribe an entire eight hour training program, it will merely amount to 160 pages of somewhat repetitive information. From a bird’s eye view, it’s very likely that such information could have been for the and more precisely dealt with. I know this because I often transcribe hours of my own lectures thinking that I would have gotten serious nuggets of information. What I often find is that because of the deviations, interjections, humor, rapport building, much of the information is lost. What could it be that in three hours was instead done in eight. This calls for better precision in the design of programs. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that deliberate design and collaboration with learning and development professionals makes for a much better program on any given day. What will be even better is that this design is dealt with in greater detail. This leads to the question: do we spend more time when corporations are already trying to cut back on training hours? Our opinion, we believe that online learning is going to be the next big wave in the change that has already taken place.

Digitization and blended learning solutions are typically the way to go so that individuals can not just have an external brain on the computer, they can also recall information and enhance that understanding through discussion within some kind of platform. Forums, wikis, blogs, are all approaches that have been used before within organizations in order to manage knowledge that is so vast and disparate. In addition to this, I would like to recommend something else.

If you’ve not heard of gamification, then you would have missed the opportunity to utilize human motivation within digital learning processes. One of the most fascinating ways one can actually reward learning is through the use of complex gamification. For example, you might simply encourage basic activities such as logging in on a daily basis. From a more advanced perspective, it might be better for participants to be able to provide a meaningful contribution within that discussions, fully and manually assessed by their instructor. From an even more advanced perspective, participants will have to submit videos or discussions in a thesis form that enable their instructor to determine that they do have the right kind of prerequisites to accomplish better understanding of the concept, or even higher level of competency. The only way to do this is to have a system that enables communication between instructor and a vast number of geographically dispersed employees.

These days, learning management systems are unable to cost effectively achieve these kinds of results. Instead, a new form of learning management system is beginning to evolve. These LMS are purely targeted at hosting content and enabling the consumption of such content. You might even say that the course markets itself by trying to sell itself through different touch points within the system. In addition, advanced gamification processes can be used to encourage participation, contribution, and even submissions. This kind of work sample is not just useful in determining who is valued as a problem solver within the organization, is also useful in the hiring and selection process. After all, we all know that resumes account for less than 10% of valid new hires!

From selection and hiring to learning and development, new systems are necessary to create more productive approaches to employee development. This does entail the need for a better and more robust LMS. It includes the need to conduct coaching online, performance feedback, as well as monitor for accountability. These are not available in traditional LMS. The future boats well for technology – there are many new forms of technology vetting corporate social interaction, and key motivations such as power, affiliation and achievement as described so many years ago by psychologist David McClelland. Perhaps, the new phase of learning and development needs to include design from the perspective of psychological motivation, utilizing the concept of gamification, and high quality contextualized e-learning.

About

Stuart Tan is a 23 year veteran in the learning and development industry and is the Master Trainer of Ultimate Alliance Consultancy Pte Ltd. He has trained organizations such as Citibank, AIA, Prudential, HSBC, Danone and Abbott to name a few. Having spoken to over 500,000 people worldwide, he offers solutions other than speaking, including sustained learning through online and blended solutions for corporate training in Singapore, the Asia Pacific region, and the rest of the world. For more information, contact him at +6563385727