What's your attitude to learning?

I recently came across a UK study carried out by the department of innovation, universities and skills.  It referred to the Leitch Review of Skills which was endorsed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the pre-Budget Report 2006 which set a commendable aim for UK to be a world leader on skills by 2020.  The analysis was undertaken using data from the National Adult Learning Survey (2005) dataset.  The methodology assumes that whether or not people will learn depends on their attitudes towards learning, and on their barriers to learning.

The study segmented attitudes towards learning into 10 different categories, 1: being the Enthusiastic and Enlightened, through to 10: the Disaffected and Discouraged.  I’ve included a summary of their findings:

1 - Enthusiastic and Enlightened – 29.2% of the population

Enthusiastic and Enlightened are very positive about learning, and have very few barriers. They are mostly employed and well qualified and they can be expected to invest in their training when necessary without external incentives.

2 - Fulfilled and Family-focused – 14.5%

Fulfilled and Family-focused are positive about learning but they have little time to learn because of their family commitments. They tend to be younger women with children under 16 in their household. Most of them are working and well qualified.

3 - Hampered Hard Workers – 7.1%

Hampered Hard Workers are positive about learning but tend to find it difficult to justify taking time away from work. Nearly all of them are in work, and most of them are well-qualified.

4 - Looking for Learning – 4.9%

Looking for Learning are positive about learning, but unsure what training to do. Nearly all of them are in work, and most of them are well-qualified. They tend to be mostly under 45.

5 - Trapped on a Treadmill – 5.9%

Trapped on a Treadmill are slightly negative about the value of learning, and have strong financial barriers to learning. Most of them are working and they have average qualification levels. Their incomes are lower than most of the other “in work” segments and they are not very happy with their lives. They are mostly under 45.

6 - Older into Other Things – 11.1%

Older into Other Things are slightly negative about learning. They are not interested in doing learning themselves and are very happy with their lives. Most of them are over 45, and a majority are male. Around two-thirds are in work and they have slightly less than average qualifications.

7 - Too Late to Learn – 10.6%

Too Late to Learn tend to be older women. They are slightly negative about the value of learning but seem to have few barriers. Only about half of them are working, and a majority have qualifications below Level 2. Despite mostly having low incomes, they seem reasonably happy with their lives.

8 - Sceptical but Scraping by – 5.5%

Sceptical but Scraping by have few barriers to learning but have a very negative attitude towards it. They are mostly in work even though half of them do not have Level 2 or above qualifications. Half of them have a low income and a majority of them are men, and are fairly happy with their lives.

9 - Unfulfilled and Unhappy – 8.6%

Unfulfilled and Unhappy are slightly negative about learning but have many barriers. Less than half of them are working and over half are without level two qualifications. They are unhappy with their lives but don’t feel that learning could change things for them

10 - Disaffected and Discouraged – 2.6%

Disaffected and Discouraged have a negative perception of the value of learning, and they report a great many barriers to doing any. Only around half of them are working, and more than half have basic skills problems. Two- thirds have low incomes, and overall they are not very happy with their lives.  

The big social challenge this raises is how you move those bottom groups with the worst attitudes towards learning up the scale sufficiently to do something about learning.  Maybe each group needs a different approach to achieve this?  Sometimes I’m glad I don’t have some of the challenges local governments face!  

It would be good if corporates became increasingly willing to facilitate some of this learning; group 5 for example sound like a perfect segment to be ‘brought around’.  Mainly at work, slightly negative towards learning but struggling to fund it.  Organisations could be (and some are) very instrumental in helping these people to grow and learn.  An number of our iManage clients are taking an increasing interest in using 3rd party academic institutes such as the Institute of leadership and Management to accredit the learning programmes we run for them.  This is a really good step, and one that supports the vision to be a world leader on skills by 2020.  

Wot, No Job Description? Crappy Performance Management Rule Number 4.

If you really want to make a disconnect between performance management and your staff here are three must haves for your teams Job Descriptions:

1. The old ones are the good ones:  Why go to the bother of updating perfectly good JD’s?  If you’ve an old one that’s been faithful in the past, then save yourself the effort and issue it again.  Even better, you might have a good one from a previous employer, search it out and get this time wasting activity out of the way.  No one ever looks at them anyway!
2. Make the job title as flash as you can:  If you have to tart up an old JD, then go for a flash title.  The grander the better.  People love to feel important, so dream up the biggest title possible for the role in question.  
3. Don’t tie your kangaroo down sport:  Keep any JD as vague as you possibly can, that way you can get them to do anything you need.  After all a flexible team is key.  

OK, so none of us would really subscribe to these guidelines would we?  Scan them again asking whether they could (even in part) be leveled at your own organisations Job description practices.  It’s often not that difficult to find more than a hint of these practices in our organisations, let’s make sure it’s not us that’s doing it. 

Performance Management should be built on an effective foundation, that starts with writing robust and clear Job Descriptions.  Let’s flip these three crappy rules around into better ones.  

1. Job Descriptions become dated as soon as you’ve written them:  The fact is people often dismiss the value of JD’s because they have the potential to become out of date very quickly.  Not only should we start with a clean sheet when we are writing a JD, we should make time to regularly review existing ones.  If you do this it will send a very strong message to your team about the direction of your function, about your seriousness with doing what we should be doing, and about the value you have for supporting the team.  Never pull out an old JD and pass it on.  Start with a good job analysis, use your team to support this activity and craft the new document.  If you’re revisiting the JD because someone is leaving, then interview them about the job they were doing, then ask how what you have learned impacts what you do next, and use your knowledge to influence the new version.  
2. Ensure that the job title will attract the write candidate:  Avoid at all costs the temptation to ‘over-egg’ the job title.  It is the main trigger for attracting new candidates to the role, it  is the thing that they will latch onto first, and if done badly can attract all the wrong people to your recruitment process.  If you had a vacancy for a systems support role you might give it the title of Systems Manager or perhaps Systems Specialist, think about it, these two titles have the potential to attract very different applicants.  
3. Make the language used as specific as possible:  A vague JD does not correlate with having a flexible team, more often it creates confusion.  Use very clear descriptions of what is needed to do the job, trying always to remove ambiguity.  Avoid fashionable but meaningless phrases such as “computer literate” - They can mean a hundred different  things to a hundred different people.  The more specific you are the better able you will be to judge role suitability, and the better the employee will be at developing the required capabilities.  For recruitment make sure you differentiate between role ‘must have’ and ‘nice to have’ competencies / requirements, it will help you to see which applicants are in the race at all, and for those that are which can offer your team the most.  

You may have heard biblical parable of the man who built his house on the sand, and his peer who built on the rock; read here if you want to know what happened when the storm came!  Great performance management should start with a rock like foundation - despite all the corporate criticism they receive Job Descriptions offer you the opportunity build a strong effective team that will take less of your precious resource to performance manage the results you require.  Perhaps it’s even a good time for a complete team JD review?  Go on, build your team on a solid foundation. 

See here for Crappy Performance Management Rule 3.   

How committed are you to experiential learning?

I recently had the pleasure of a relaxed chat with a Professor of the very respected Henley Business School.  We walked around their impressive stately home environment on the banks of the river Thames dodging the heavy showers and discussing approaches to learning.  It was as you might expect a thought provoking hour or so. 

Previously I had been musing on the seeming lack of tutor input that my daughter was receiving on her degree course at Central St Martins college of the arts.   Ok, I know it (like Henley Business School) is a world renowned leader in its field, but to me it seemed like our considerable fees were providing pitiful levels of input to the students within the process.   

Back at Henley the conversation came around to experiential learning.  My very clever acquaintance explained just how committed they were to student immersion in self discovery. Great resources were at hand, but expectations that the learner would take responsibility for their own learning experience was high.  It was clear that some students found this disconcerting at least for a start, especially it seemed those that had been brought up in strongly didactic teaching environments.  Certainly he suggested, some international students who may have been used to very traditional academic teaching could be excused at thinking they weren't being taught anything at all!  

All this got me thinking about our own commitment to experiential learning at iManage.  An example of experiential learning would be going to the zoo and learning through observation and interaction with the zoo environment, as opposed to reading about animals from a book. Thus, one makes discoveries and experiments with knowledge firsthand, instead of hearing or reading about others' experiences.  It is unlikely that this idea is new to any of us reading this, indeed at iManage would consider our own workshop learning solutions as experiential.  The challenge is, just how experiential are they?  

Two very different, but world leading academic establishments seem totally committed to facilitating individuals learning, but not in merely handing out education.  In fact if students don't immerse themselves in the experience they are somewhat unwelcome.  What can we learn from this as L&D professionals in the world of commerce?  

Content on our courses must still be important, but so is creating a memorable learning experience.  Budget pressures are in some organisations encouraging HR and L&D decision makers to squeeze as much as possible into courses and run them in the ‘most efficient’ way possible.  Longer experiential events are definitely under pressure in favour of shorter crammed in versions.  How is that impacting the learning?  Maybe we need to be more confident in maintaining the necessary space within training courses, being prepared to remove more of the content (if the length is shortened) so that the space remains for learners to engage in a valuable journey of self exploration.  

How some professionals are really making a difference through learning and development.

For me one of the interesting observations of the last 24 months has been the return of  the 'substantial' training programme. Four (or was it five) years ago as the banks went into melt down our iManage order book became very short term.  Clients were still buying, but it felt quite reactive. Often we were being asked to run interventions at short notice, and those interventions were frequently shorter in duration and perhaps more tactical in application. That was way back then, but now there seems to be a more exciting wind of change blowing through learning and development. 

If our experience is anything to go by, we are seeing much more strategic intent motivating our clients buying behaviours. Typically that seems to manifest itself in more significant training and developer programmes that align themselves to business initiatives as much as individual needs.  Coupled with this we are finding more readiness to engender a learning culture through some form of 70:20:10 approach.  The shorter intervention has not disappeared, rather it seems to have polarised around bite sized style solutions that are part of the supporting blend.  This to me feels like a healthy place for L&D to be.

It would be easy to assume that this is being driven by an need to secure true value from the training budget, but in practice it's seldom as simple as that.  So here are some of the things we've seen that have impressed us about the way L&D teams are working:

Being bold enough to make the case.

It's not an easy thing to put your head above the parapet, it's a bold thing to do, but sometimes great leaders do bold things.  Where L&D professionals step up and begin to make the links between an organisations strategy and operational effectiveness you start to see how value is really delivered.  The good ones are all over the strategy, working out ways in which they can support the vision and direction with a range of very targeted learning interventions. 

Being prepared to make a single way. 

Whats coming here may be an obvious thing to say, but it's far from an easy thing to establish. Organisations that get hold of maverick, independent budget spending, and instead puts a high quality 'company way' together begin to maximise the benefits. Success in this area seems to come when learning solutions really hit the spot with individual needs whilst delivering against strategic goals.   

High levels of involvement.

It’s no accident that some of the best and most exciting programmes we are involved in are well supported by the HR / L&D teams.  Simply put they are just very active; have a high level of interaction with the delegates, seen to take an interest, dropping in, helping out, looking for ways to support the learning etc.  

If there is one benefit from the conditions brought about by the current economic downturn, it’s that much more care is being taken around creating tangible value from the L&D budget.  That’s got to be a good thing for the profession, and one we’ve always supported with our ‘no change - no fee’ approach to learning solutions.  It’s great working with teams and individuals who are determined to go beyond the menu based ‘seen to be doing something’ training portfolio.  Long may the current climate continue!