At the outset, I would like to share few of my experiences in context of learning and career spectrum.
Scenario 0:
I was in 10th grade, facing the ‘Board’ Examination. The faceless ‘Board’ used to loom like an unknown monster, and in its severest form, vaporize all my dedication to learning. My only silver lining then was that one day, when I would start working like my father, I would no longer need to study. What puzzled me that despite his work, my father spent his leisure reading thesaurus. I wondered as to why he chose them over story books!
Scenario 1:
I was supporting a B-school to interview and identify their class. I met quite a few young MBA aspirants who were willing to quit their plush jobs to join the program. I asked them, “Why?”
Apart from the stereo-typed response of “looking for faster career enhancement”, I also heard a significant number of responses stating “The work is boring. Want to learn and try something new.” The boldest comment stays etched on my memory, “I have learnt what I needed to learn.”
Scenario 2:
I was interviewing for a position in my own L&D team, with a preference for candidates with engineering knowledge.
The best eligible candidate rejected my offer as he wanted to take up this station as a part-time role, which the organization did not permit.
A pure arts graduate staked her claim to the position. She stated that in her earlier assignment, she had proof-read every technical training content and had googled up to reconfirm her understanding, and in the process had acquired a near-to-perfect understanding of the topics.
Scenario 3:
In our Employee Engagement survey, career development had emerged as the key action area. A deeper demographic insight revealed that the freshers and executives were relatively happy with their learning options. The significantly disgruntled group were the mid-level managers, who felt that they were caught up with operational tasks and thus, not able to invest in their learning. Further, during focus group discussions, the techies also commented that they wanted upskilling trainings much ahead of the actual projects as this would give them more confidence to acquire new business.
Scenario 4:
While facilitating a leadership workshop on ‘Leading Teams’ for managers with about 15+ years of work experience, one of the participants stated that learning and development is an individual’s prerogative and not an organizational mandate. This was contrary to our messaging that as managers we need to invest in our employees’ learning. He went on to cite his bitter experience of his prior direct reports who had availed high value trainings but had quit their jobs. One of his fellow participants shared his point of view, “What if you had not invested in their learning and they had stayed on with you as ‘not so smart’ employees? How would that situation have impacted your performance?”
Scenario 5:
One of our Vice Presidents was to retire soon. The company retiral benefits included providing coaching to help them better reintegrate into their life outside work. This Vice-President asked me to book him into a coaching certification class. His goal was clear – he wanted to give back to society all that he had learnt in his years in office. By his position, he was accustomed to telling rather than asking. And he wanted to unlearn this trait, henceforth influencing through coaching in his new constellation.
I am sure that reading these instances will prompt you to introspect and come up with your own hypotheses. Personally, given all these scenarios, I am convinced that learning drives every one of us. At times we might consciously put it at a back-seat. But the ones who lead life with a purpose, always find their way back in learning.
“In fact, Udemy Research too reiterates the impact of learning on employee motivation. Their study reports that 54% of employees surveyed stated that they would be motivated by more time to learn at work, while 46% said that personalized learning path would influence their motivation“
This correlation is further confirmed by the exit data research. According to CEB Insights, 41% of the employees who left their jobs cited a perceived lack of future career opportunities as their primary reason for exit. Interestingly, pursuit of career opportunities was rated significant over better compensation.
With the obvious mandate of establishing development opportunities, the role of L&D becomes very critical in the organizational success. Unfortunately, many organizations have not yet geared up to this reality. HR is often caught up in the ‘War for Talent’ and invests heavily in recruitment to get the best talent in. In comparison, the L&D investments to retain this talent is meagre. In fact, ATD Research cites this ratio as 1:6, the skew clearly favoring recruitment. The organizational imperative has to be the goal of retaining talent, and towards this L&D needs to transform itself.
We need to rethink the purpose of L&D and consequently, its structure, processes and tools. The purpose should shift from a learning provider to a learning partner. Accordingly, the structure needs to be repositioned from a Centre of Competence to a business-integrated role, possibly tagged as a ‘Learning Partner / Talent Curator’ role. The touchpoints with business need to be integrated through every management driven operational and strategic business meeting. L&D needs to understand business strategy and accordingly co-create with business, options of personalized learning maps. Further, these learning journeys should not be overwhelmed by conventional classroom trainings.
Today people like to learn by asking the Alexas and Bixbys. They prefer MOOCs as look-ups. They youtube videos/ TED talks as inspirational reads.In fact, this brings up yet another shift that L&D needs to make. Today, quite a few organizations have signed up with MOOCs and are at present troubled with their return on investment owing to inadequate utilization. We need to respect the individual discretion for choice of learning formats / courses, etc.This calls for shifting out of the conventional buffet manager role. Instead, L&D has to step in to make the learning meaningful, and act as a learning sponsor. This means that L&D needs to help the learners map to potential application opportunities in different projects across the organization. From a tools perspective, the classical Training Needs Analysis could be expanded to look beyond training topics and instead identify training application scenarios!
These are just a few of the most obvious rejigs that we need to initiate for transforming the L&D portfolio. And to reach the pinnacle of success, L&D needs disruptions like a metamorphosis into an organizational PDA (Personal Development Assistant), catering to the unique learning need and style of each employee. The learning empowerment that an employee would experience, would unquestionably create a high level of employee loyalty to the organization by bringing in a completely new psychological contract. If the employee is assured by L&D of best performance, retention would not remain a challenge any more.
