We Are Losing the Race Between Learning and Technology: What to Do About It

In his HarvardBusiness Review article When Learning at Work Becomes Overwhelming, David DeLong points out that“learning requirements have reached unrealistic levels in many roles and worksituations today.” Specifically, he is talking about knowledge-intensivefields, such as healthcare, at every level from top executives to officeprofessionals and production workers. He cites examples from clinical nursing,but you are surely familiar with examples closer to where you practice.

This is a big deal and we need to adjust our thinking aboutlearning and our roles in our organizations.

Get rid of the silos

We have known for a long time that formal classroom trainingis expensive and time-consuming. Today eLearning, professional reading, and allthe other media that support skill development and knowledge transfer, add tothose costs. As DeLong makes clear, the load they place on learners adds toemployee stress, burnout, and turnover, hurting both individual andorganizational performance. He also cites Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee(see References), who argue that we are now in a race between education andtechnology. DeLong asserts the skills gap in any field is evidence thateducation, both formal and informal, is losing the race.

For learning professionals, whether we call ourselveseducators or trainers or learning-and-development practitioners, this is amajor concern. Traditional approaches alone, whether classroom-based oreLearning, will not win the race. Learning through social media alone will notwin the race, and neither will learning on the job. Taken individually, withouta strategic plan on our part and without appropriate infrastructure, thoseapproaches will only increase the frustration and burnout as employees try tokeep up.

And yet, today, what we see are “silo” strategies: learningand development tends to stick to courses. Few if any L&D practitioners employthe social strategies that Jane Bozarth has written about so well, and few if anyprovide infrastructure to support the “natural pathways” that Jay Cross, HaroldJarche, and other members of the Internet Time Group have illuminated. Andalmost no one takes on the challenge of parsing and balancing the learning loadacross formal, social, and informal approaches.

Let’s take a different view

Here is an overview of three elements that support learningand accomplishment (a larger-scale view of “performance”).

The support elements are:

• Skills and knowledge
• Shared experience
• Individual experience

These are attributesbelonging to individual persons. They enable performance and accomplishment;there are, of course, environmental factors that affect those outcomes (supervision,organizational culture, budget, opportunity, and so on), but those are not theconcern here. The titles I have given those support elements, the attributes ofour learners, do not refer to the meansby which individual performers acquire those attributes, that is, to what we doin L&D.

Table 1 provides some context.

Learning professionals have tended to treat each of theseelements, and the methods and means by which people acquire them, as separateareas of endeavor. Furthermore, as designers we have often:

• Specialized in providing or supporting only oneelement (skills and knowledge) and often only one of the means associated with it.
• Ignored the crossover or shading from oneelement to another: individual experience informs responses to sharedexperience; individual and shared experience inform responses to formalinstruction; formal instruction, when applied, creates individual experience; peoplemake connections between what they learn from experience and what they learnfrom formal instruction, leading to new ideas, new attempts, and so on.
• Ignored an individual’s prior experience oraccess to shared experience when providing formal training; why force people tosit through what they already know?

It is important not to think of these three elementsseparately, and the ways in which learning and performance professionals dealwith them (or don’t), without considering the relationship between the three. Aholistic strategy for supporting learning and accomplishment will yield betterresults than any silo strategy. It will also help to relieve the load onemployees by giving them some help with that load.

What can we do about it?

The 70-20-10 “rule of thumb” has had quite a bit ofattention, and I’d like to suggest we reframe it a bit. It really applies moreto our work as learning professionals than it does to the learners.

It is very difficult to calculate or quantify how much ofwhat a person knows about their job comes from formal instruction, from socialinteraction, or from just doing the job. Rather than struggle with trying to buildthis into an organizational strategy for learning (any plan we came up withwould have to vary according to the job, and within the job according to thepersonal life experience and physical and mental capacities of individuals), itmakes more sense to apply the relative proportions to our effort devoted to providingsupport for each of the attributes.

Consider carefully how to parse the elements and the role ofeach element in determining performance. Without automatically defaulting tothe current levels or cutting it out entirely, the smallest amount of time andbudget possible should go to the formal development of skills and knowledge. Doinclude formal instruction where it is required to support performance andaccomplishment, but keep it lean and realistic, with priority going to the mostcritical skills and knowledge. Regarding knowledge, remember the search engines.

Assign the largest amount of time and budget to developing, providing,and maintaining the technology infrastructure that supports “learning theropes” through individual experience, and to helping employees leverage theaffordances of that infrastructure.

Somewhere between these two is the appropriate amount oftime and budget for providing social infrastructure technology, opportunity forsharing experience, and helping and/or motivating employees to use thatinfrastructure. Remember to treat the development and support of coachingcapability as important.

Measure results as a way to look to what needs to be done tosupport learners accomplishing better results; don’t treat the data fromassessment as an autopsy of learning. Learning is a living process, not acompleted effort.

Finally, dumb luck (or, if you prefer, divine providence,the deus ex machina, a guardian angel) can result in someone having anexperience that results in learning exactly what that person needs at a latertime. We can’t plan for dumb luck, but we could also help people to understand the value of serendipity and the importance of always being ready to learn something,even when least expected.

References

Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee. Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is AcceleratingInnovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment andthe Economy. Lexington, Massachusetts: Digital Frontier Press, 2012.

Harold Jarche. “Work is learning and learning is the work.” Blog post, 17 June 2012. Retrieved 11January 2016.