Author: Clive Shepherd

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the third part of chapter 11:
Your next step is to identify the learning and development needs that you wish to address for the population defined in step 1. Ideally these should reflect the established business needs of the organisation and be reflected in clearly-defined statements of competency.
You can be as flexible as you like in defining the scope of your analysis:

• The totality of all the learning and development needs of the target population.
• Just those needs associated with a particular upcoming business change or project.
• Those needs associated with a particular performance problem.
• The development of the target population to take on further responsibilities in the future.

Ask yourself the following questions about each of the major needs that you are required to address:
How critical is it that the employees concerned have the particular knowledge or skill (regardless of how often they may use it)? Critical skills are those that the organisation absolutely depends upon to meet its objectives and its legal responsibilities. In some cases these skills may be used only rarely, such as in an emergency, but that in no way diminishes their importance. When employees are not recruited with the required skills, the organisation has a responsibility to provide this training, typically using a formal intervention with assessed outcomes.
How frequently will the employees concerned need to use the particular knowledge or skill? The Pareto principle applies as well to skills and knowledge as it does to many other aspects of our lives. It is very likely that 20% of the total knowledge and skills required for a particular job are used to fulfil 80% of tasks. The remaining 80% of skills and knowledge will be used more rarely. The implication here is that the learning and development effort is best applied to the most used 20%, whereas the remaining 80% can be covered more superficially and/or provided on an on-demand basis.
How much fluidity of change is there with respect to the associated tasks and goals? Tasks and goals change much more rapidly in some jobs than they do in others, and this is likely to have an impact on the required knowledge and skills. When there is a high degree of fluidity in tasks and goals, it makes less sense to try and provide training on a formal basis and makes more sense to support performance on an on-demand basis.
To what extent will the employees concerned need practical on-job experience in order to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills? Any work-based skill is likely to benefit from practical on-job experience, but in some cases the importance of this experience, relative to formal off-job training, will be much more significant. This will be particularly true when the circumstances in which the job is carried out are hard to simulate in an off-job environment or where the employee is required to exercise judgement in dealing with a very wide range of possible situations. A good example would be the training required to become a doctor or to learn a trade such as plumber or electrician.
How complex is the skill or knowledge required? When a job requires complex skills or knowledge, which for a less-experienced employee would be hard to recall, then there is an argument for supporting any more formal training with on-going support on an on-demand basis.
Would it damage credibility if the employees concerned were to make use of on-demand performance support to support their learning? There are situations in which an organisation’s credibility would be damaged if their employees had to consult a reference source before responding to a problem. In these cases, there is no alternative but to make sure the required knowledge and skills are in place before the employee takes up their responsibilities.
Is it vital that the employees concerned are able to carry out their responsibilities smoothly and speedily? Similarly, sometimes there is simply no time available for an employee to consult a reference source before responding to a problem. They have to be able to react quickly on the basis of what they already know. Examples include emergency situations, where immediate action is required, or jobs where the employee has to rapidly carry out a series of transactions, such as on a supermarket checkout. The skills and knowledge needed to carry out these tasks must be acquired up-front before starting the job, with minimal performance support.
Do the tasks involve novel and unpredictable situations? Where it is hard to predict the situations that a job holder will encounter, it becomes impractical to provide very specific up-front training or to develop detailed performance support materials. The employee needs to be provided up-front with the core skills needed to deal with the widest possible variety of situations, but also requires the support of recognised experts on an on-demand basis.
Is it essential that the organisation is able to demonstrate compliance to an external regulator? In many cases, an organisation has to demonstrate to an external regulator or an insurance company that employees have been provided with specific knowledge and skills. Classic examples are in financial services and in situations where there are serious health and safety risks. In these cases, it is important that an organisation can demonstrate that each employee has received the required training and, in many cases, acquired the necessary knowledge and skills. As a result, compliance training is much more likely to be addressed using formal methods.
Coming next: Step 3: Decide what must be tackled formally
Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10
Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the second part of chapter 11:
It’s possible to apply the model very generally across a large population, say an organisation’s entire workforce, and this may help in making very general policy decisions; but the model will be most useful when applied to a relatively heterogeneous group, whether that’s a vertical slice of the organisation (by department, by division, by region) or horizontal (by management level, by level of experience and so on).
You’ll know if you’ve defined the population appropriately if you are then able to make some generalisations about its characteristics. If every characterisation can be summed up as “some are like this, some are like that”, then you will have difficulty in coming up with a coherent architecture and would do better to sub-divide the population further.
The following questions will help you to characterise the population. Hopefully, most or all of these questions will be relevant in your case. However, you may need to extend the list to capture the important subtleties of your particular situation:
How much knowledge do the employees concerned already have about the field in which they operate and their particular job responsibilities? The more knowledge they already have, the easier they will find it to add to or modify this in response to changing circumstances. This is because memories do not exist in isolation; they are formed as connections to existing memories. Those with plenty of experience in a particular occupational area will have a solid base on which to build and are likely to have a good idea of what gaps there are in their knowledge. Conversely, novices in a field will have little prior knowledge on which to build and little idea about what gaps there are in this knowledge. They require, and will be grateful for, more structured approaches to learning.
How widely is expertise distributed among the population? When expertise in a particular domain is concentrated in a relatively small group of people, then you will be constrained in your choice of approaches to learning on the basis of simple capacity. You can’t expect the same few people to be instructors, coaches, reference sources and champions of good practice when you are also relying on them to use their expertise to fulfil their own, critical job responsibilities. In these circumstances you are more likely to try and capture their expertise in some way that allows for more scalable forms of dissemination.
How fast does this population turn over? In some occupations, the employee population turns over very rapidly, making it even more important than usual to minimise the time it takes to bring new entrants to competence. To make this possible, formal training should ideally concentrate on key skills and core knowledge, leaving less essential information to be delivered on-demand. Another implication of high turnover could be that less emphasis is placed on experiential and developmental learning, although it could be argued that this would make employees less inclined to move on.
How independent are the individuals as learners? Those with good metacognitive skills are better equipped to learn independently. They have a good feel for what they already know, what’s missing and how to go about filling the gap. They will benefit from top-down learning but they don’t depend on it. For this reason, where resources are tight, efforts are more sensibly directed at those who most need the assistance, i.e. the dependent learners.
How motivated are the employees concerned to learn and develop? Motivated employees are more likely to undertake independent learning activities and to contribute to the learning of those around them. Conversely, those lacking in motivation, perhaps because of poor management or because the job is, for them, no more than a means to an end, will do the minimum required to fulfil their basic job responsibilities and no more.
How much discretion does this population have over the allocation of their time? There are many jobs in which the employees involved have very little choice over the way in which their time is allocated – they are needed to carry out their tasks at specific times if the organisation is to function successfully. These jobs range from the un-skilled to the highly professional, from assembly line workers to soldiers and airline pilots. When an employee’s time is rostered, it is unrealistic to expect them to make time for less formal learning activities in the same way as, say, an office-based professional who is working to longer-term objectives. This is not to say that those whose time is rostered cannot engage in a wide range of learning activities, just that these will typically need to be formally added to their list of responsibilities and time specifically allocated for them.
What channels of communication are open to this population? Many learning interventions depend on the availability of particular communication channels. Some, such as on-job instruction or classroom training, rely on face-to-face contact. Many others need to be mediated in some way, through the telephone or through devices, such as smart phones, PCs and laptops, which connect to an organisation’s intranet or the internet. Communication channels are an important enabler for learning, so you’ll need to know exactly what channels are available to the population in question and what functionality they are capable of supporting. What devices are provided? What bandwidth can these devices access? What communication tools (web conferencing or social networking for example) are available on the networks in question?
What commonality is there within the population in terms of the tasks performed? It is important to get a feel for the numbers within the population who carry out the same tasks and are therefore likely to share many of the same learning and development needs. It is much easier to justify top-down approaches when the target audience is sizable, particularly when this involves the creation of content.
How important is it to individuals that their learning achievements are formally recognised? In some situations it will be important to employees that their learning be recognised through some formal certification or qualification, particularly when this will have a major influence on their future job prospects either within or beyond the organisation. In these cases, there will undoubtedly be a pressure for more formally-structured interventions.
Coming next: Step 2: Identify needs
Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10
Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the first part of chapter 11:
Models are fun. In their attempts to explain the complex cause and effect relationships of life, they encourage us to believe that we can become masters of our own destinies. If we’re discerning, we’ll reflect on the assumptions underlying the model, and test these against our experiences and the experiences of our peers. If the model holds up, it may even provide us with insights, helping to explain why things have happened the way they have in the past, and how they might just turn out in the future, if we were only to make more use of the model as a basis for our decisions.
Having got this far with this book, you may be encouraged by the prospect of becoming a new learning architect yourself (assuming you’re not one already). If so then this chapter is for you. It provides some guidelines for ways in which you can put the model to practice in real situations involving real learners. It will also help you to structure your analysis and your decision making, but having said that, there’s still plenty of work for you to do. After all, every situation really is different and architects are professionals who are used to thinking for themselves.
The process is described below as a series of steps:

1. Define the population
2. Identify needs
3. Decide what must be tackled formally
4. Decide what can be addressed using non-formal approaches
5. Decide what can be addressed on an on-demand basis
6. Decide how best to support experiential learning
7. Implement and evaluate

Coming next: Step 1: Define the population
Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10
Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the third and last part of chapter 10:

Top-down approaches

There are many ways in which an organisation can encourage experiential learning on a top-down basis::
Benchmarking
Project reviews
Action learning
Job enrichment
Job rotation
Performance appraisals
Continuous improvement
Optimising the working environment

Bottom-up approaches

Employees can also take the initiative themselves when it comes to experiential learning and in many cases this happens quite naturally, as individuals reflect on successes and failures, and talk things over with colleagues, friends and family. The following are additional bottom-up initiatives which can be actively facilitated by employers:
Blogging
Getting a life

Conditions for success

Experiential learning happens whether we plan for it or not, but it will only thrive in a supportive culture. That means:

• a culture that encourages innovation and accepts that mistakes are an inevitable consequence of this;
• a culture that does not seek to apply blame or find scapegoats when initiatives fail;
• a culture in which mistakes from which lessons have been learned are valued as highly as successes;
• a culture that is always looking to learn lessons from the successes and failures of other, comparable organisations;
• a culture in which employees are regularly exposed to new and unfamiliar situations, in order that they can develop and grow;
• a culture in which employees are encouraged to reflect openly on their work experiences;
• a culture that values the participation of all employees in its quest to change and improve;
• a culture that appreciates the importance of diverse out-of-work experiences and encourages a healthy work-life balance.

This culture starts from the top.
Coming next: Chapter 11 – Putting the model to use
Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9
Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the second part of chapter 10:
Experiential learning occurs whether we want it to or not, but there are good reasons why we should be actively supporting and encouraging it:
Because everyday work experience is rich with opportunities for learning: However hard you try to create authentic learning scenarios in the classroom, you will never match the real thing.
Because we don’t always take the best advantage of these opportunities: In the mad rush of everyday life, we don’t always take the time to reflect on what has gone well and what less well. True, if an incident has a major emotional impact on us, we can’t help but reflect on it, so much so that we may find it hard to sleep; but there are many less monumental learning opportunities that end up being wasted.
Because, if something goes well, we want to repeat it: Every effect has a corresponding cause, and when these effects are positive, we would be foolish not to try and pinpoint the causes. Obviously we may just have been the beneficiary of good fortune, but chances are there are some good practice lessons to be learned and ideally shared with our colleagues.
Because, if something goes wrong, we want to avoid it happening again: Children soon learn not to bang their head against the wall, because it hurts. But as adults we aren’t always so keen to learn from our misfortunes; we often just hope things will work out better next time. It may be more painful to reflect on our failings than our successes, but change is often painful, and learning is change.
According to James Zull, “Little true learning takes place from experience alone. There must be a conscious effort to build understanding from the experience, which requires reflection, abstraction and testing the abstractions. Testing our ideas through action is how we find out we are on the right track. The only pathway that seems unproductive for learning is the pathway that excludes testing of ideas.”

References

The art of changing the brain by James E Zull, Stylus, 2002
Coming next: The experiential learning toolkit
Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9
Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the first part of chapter 10:
As learning and development professionals we are most alert to those opportunities which will help employees to ‘learn to’ carry out some task or fulfil some responsibility; we want to get ahead of the game, to equip employees with the knowledge and skills needed to meet the requirements of current and future job roles. Even when we put in place facilities and resources to support just-in-time learning-on-demand, we still have a forward looking focus, trying to get ahead of the game, even if only at the last minute.
Yet for many people, the greatest insights come not through ‘learning to’ but by ‘learning from’ our day-to-day work activities. Experiential learning is literally learning from our experience. It occurs consciously or unconsciously as we reflect upon and react to our own successes and failures at work as well as those of our acquaintances. It introduces an extremely valuable feedback loop into our everyday work.
Without experiential learning, all we are left with is the ‘doing’. We repeat the same actions over and over again, never improving and constantly at risk to every new threat that appears in our environment. Experiential learning is ‘doing’ plus an essential additional ingredient – reflection. Without reflection, we can have many years of experience and learn less than someone who is a relative newcomer but who has learned how to learn.
The natural way to learn
Experiential learning is the natural way to learn. According to Charles Jennings, “70% of adult organisational learning takes place on the job. This learning is gained through experiences that develop, through facing challenges, through solving problems, through special assignments and through other activities that an employee carries out on a day-to-day basis.”
We are hard-wired for experiential learning, as John Medina explains: “When we came down from the trees to the savannah, we did not say to ourselves, ‘Good lord, give me a book and a lecture so I can spend ten years learning how to survive in this place.’ Our survival did not depend upon exposing ourselves to organised, pre-planned packets of information. Our survival depended upon chaotic, reactive information-gathering experiences. That’s why one of our best attributes is the ability to learn through a series of increasingly self-corrected ideas.”
And what’s more, this ability does not fade with age: “The adult brain throughout life retains the ability to change its structure and function in response to experiences.”
Employees are well aware of how important experiential learning can be. The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) asked 2076 employees in the UK to identify the activities that had been useful in helping them to do their job better. Here’s what came back. The figures show those who found the activity ‘very or quite helpful’, with those who found the activity ‘of some help’ shown in parentheses:

1. Doing your job on a regular basis 82% (13%)
2. Being shown by others how to do certain activities or tasks 62% (23%)
3. Watching and listening to others while they carry out their work 56% (26%)
4. Training courses paid for by your employer or yourself 54% (20%)
5. Reflecting on your performance 53% (30%)
6. Drawing on the skills you picked up while studying for a qualification 45% (21%)
7. Using skills and abilities acquired outside of work 42% (29%)
8. Reading books, manuals and work-related magazines 39% (24%)
9. Using trial and error on the job 38% (27%)
10. Using the internet 29% (18%)

Unfortunately these options are rather ambiguous and overlapping, but it is safe to say that numbers 1, 3, 5 and 9 are all aspects of experiential learning.

References

The Point-of-Need: where effective learning really matters by Charles Jennings, article in Advance series from Saffron Interactive, 2008
Brain Rules by John Medina, Pear Press, 2008
Practice Makes Perfect from NIACE, 2007, www.niace.org.uk
Coming next: The argument for experiential learning
Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9
Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the fourth and last part of chapter 9:

Top-down approaches

A number of options exist for organisations to support employees with on-demand learning:
Performance support materials
Mobile learning
Help desks
Online books

Bottom-up approaches

On-demand learning can also be supported from the bottom-up through the use of technology:
Online search
Using forums
Using wikis

Conditions for success

On-demand learning occurs whether or not an organisation takes active steps to provide encouragement and support. Every time an employee turns to a colleague for help with a task, they are engaging in on-demand learning. However, on-demand learning is more likely to thrive when l&d professionals recognise that:

• it is often unnecessary, if not completely futile, to try and teach employees everything they need to know to do their jobs; there is too much to know and it changes too quickly;
• resources need to be shifted from teaching everything there is to know, to covering the key underlying concepts, principles and skills formally (unless, of course, the job situation clearly demands that these be memorised / fully embedded) and then providing high quality, context-sensitive, usable, easily-accessible information at the point of need;
• in many organisations it is impossible to provide all necessary information on a top-down basis; employees need to be encouraged and empowered to form communities of practice, to develop knowledge networks, to share best practices, and to collaborate in seeking solutions;
• everyone knows something, nobody knows everything.

Coming next: Chapter 10 – experiential learning
Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8
Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect