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Lies About Learners: It’s Time to Disrupt the Model of Learning

Annmarie Neal and Daniel Sonsino

Between the birth of the world and 2003, there were five exabytes of information created. We [now] create five exabytes every two days. See why it is so painful to operate in information markets?

—Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, at Google’s Atmosphere 2010 conference

Never before has the world been marked by such turbulence, complexity, ambiguity, and relentless speed. An insatiable pursuit of technology is propelling a new era of globalization, economic value creation, innovation, and discovery. The pervasive nature of mobile technology and social networks has increased the size of the network, giving voice and economic opportunity to many who were previously silenced by a lack of connectivity.

For global businesses, these factors necessitate a shift in how, where, by whom, and with whom business is done, how leadership is applied, and how individuals organize to increase productivity while creating new forms of value. This pace of business, technology, and societal change necessitates an accelerated need for innovation and business agility, and, for many, a significant reskilling of the workforce.

Learning professionals can no longer rely on traditional—and soon to be obsolete—career development, talent mobility, and learning practices to drive business impact. Learning and development is thus at a strategic inflection point, if not already in crisis. In this chapter, we hope to provide a wake-up call to those learning professionals whose companies collectively spend billions of dollars a year on learning, leadership development, and training (according to the 2013 State of the Industry report, ATD estimates that companies invested more than $164 billion in learning and development in 2012)—and to those ecosystem partners providing learning solutions, but not achieving the enduring level of success desired.

Our profession can leap the chasm between traditional talent development practices and those required to support the new workforce—and build the organizational learning systems and cultures to ensure that their investments pay off and drive competitive differentiation and success. Thus, we aim to expose four lies—or assumptions—about learners that we believe must be vigorously challenged to improve our thinking about the future of organizational learning.

It’s Time to Challenge Our Assumptions About Learners

If the organizations in which we work must challenge assumptions about their core business models, shouldn’t we challenge our assumptions about organizational models, leadership capabilities, and learning practices? If we believe what many are predicting, the future of work over the next decade will look nothing like it does today. In fact, those close to technology disruptions and future work trends predict that nearly 40 percent of the jobs we know today will be disrupted by technology within the next five years. Shouldn’t we be vigorously challenging our assumptions about the organizational learner?

As learning professionals, we prepare employees to work in dynamic, fluid businesses that are designed with different organizational structures, where the workplace is defined less by employers and more by ecosystems. We thus set out to challenge four lies about learners:

   Learners want to go somewhere (a university or a corporate learning center) to learn.

   Learners want to learn in order to improve their skills and capabilities.

   Learners want to be taught by experts.

   Learners want to keep learning separate from work.

The Digital Generation

Before we jump into our discussion of the lies about learners, let’s step back and set some cultural and psychological context around the key attributes of the worker—and learner—of the future. Or as we call this population, the digital generation.

Tech-savvy. Most of the current workforce has grown up during exponential technology advancement. During the past 10 years alone, the workforce saw disruptive technical innovations including text messaging, file sharing, social networking, search as a new way of life, the entire revolution (and repurposing) of the gaming industry, smartphones, and robots doing work previously done by humans. All will revolutionize the workforce as we know it.

Tech-savvy and multitask masters, the digital generation is constantly exchanging messages, surfing the web, and openly participating in social networks using their mobile and gaming devices. They know how to navigate hundreds, if not thousands, of Internet sites and mobile apps that enable them to develop their own content, engage in social learning communities, and even plan their lives and careers.

Collaborative and connected. With access to social, open-source, and mobile technologies, this digital generation is collaborative in work and life and always connected. And as a generation, they were raised to be active team members in academic (learning teams) and recreational (organized sports) activities. So it should be no surprise that as workers, they harness the collaborative intelligence of personal and professional networks and ecosystems—whether in their organization or in their broader network and community.

Flexibility in how they work, live, learn, and play. Developing careers rapidly, learning in the moment, and taking on new experiences are the realities of the new workforce. For the digital generation, work isn’t a place you go, but, rather, it is what you do to contribute to the organization, and society more broadly. Work is not just about earning income. This generation of worker places much more emphasis on personal and social enrichment and fulfillment, meaning that they not only need flexibility in how, when, and where work and learning take place, but they also need to see the relevance of what they are doing or learning and its broader application.

“I can do anything” mentality. Confident, raised with a parenting style that built self-esteem at an early age, and not afraid to fail, the digital generation expects to succeed. With this confidence comes an insatiable search-and-explore nature regarding how, when, and where they want and need to work and learn. Our learning systems need to support this exploratory mentality, ensure that developmental opportunities are easy to find, and work with managers to reset assumptions about how to support their expectations.

Lies About Learners

Our current learning approach is outdated. Now is the time to reinvent it. The global business environment is changing rapidly; access to sophisticated, social, digital technologies is increasing; and the digital generation’s expectations of how, when, where, and why work gets done are shifting. The learner needs to be at the center of our reinvention. In this section, we aim to create a dialogue that moves us beyond developing learning programs to developing learner-centric learning ecosystems that allow our learners to not only master content—but to thrive with it.

Lie #1: Learners Want to Go Somewhere to Learn

Learning at any time, any place, any path, any pace!

—Milton Chen, Edutopia

The first lie—or assumption—is that learners need a break from their hectic work setting, and thus need a peaceful and tranquil environment to soak in and apply content. Instructor-led delivery of training content continues to lead the way when it comes to formal programs, but most learners prefer an anytime, any place, any path, and any pace approach to learning.

If we believe the classroom is where people learn best—and this is validated by industry studies—how does this mesh with changing workplace demographics? In 2012, IDC stated that 1.3 billion people would work remotely using mobile technology by 2015—that’s nearly 40 percent of the workforce. To continue with traditional classroom learning settings while the workforce becomes increasingly mobile would be to ignore the needs of our audience, preferring to stick with the methods with which we feel most comfortable.

In the mid-1990s, many within the learning and development profession thought e-learning was the answer. And for many, this approach has allowed for scaling learning through online technology. But it has proved less than adequate in developing critical thinking and innovation skills and, even worse, in developing problem-solving approaches. During the past 10 years, the shift has been toward blended programs, combining classroom and e-learning content. But again, this approach seems to miss the mark with current- and future-based workforce and workplace trends.

Gaming, cyber simulations, and mobile and social tools are all trying to fill the void, but for many organizations these approaches are expensive and time-consuming to conceptualize and develop. However, they represent social engagement and learning trends that we just cannot ignore. With learners that are increasingly mobile, learning professionals need to meet them where they want to learn, not where we want to teach them. So we must address three critical factors if we are to bring learning methods up to date with the needs of learners:

   Align learning content with the pace of business. Does learning content keep pace with the speed of the business? How long does it take to design and launch a learning program? Does that mesh with your company’s product development timeframe?

   Engage learners emotionally, intellectually, and socially with anytime, anywhere learning. How can a high-engagement, (cyber) simulation-like experience merge with the increasing pace of technological advancements (cloud, apps on devices) so that training professionals can deliver creative, engaging, and immersive experiences?

   Create real-time immersive experiences. As technology continues to permeate our daily lives, how do we create social learning environments that leverage these technologies (mobile, sensors, augmented reality) to enable our learners to learn about and interact with the world in a highly engaging, immersive way?

To us, the answers are in how we accelerate the blended approach, combining all the tools in our learning portfolio while adding several new social learning tools to meet the needs of our digital-minded workforce.

Imagine a scenario in which we are location agnostic. Learning is available on demand—it can be consumed whenever, wherever, and however. In this new world, we bring the learning to users and no longer expect them to sit in a traditional classroom, subject to the trainer’s availability. To achieve this ambitious goal, we must assess our approaches to learning to identify ways that we can blend mobile, social, mentoring, and both synchronous and asynchronous approaches to create immersive experiences that fully (and frequently) engage learners anytime, anywhere, and on their terms.

Lie #2: Learners Want to Learn in Order to Improve Their Skills and Capabilities

The second lie is that the more skills learners put on their resumes, the faster they expect to be given new opportunities or be promoted. But according to a 2012 Deloitte study, the skills graduates acquire after four years of college have an expected shelf life of only five years, meaning that skills learned in school may become outdated long before student loans are paid off. To meet the needs of our learners and our employers, we must shift our mindset from developing skills to developing learning agility.

Learning professionals often embark on program design with one end in mind: to improve relevant skills in the workplace. We measure return on investment to prove to business leaders that their investments in development are both valuable and relevant. We question this traditional approach because as soon as we train or certify someone in one skill, there are 100 more skills that must follow. And that only includes the skills we are aware of; there are probably many others. If we continue to play the skill game, we will undoubtedly lose.

Traditionally, learning and development professionals have been told to create environments that enable learners to learn. We challenge this premise, and strongly suggest that we shift our focus to developing learning agility, which stems from the ability to engage in rich personal growth and complex problem solving. If we can establish a culture of personal growth and problem solving, we can outpace the skills race.

Think back to high school algebra—back when we had to memorize equations. We now realize that if we had learned to understand the theory and to apply the theory to multiple situations through the use of problem solving, we would have been far better equipped to solve current and future issues. And there would have been no need to memorize specific equations.

The skills gap becomes more apparent the higher you go in the organization. At senior levels, decision making, prioritization, influence, and problem-solving skills have become prerequisites for success; specific technical skills have become less relevant. This may be why executive development programs have started to focus on building the strengths necessary for the future, rather than skills that may become outdated once the program is over.

Imagine a world in which our primary focus is learning to learn—a world in which exercising the mind is as important as exercising the body. For learning professionals, this is a major shift in thinking. It also represents a major shift in how we must justify investments in learning and development to our stakeholders and partners. Successful professionals will embrace this new challenge, move away from their traditional focus on competencies and skills, and rapidly shift their emphasis to higher-level functional development.

Lie #3: Learners Want to Be Taught by Experts

Organizations need to shift in thinking—from fixing what’s wrong to unleashing what is possible.

—Angel Mendez, SVP and Chief Transformation Officer, Cisco Systems

The third lie is that learners want to be taught by thought leaders, university professors, consultants, and professional trainers. Many learning professionals continue to believe that the transfer of knowledge is critical to the success of their learning programs. But we are coming to understand that the digital generation would rather turn to their social networks and global online communities to learn what they need, rather than engage in formal, instructor-led learning.

Learning methods have not changed for decades; how we design learning experiences was developed by the military more than 60 years ago to rapidly train soldiers for World War II. Most of our learners still sit in classrooms (physical or online) while an instructor transmits content. While the instructor-led learning model worked in the industrial age, it breaks down in an information economy.

While instructors are considered the experts, many are only concretely knowledgeable about the subjects they are teaching. Instructors tend to stick to the subjects with which they are most comfortable and pass on their own, often narrow, views. Curious learners thus lose the opportunity to look at problems from different perspectives, a capability essential to success in today’s business context.

If we think about it, the instructor at the head of the class is not unlike the now outdated hierarchical business model, with a leader at the top whose primary responsibility was keeping things under control and moving efficiently through the tasks at hand. Just as corporate hierarchies are under pressure to change, so too are top-down learning environments that no longer work in today’s fast-changing and collaborative business environment.

So, how are our learners learning? Are our learning and development organizations unleashing what’s possible, as Angel Mendez suggests? To unleash the possible, we need to move away from an expert model of instruction (aligned to specific content domains) and build on social community structures for learning and sharing. Imagine a learning environment in which employees learn in diverse social communities—communities focused, for example, on a particular engineering problem that they are trying to solve, a product innovation they are trying to launch, or even a business model they need to transform.

Learners no longer have to rely solely on formal learning programs to acquire knowledge. The Internet, after all, can fill that role. But they do need to be encouraged to develop social networks and create learning communities in order to master broader discovery skills, question legacy, observe new ways of thinking and problem solving, and experiment in collaboration with others.

Imagine an organization where learning (not training) is the highest priority and where learning communities prosper. Imagine if employee development was organized around what’s most relevant to their day-to-day activities, interests, and passions. And imagine if learning was powered by social networks and technology, rather than by instructors and classrooms. This is how a learning culture will thrive.

According to the Corporate Leadership Council, only 23 percent of business leaders reported satisfaction with the overall effectiveness of their learning function. If these data were reflective of a sales or supply chain organization, those who lead these functions would, surely, be exited from the organization. As learning professionals and experts, we need to put our profession under greater scrutiny. Completely changing our model from learning programs to self-guided social discovery should not seem like career suicide. Why? Because the Corporate Leadership Council also tells us that experiential learning improves engagement by 260 percent and boosts employee performance by 300 percent. We need to listen and lead.

Lie #4: Learners Want to Keep Learning Separate From Work

The fourth—and final—lie we’ll cover here is that when employees want to learn, they want to stop what they are doing and attend a scheduled class, book an hour to complete e-learning content, or search the web for relevant content or a job aid. But when employees stop their work processes to learning something new, productivity comes to a halt. Future employee learning will occur as a result of highly personalized, intelligent knowledge management systems that bring content specific to the task at hand to the learner, just in time.

To avoid intruding into business processes, learning professionals have to redesign their approaches to integrate, not interfere, with an employee’s workflow. This requires bringing learning to employees and integrating it into functional tools that are used within an organization. Embedded learning objects, social experts, chat functions, and central repositories of critical knowledge—all are examples of learning that must be fully integrated into the processes in which employees work.

In addition to embedding learning within the workflow, companies can support employees beyond the traditional day-to-day work cycle. For example, gamers can use the same online, collaborative approaches to learn work-related, problem-solving skills. Marketing professionals can apply the creative approaches in their personal and social collaboration lives to their work by engaging with their current and future customers in the same ways that they engage with their families and friends. Learning must come from within and across the organization’s ecosystem of customers, employees, and partners, drawing from professional networks, social communities, and the passion each individual brings to the organization. The key for learning professionals is to find creative approaches to nurture this learning within the organization.

Imagine a scenario in which an employee is challenged by a work task—such as selling a new product to a customer—but can learn how to solve the challenge the moment it arises. Imagine if this sales employee could simply ask the company’s internal virtual assistant, knowledge system, or network of content mentors for help. And imagine that the response was practically instantaneous. The employee wouldn’t have to search the LMS for relevant content and then wait for an available classroom program, plod through a badly designed or only partly relevant e-learning program, or navigate the company’s intranet for information that may or may not be useful. Instead, the employee could learn immediately within his current business processes or workflow.

It’s Time to Disrupt the Model

To get in front of and fully support this changing environment—to disrupt the traditional model—we offer some examples of ways you can challenge yourself daily.

The growing trend among businesses is toward more open and collaborative networks. How can we disrupt the learning and development platform to create an innovative learning experience—maybe even something that approaches an open-source model—that still creates value for all learners? How can we reward learners for both the quality of their ideas and their ability (and willingness) to co-create and share knowledge? Some growing movements toward open-access and open-knowledge models are the TED Talks and the Kahn Academy. These movements will only grow stronger, as a generation that has grown up sharing everything—and expecting everything to be shared—assumes a more influential role in business and society.

We need a new business model around knowledge itself. A business model based on developing and selling knowledge (training) no longer works in an age when content is increasingly free and accessible. Knowledge should no longer be treated as a standalone product. The marketplace values the ability to share that knowledge so that others can apply it, enhance it, and create even greater value from it. How does this translate to those in the business of learning and development?

As the technology choices and options become simpler, the learning executive becomes less of a trainer and more of a community curator—creating social networks and learning communities that help learners figure out how to solve business problems, rather than telling them what training courses to take. We need to challenge learning system providers to consider these trends and meet our needs. All too often we take the available systems as they are, sealing our own fate by launching outdated tools.

We need to challenge the performance systems used by so many companies that serve as barriers to taking a broader organizational approach to learning. These industrial-age systems encourage competition among individuals, rather than fostering experimentation, risk taking, and collaboration. All this despite the fact that elite performance and engagement comes from meaningful work with fully engaged colleagues who collaborate to solve complex problems for a company, an industry, and society at large. We cannot establish a culture of learning if we rely on systems that devalue that culture. It’s that simple.

Conclusion

Our complex, globalized, and highly technological business environments demand new business models, new management models, and new ways of creating systems for organizational learning. As our organizations evolve to support an innovation economy, so too must our understanding of how employees engage with content to remain productive in the future—how learners learn.

New social learning platforms and technologies are forcing an unprecedented reorganization of how we develop, curate, and deliver learning content at scale. Having a social networking (or social learning) presence is no longer optional. Employees expect it in order to connect to their co-workers, their ecosystem partners, and their communities of practice. In many industries, employees are expected to engage in vital conversations, build trusted relationships, and learn. So traditional forms of learning are yielding to entirely new development programs that are social, mobile, continuous, and highly integrated with broader business strategies.

Our learning tools must not just serve to retain and train the workforce. They will need to shape the socially structured organizations that we will inhabit in an information economy and where innovation is essential to sustained market differentiation. Immersive learning strategies—such as sophisticated workplace games—are engaging learners to solve problems and co-create solutions, while open education platforms are increasingly making content available just in time to everyone that wants, or needs, to learn.

The future is fraught with risk, change, investment, and personal and professional sacrifice—but also with incredible promise. Are you ready, willing, and able to take the steps to accelerate your organization’s success? Now is the time for you to decide.

References

The American Society for Training & Development (ASTD). 2013. 2013 State of the Industry. Alexandria, VA: ASTD Press.

Eggers, W.D., and J. Hagel. 2012. Brawn From Brains: Talent, Policy, and the Future of American Competitiveness. Deloitte University Press, September 27. http://dupress.com/articles/brawn-from-brains-talent-policy-and-the-future-of-american-competitiveness.