Thursday, November 19, 2015

You Don't Work in Learning Anymore

Years ago our HR Director challenged us all to consider the question ‘what does the organisation really hire you to do?’

The answer – delivering learning – never seemed very satisfactory to me. The business is really interested in outcomes. They have never been entirely convinced that learning delivers them, and we have never been very convincing.

But now I think it is clear: either you are delivering engagement, or you are improving performance. There is no ‘learning’ role. In general, the output of courses (events) should be engagement. The output of resources should be improved performance. You can work in either (or both)*.

But the implications are significant: firstly, there are principles and capabilities which belong to either class of activity which we are not following. Specifically - neither activity involves pushing content at people via various channels. Secondly, if we work in either engagement or performance support we must be accountable for tracking and demonstrating the outcomes. We must develop tools and methodologies that reliably track shifts in engagement and performance on a daily basis.

So next time someone asks you what you do, which is it? Performance improvement or employee engagement?


*I’m not even going to talk about compliance.
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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous8:32 AM

    Agreed, Nick. I wrote about this in 2011 https://donaldhtaylor.wordpress.com/2011/12/19/if-youre-in-ld-just-what-do-you-do/ There's a joint issue here of the way we present ourselves and the way others are pre-disposed to see us. I'm sure we'll get to a new mind set on both sides eventually. I'm not terribly optimistic about it happening soon.

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    1. shackletonjones2:15 AM

      Thanks for your comment, Don. Many of us have been concerned with the perceptions of L&D, and the way that we present ourselves for some time. But my point is rather that this is now a dead debate: that the class of activity - learning delivery - is no longer presentable. The good news is that there are two very clear, very legitimate classes of activity: engagement & performance support. This is not a 'philosophical' stance - by which I mean that our own efforts to deliver these things have shown that you need different processes, principles, people, suppliers and technologies. I remain a sceptical optimist; I prefer to think that L&D can be disrupted from within and is not merely at the mercy of external disruption.

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