Making
learning more palatable
Upskilling
is becoming continuous, bite-sized, just-in-time, personalised and
outcome-oriented
August 30, 2017:
What
will the workplace in 2020 look like? By most reckoning it will be an
automated, digital world where we have bots for colleagues, hold virtual
meetings and our job roles and functions keep changing. How do we prepare for
such a world?
Companies
are radically altering their Learning and Development (L&D) models as they
embark upon digital transformation and prepare their employees to cope with an
unknown future. From content to delivery everything about training is changing.
The buzz words in L&D today are to deliver continuous, bite-sized chunks of
content that is just in time, just enough and personalised. Also, there is a
huge emphasis on evaluating and measuring training.
Arun
Rajamani, Country Head of Pluralsight India, an online training company that
has delivered over one million hours of training to Indian customers, says
learning is now deviating from old models of classroom training and going
digital. He explains the imperative: “With shrinking attention spans and
digitally induced distractions plus the pressure of meeting work deadlines, it
is important for learning to be condensed into bite-sized modules so that the
learner can switch to 2-5 minutes of learning and then switch back to their
work.”
As
training becomes 24/7 and all year around, several companies are investing in
dedicated L&D centres at their campuses.
Flying
ahead
At
IndiGo, arguably one of India’s most efficiently run airlines, you will find
examples of this new L&D model. As Summi Sharma, Vice-President, Ifly, the
airline’s dedicated training academy in Gurgaon, says, L&D at IndiGo is
crisp and short to make it impactful, integrated with operations to make it
actionable and do-able, keeping it as close to reality as possible. And it is
evaluated and monitored. “After training, the participants undergo tests as
part of practice – so that they implement the learning effectively,” she says.
Not surprisingly, IndiGo has just been awarded for its L&D at the CLO
Awards (Chief Learning Officers Awards) show held by Tata Institute of Social
Science.
Although
many companies swear by the 70:20:10 framework of L&D – which holds that 70
per cent of learning is done on the job (experiential), 20 per cent through
interactions with others (social) and 10 per cent through academic courses
(formal), Rajamani bluntly says there can be no ratios any more. How you learn
no longer matters.
Over
to the employee
He
says the learning accountability is now increasingly shifting to the employee.
Jaspreet Bindra, Senior Vice-President - Digital Transformation at Mahindra
Group, agrees that in the new world the employee has to bear the onus. “When
computers first came in people who didn’t learn MS word or Excel had no job.
Organisations did not teach them,” he says. Eighty per cent of the onus of
learning lies with the employees and 20 per cent with the organisation, he
believes. “There are so many options available for individuals to skill up and
so many ways to get trained, many of them free,” he says, pointing to MOOCS,
Stanford courses, and such. Other ways could be to read, and attend conferences
to gain awareness.
Bindra
puts these skills into two buckets – hard and soft. Soft skills are
culture-related and usually delivered by the company. Hard skills are technical
and related to job functions – some of which may be taught by organisations.
For instance, Mahindra employees were exposed to Design Thinking. Rajamani says
skills the most in demand today are “cloud computing, user experience,
mobility, data sciences & analytics, cyber security, machine learning,
design thinking, automated testing , AI and RPA (robotic process automation)”.
Outcome-oriented
L&D is also increasingly becoming personalised and addressing the needs and
aspirations of individual learners. Companies are investing thought into which
courses are better suited for which employee, what the skills needed for a
particular role or function are, and so on.
All
these changes are coming about as there is now heavy pressure on L&D
functions at organisations to deliver and make an impact on business outcomes.
As a result training has moved from being a nice thing to do, to a very
outcome-oriented approach. “Earlier learning was measured on the basis of time
spent by a learner while today it is the ability of the learner to demonstrate
the new skills learnt on the job,” says Rajamani.
Although
changes are happening, the investments in training per employee are still
inadequate, says Rajamani. MNCs tend to spend more. Indian companies spend just
one-third of what global organisations do. “Even if you factor in cheaper costs
here, we believe that the spends are inadequate considering the enormous task
ahead to transform organisation capability at scale. One of the main reasons
for lower spends in Indian companies is due to their emphasis on relying upon
traditional forms of learning as well as limited focus on continuous learning,”
he feels.
According
to estimates the overall corporate L&D spends in the Indian IT industry
alone exceed $500 million. Online video-based learning accounts for one-fifth
of this spend and over 75 per cent of this spend comes from large and mid-sized
organisations.
Challenges
and innovations
There are challenges, of course, in the new models. It is not easy to deliver
bite-sized learning. Curating content is a complex process that starts from the
design of a course, needs careful sequencing and incorporates significant
research of learning behaviour, points out Rajamani.
There
are also mindset issues. In the digital transformation context, Bindra says top
management usually buys in, and junior employees usually have these skills
inborn. The challenge is for middle management to adopt.
But
several innovations are emerging too. Take IndiGo, which has something called
ICoaches, an army of leaders. “Each station in our network has specific
individuals who have been hand-picked and trained to represent the L & D
team at our airports. They not only act as our eyes and ears but also conduct
briefings and ensure their teams stay updated by keeping in constant touch with
Ifly,” says Summi Sharma.
IndiGo
also allows its employees to take control of their own learning by running open
workshops every month for which they can nominate themselves and attend.
“At
the same time, we also create DIY (do it yourself) learning videos on
functional skills which they can view at their own convenience,” says Sharma.
Bindra
says Mahindra has done innovative stuff like getting employees to interact with
startups or visiting new-age organisations to see how they work in order to
promote agile thinking.
L&D
is constantly evolving. Rajamani picks three trends that will further change
models. These are gamified learning, artificial intelligence, and cloud
technology in learning. “Gamified learning not only makes the learning process
more of a fun activity, it also increases learner engagement and
effectiveness,” he says. Artificial intelligence is used for personalisation.
“Machine learning, which we use in our platform as well, will be used
extensively to understand user behaviour to recommend courses, paths and
assessments based on their browsing patterns and interest levels.”
He
believes cloud-based learning platforms will pick up in the enterprise space as
firms look to promote any-device, any-location, any-topic learning solutions to
meet their re-skilling needs at scale.
Source | Business Line | 30 August 2017
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior Manager @
Knowledge Repository
Khaitan
& Co
Upcoming Conference | National Conference on Transforming Libraries into
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