For a faster path to excellence
The future of talent development. How we build highperformance organisations, has finally taken flight.
Authors Ant Williams, Terry Condon, Helen Wilkie
Learning is vital to organisational success. With farreaching changes taking place in technology, business models, and work practices, the need for effective employee skill development has never been higher or in greater demand. But our current approach to learning and development is not keeping pace with modern business needs. With 99% of organisations embarking on some form of transformation since 2020, nearly all report significant skill gaps in the areas required to drive business success.
Simply put, organisations must change the way people learn to make professional development activities more effective and easier to access.
Technology has dramatically enhanced our ability to access and consume content. Most of us are learning differently today, preferring on-demand experiences that are both
educational and entertaining such as YouTube videos, podcasts, and blogs. As organisations transform to more agile ways of working, professional development must transition from rigid classroom-only approaches to create a vastly more personalised learning experience; one centered around skill acquisition in the natural flow of work and life.
Our goal must be to create personalised and highly
targeted training and information to learners, in a format they want, whenever they want it. This is easier than ever through the emergence of learning experience platforms (LXPs) that mirror common technologies people use in their everyday lives such as video streaming services and social media. Personalisation also means offering learners more say in what development they can access.
With 99% of organisations embarking on some form of transformation since 2020
From 2021 onwards we expect classroom sessions will remain relevant, but their focus will shift from imparting knowledge to the building of new skills through deliberate practice. The expert teaching others from the front of the room will be superseded by facilitators who coach small groups of participants through a practice session that builds skill rather than knowledge. It will be social, gamified and designed as an immersive experience.
We invest in training to build capability, improve performance towards key goals, and enhance loyalty. But does it actually work?
An organisation’s ability to innovate, change and thrive is largely dependent on the skill of their staff. Training those staff is a source of competitive advantage. We invest in training to build capability, improve performance towards key goals, and enhance loyalty. But does it actually work? Training and development programs are time consuming for learners and costly to organisations. A staggering $83 billion is spent on training each year in the United States
alone. Then there are the additional expenditures not factored into this amount. Unites States companies spend a further $29.6 billion on “other training expenditures” such as travel, facilities, and equipment (Training Industry Report, 2019).
$83b spent on training in the US
Organisations spent $359 billion globally on training in 2016, but was it worth it? Not when you consider the following:
75% of 1,500 managers surveyed from across 50 organisations were dissatisfied with their companies
Learning & Development function
70% of employees report that they don’t have mastery of the skills needed to do their jobs
Only 25% of respondents to a recent McKinsey survey believe that training measurably improved performance
In 2020, increasing the effectiveness of training programs was the top priority of surveyed organisations (37%). This was closely followed by the need to measure the impact of training programs (18%), reducing costs (14%) and increasing learner uptake of training programs at 12% (Training Industry Report, 2019).
Only 12% of employees apply new skills learned in L&D programs to their jobs
Despite the significant investments made in developing staff, the limitations of corporate training are well documented. Even when great care is taken developing program materials to target key capability areas, programs often suffer from the same weaknesses:
1 Learning transfer
Learning often fails to transfer to the workplace.
2 Return on investment
Training benefits are seldom measured and reported.
3 Low personalisation
Programs are one-size-fits-all and lack individual tailoring.
SOURCE: HBR (2019)
The challenge of transferring learning back to the workplace is the number one reason most training is thought to be ineffective. Unless learners can successfully apply new knowledge and skill from a course into their roles, then their capability remains unchanged. What learners need most is a setting where managers and peers are supportive, workload is manageable and opportunities
any new knowledge into
learner receives beforehand, a social component that continues the learning beyond any collective sessions, and the embedding plan should be more than a TED talk and an HBR article.
to practice exist.
A personalised reinforcement plan to transfer any new knowledge into greater capability is needed for each learner. While external coaching is regarded a highly effective way of achieving this transfer, coaching is seldom offered to leaders because the costs are high.
Achieving good learning transfer requires careful selection of participants with development goals aligned to the programs focus. There should be priming content the
For greater impact, the learning needs to be integrated. Generally speaking, e-learning by itself has been heavily criticised as being ineffective in building useful skills for the workplace. Often large scale tech changes, system upgrades and software all add to the cost of e-learning which significantly decreases the overall value it provides a company. While e-learning can be helpful for those with clearly defined needs, this is “a bit like giving a student the key to a library and telling her to figure out what she must know and then learn it (HBR 2018).” It also fails to bridge the gap between acquiring knowledge and building relevant skills.
Classroom-based workshops also need to be supported with ongoing forms of development to embed the learning. Integrated approaches have strong empirical support for their use when combined with on the job experiences and feedback.
Despite a seemingly obvious need to establish whether our training initiatives are delivering the desired outcomes for the investment, training effectiveness is poorly assessed by the business community. And when assessments are made, they are only done at a superficial level with self-reported feedback the most common.
Research on ROI is limited, but studies have found that companies just aren’t
measuring training effects to understand if knowledge has increased, behaviour has changed, or greater organisational performance has been realised. Therefore, it is understandable that the business community continues to question the impact of training on their bottom line.
A major study showed that CEOs’ want to quantify any business impact from learning and development initiatives (ASTD 2010). But most
executives in the study indicated that their current level of measurement fell far short. Only 8% said that they were able to see current business impact—96% wanted to. The difficulty and cost of gathering the relevant data and measuring ROI accurately is seen as a major barrier to this occurring. Many organisations simply lack the integrated systems and the expertise needed to do this in-house.
While it’s unrealistic for educators to tailor training to each individual, we have to avoid the one-size-fits-all approach to development. Learning teams need to be segmenting staff and delivering training strategically if we want to make a measurable impact.
It’s hard to escape the limitations of any training that requires people to congregate at specific times in a common location. The travel, the time
away from home, the pull away from critical work for sometimes days at a time. Then there are the limitations of the actual training experience. With the preferred model placing an expert at the front of the room ‘teaching’ skills like leadership. But participants may struggle to learn complex behavioural skills this way.
If the corporate world takes anything meaningful away from the COVID era, it’s that
people can adapt quite successfully to virtual learning environments. We’ve become accustomed to smaller bites of training that are easy to consume and often easier to implement. Short sessions, or micro-learning, that focus on one topic at a time can have greater impact as the ideas can be immediately acted on and have a growing body of empirical research confirming their effectiveness.
Part of the challenge is that many L&D professionals are using outdated frameworks, designed for traditional classroom learning. One common framework is the 70:20:10 model developed by Morgan McCall at the Centre for Creative Leadership nearly 30 years ago. McCall’s research found that informal learning (70% experiential and 20% social) contributed to 90% of an individual’s skill development. But today there is little opportunity for informal learning in an environment where most people work remotely or visit the office infrequently.
Of the remaining 10% that was intended as formal development, there has been an over-investment in elearning as a replacement for classroom training. While this has given people more information, learners now face the daunting task of deciding what to learn and where to find it. The challenge has become one of modernising our learning frameworks to better suit our blended work environment. We need tools that guide our thinking and inform our approach in this new landscape.
If you wanted to build a kid’s cubbyhouse ten years ago, you would have probably enrolled in a night class. Over several weeks you would gradually gain the knowledge and skills needed to accomplish the task. But it’s unlikely you would use that same approach today. Rather, within seconds you would find an instructional YouTube video with a relatable person showing you exactly how to build one, and what tools you would need. It would also allow you to share your own experience of building the cubbyhouse with friends via social media.
“People now prefer to learn through the social media formats of video, podcast and blogs.
They want to escape the rigid classroom format.”
Social media has reshaped our learning preferences by making it easy for us to access highly targeted and relevant content, precisely when we want it. The widely accepted adult learning styles of visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic remain relevant but they take on new forms in todays supercharged social media environment.
learn through the social media formats of video, podcast and blogs.
We would like to propose a new learning framework. One that focuses on how we move from knowledge to competence faster, while encouraging the learner to take greater responsibility for their development. The framework is called the Learning Ladder because there are three rungs to move a learner from knowledge, to skill, to the competence required for their current or future role.
Photograph Scott Osborn
The responsibility for the individual’s development begins with them at the base level of the ladder, then involves the leader more as they progress. This is an important reversal of what we currently have, where we expect the manager to drive all development of their people. The responsibility needs to sit with the individual.
This type of learning forms the bottom rung of the Learning Ladder which represents any independent learning activities. Here the learner builds their knowledge of a topic through accessing learning content on their own. They can exercise new levels of choice around how, what and when they consume this content.
The learner will be able to choose between reading, watching, or listening. It could take the form of a thoughtfully written blog, a captivating podcast you might expect to find on Spotify or even a highly engaging video lesson that delivers a YouTube-like experience to the viewer. Educators will see their role as content creators responsible for building quality lessons, across each modality, that delivers high levels of user engagement within each intended audience. Where the learning content does not meet this high standard, learners will quickly switch off.
On the second rung of the ladder, the learner builds Skill. The fastest way to achieve this is by using a technique called Deliberate Practice. It’s a way to provide focused practice with instant feedback to the learner in a pressure free environment.
There are four parts to Deliberate Practice. The first part is called Scrimmage Scrimmage allows you to quickly assess your skill level at the task and identify where you need to improve. This awareness is crucial for the next step, which is setting a concrete Goal for each practice session. Scrimmage is usually done in a group, or with a partner, who can provide good quality feedback to the learner.
Once we have an awareness of our current ability and a specific focus, we work on discrete aspects of the new skill by Drilling. Drilling allows us to quickly improve through repetition and fast feedback from our partner. This is how we encode new patterns of behaviour and embed them through a neurological process called automaticity. Automaticity is the reason you can drive your car without putting too much thought into the mechanics of the task.
Finally, once we’ve built our skill and confidence, we put it to the test through Simulation. This is done by stepping into a realistic task scenario from the work environment, along with a degree of performance pressure. Creating these peak experiences is how to make training stick.
Once we have a base level of skill, we move onto the top rung of our learning ladder: immersive learning. This where knowledge and skill come together
It is also where our learner takes responsibility for their on the job development, with greater guidance from their Manager. The task here is to Act, Assess and Adjust. This three step sequence is how people become naturally talented and competent in high value activities in the workplace. Competence is not developed through reading
books or listening to lectures.
When we develop people using the learning ladder, we substantially increase their competence and therefore the results they can achieve in their role. It’s a way to ensure people don’t just know more, rather all new knowledge is transferred into usable skills and value for the workplace.
Learning & Development Teams (L&D) will have greater impact when their approach personalises the learning experience. We may have moved on from the practice of ‘sheepdipping’ learners through the same
programs, but the immediate future promises far more tailored learning experiences than ever before. True personalisation of training must deliver highly targeted information to participants rapidly, in a format they want, whenever they want it.
Whether that’s a podcast, an online course, or more in-depth experiences, L&D must guide learners through the myriad options and help them close skills gaps.
The new approach to learning and development will occur naturally in the flow of life. If I am a new manager wondering how to coach an underperforming team member, then on my morning walk to the train station I can listen to a podcast on the key principles of effective coaching. When I board my train, a notification on my phone asks me if I would like to watch video of an expert coaching a team member on a performance issue. By the time I arrive at work, I
I on
have gained most of the base knowledge around coaching conversations to
plan for my upcoming meeting.
I can listen to a podcast on the key principles of effective coaching.
Of course, despite my new a
knowledge, I haven’t built any actual skills around coaching yet. For that I need practice. Motivated learners might seek out a more senior manager to rehearse the conversation through a role play scenario. Or they might feel they have enough knowledge to have a go at the real coaching conversation and learn through doing and reflection. But how can the learning team facilitate this stage where new skills are developed?
life,
remarkable capacity to improve our performance, in nearly any area of life, if we train in the correct way. An
approach we would more
encourage more L&D teams to invest in comes from elite sport. Called deliberate practice, it refers to a special type of practice that is both purposeful and systematic. While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance
(Ericsson, HBR 2007).
weaknesses, test new then integrate your learning
good example of this can be
Deliberate practice always follows the same pattern: break the overall process down into parts, identify your strategies for each section, and then integrate your learning into the overall process. A good example of this can be seen in competitive versus recreational surfers. In Australia 2.5 million people class themselves as surfers. That’s over 1 in 10 people across the country, yet the number of these surfers who go on to become competitive athletes
is very small. What builds their skill level faster than recreational surfers is not how much time they spend in the water, but how they invest that time to improve performance.
When competitive surfers paddle into the line-up to train, they focus their surf on a single manoeuvre or skill. They repeat the manoeuvre over and over, perfecting it, seeking feedback from a coach or reviewing the session afterwards on video. On the other hand, recreational surfers will treat every surf the same. They will try to perform different manoeuvres on each
wave, even manoeuvres that are not well suited to the waves available. It’s also unlikely they will go out of their way to seek accurate feedback from an expert coach or critique video from their surf session.
When it comes to organisational learning and development, we need to adopt a similar approach that delivers focused practice to learners that is feedback rich. Classroom sessions will remain relevant, but their focus must shift from imparting knowledge to the building of new skills.
“The idea of an expert teaching others from the front of the room will be replaced by facilitators who coach small groups of participants through a practice session that builds skill rather than knowledge. It will be social, gamified and designed to be an immersive experience.”
If I gain knowledge on how to coach from videos and podcasts, then any training I attend can fast-track me to the deliberate practice of these skills. These practice sessions should be short and intense. The format should include retrieval, scrimmage, drilling and scenario-based application to get my ‘reps up’ and deliver rapid skill development in a focused area.
While the greater benefits of combining classroom training with coaching and online learning is well-documented, the forms of blended learning are becoming more sophisticated. The humble learning management system (LMS) is being replaced by learning experience platforms (LXPs) that mirror the common technologies people use in their everyday lives such as video and social media streaming services.
their peers, friends and even a program facilitator for feedback and support.
Currently, most LXP systems use basic if/then programming. For example, they might ask a learner what time of day that person prefers to learn. It might present the learner with three options: morning, afternoon, evening. The learner’s selection will then determine the timing of all future content nudges.
It will be social, gamified and designed to be an immersive experience.
The best LXPs are more than a repository of eLearning programs and training records. They use artificial intelligence (AI) to direct content to a learner based on their goals and learning preferences (how, when and where they learn). Learners are sent a sequence of nudges to promote learning behaviour in the flow of work. Learners can set their own personal commitments and engage
True machine learning exists in some LXPs, where the system picks up more nuanced information to further shape the learning experience. That might include identifying learner stress and responding with a personalised nudge to offer targeted stress management content.
The future of the LXP may see these platforms accessing the camera on smartphones to ‘read’ the mood of the learner and
shape the learning experience based on the learner’s emotional state at any given time. We will also see training delivered over virtual reality and augmented reality platforms. This promises to expand the options available to learners for high-quality deliberate practice on demand.
Training sessions are facilitator led.
Of course, like any new technology there can be teething issues when you introduce a new system into an organisation. One of the most common challenges with learning platforms is just getting people to use them. As most come at a significant cost, HR teams can be left
disillusioned by an investment that fails to meet their expectations.
The following table outlines a summary of the changes seen in the wider business environment in reference to L&D.
Training sessions are learner led.
Knowledge is passively received.
All learners acquire new knowledge the same way.
Knowledge is actively gathered.
Everyone learns at the same time.
Learning sessions are content heavy and delivered over a short period of time.
Training sessions emphasise information transfer with little feedback.
Learners spend little time in learning sessions getting to know each other.
ROI inferred through short term participant sentiment, often referred to as ‘happy sheets.’
People encounter new knowledge in a variety of ways.
Everyone gets to choose when they learn.
Learning is introduced one topic at a time over a longer period.
Training sessions emphasise deliberate practice and fast feedback.
Learners spend a healthy amount of time in practice sessions getting to know one another.
ROI can be measured and reported on across all four levels of Kirkpatrick’s framework.
Most LXPs will track individual and team performance throughout a learning program and give learning teams a number of detailed reports and dashboards showing the business impact of their learning programs. A useful
way to assess the impact of training is to use Kirkpatrick’s Evaluation Model. The model defines four levels of training evaluation ranging from simple participant reactions through to organisational impacts that result from the training.
Level Description Attribute
1
2
3
4
The degree to which participants react favourably to the learning event.
When we use LXPs, it makes the task of measuring training benefits effortless as evaluation data can be captured and fed into dashboard reporting across all four levels of Kirkpatrick’s model.
What an LXP can track Reaction Learning Behaviour Impact
Post-workshop evaluations from participants can be built into an online form.
To what degree participants acquire the intended knowledge, skill and attitudes based on their participation in the learning event.
To what degree participants apply what they learnt during training back on the job.
The degree to which organisational outcomes occur as a result of the training and the support placed around it.
Knowledge retention and mindset can be assessed through quizzes, rating scales and free form questions during and post-training.
Behaviour change can be tracked through peer feedback and self-reflection using a 360-survey tool both pre and post the training event.
The best LXPs will integrate with hundreds of common applications such as Salesforce, Slack and Google apps to track training impact.
New approaches to knowledge acquisition and skill development have the ability to maximise the business impact of organisational learning. By increasing the impact of learning programs, businesses can better prepare workforces for future demands. The move towards blended development by L&D teams should continue as technology brings a range of new and exciting ways to supplement existing training approaches.
Greater use of technology will bring new establishment costs but many providers of LXPs, and the program content behind them, may adopt new consumption models that only see users charged when learners are engaging with their products. When learning teams place greater reliance on technology supported learning, it will reduce the costs associated with classroom training. This includes flights, accommodation, lost opportunity costs, train-thetrainer costs, even one-to-one coaching costs can be reduced.
Despite these technological advances, L&D professionals still face the on-going challenge of how to
accurately identify, agree and articulate what capability is needed for the future. How do we give individuals choice but also direct them towards the required capabilities the business needs in the years ahead? How do we accommodate people who want choice but seem to crave direction at the same time? We believe that strong internal consulting skills will continue to feature as an essential ingredient of all great L&D teams.
By increasing the impact of learning programs, businesses can better prepare workforces for future demands.
Build the learning ladder into your L&D strategy. The framework will be particularly helpful as a learning approach for future training programs.
Build engaging learning content that people actually want to consume before they attend a training session. Allow them to undertake the training during work hours but make it available to consume at any time.
Spend your valuable training session time practicing skills rather than
teach new concepts. Follow the principles of deliberate practice.
View eLearning as a tool to help equip learners with new knowledge. Use it as a training supplement, rather than a substitute.
Shop around to find a system that is right for you and within your budget. Consumption-based systems can be used for discrete learning programs without an upfront investment or any ongoing costs.
1 4 6 2 5 3
Work with training providers who offer true blended training, where your people choose how, when, and where they learn. Go with a provider who builds their approach around your needs, rather than one with prepackaged solutions.
7
If you would like to factor these organisational development trends into your current people plans, then speak with a senior member from the Modus Leadership team soon. Whether you end up adopting these types of novel approaches or not, we welcome the chance to connect with you and share our deep industry insights with you and your team. ➳
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