CHAPTER 33
Digital-Age Requirements for Talent Development Professionals
As we adjust to a new virtual reality and pivot swiftly to market demands, bringing trainers and technology closer together starts with learning and applying new ways of working.
IN THIS CHAPTER:
Apply work-based learning principles to adopt modern ways of working
Establish effective processes and practices for Agile and Lean ways of learning and working to align with the speed and scale of digital requirements
Enhance communication, collaboration, and coordination across the organization to motivate people to continuously learn
The current state of our digital world emphasizes and resurfaces some of the challenges that talent development professionals have been experiencing for years. Mainly, how do you accelerate the learning of individuals and teams so that they can respond well enough to the constant tides of change?
Companies are recognizing, in a very abrupt way, that adaptive practices of working and dynamic decision making are essential to maintain momentum and ensure products and services are delivered and sustained. Many of these changes are positive, and companies will not want to lose them or retract. For example, faster decision making, renewed organizational purpose, a focus on people, and a true manifestation of corporate responsibility have all come to the fore. Even more so, the upskilling and reskilling that is needed to close the talent gap is only growing in demand.
In these uncertain times, every organization needs to adapt a revised set of working principles, underpinned with the behaviors and capabilities to deliver them. This must be combined with an overarching ability to coordinate these principles coherently, despite disruptions to working norms. Now, more than ever, we need to ensure that we have the correct skills and capabilities to quickly deploy and further exploit technology to scale market share, revenues, and profitability.
OK, that all sounds great in business speak, but how do we make it practical and useful to understand and apply? Let’s start by improving how we teach and learn so that we’re not defaulting to the things we’ve always done. Work-based learning presents an opportunity to significantly shift the way we help others understand and apply new skills.
What Is Work-Based Learning?
It’s ironic that something we understand in our daily lives gets forgotten when it comes to training in the workplace. If you want to improve your presentation skills, your boss might send you on a one-day course, or you might trawl the internet for tips. Both methods have some value, but neither will help you improve as much as testing your speech in front of a colleague, or simply presenting more frequently.
If we’re trying to acquire new skills that are intended fundamentally to change the way we work, then it makes even more sense to learn through experimentation and doing.
Work-based learning presents principles and concepts and then asks learners to apply them immediately through a series of activities. The structured nature of the activities provides a supportive and secure environment where you can experiment, practice, and then evaluate how things went, before moving on to the next step. It also ensures that learning is at its most effective because it’s tailored by you to your unique circumstances. Because you are working on real projects alongside your colleagues, work-based learning is designed to share the learning experience with your whole team. It has been described as a metacompetence—not the acquisition of knowledge, but the acquisition of learning how to learn.
Think about how we’ve traditionally trained others. For the most part, learning has happened in the classroom or conference room. Even with the introduction of innovation labs and all types of master classes where you get people to interact and run activities and games to help teach skills, the learning is still confined to the classroom. Now think about a framework that has been in play for some time and based on CCL research that goes back more than 40 years: the 70-20-10 framework (Lombardo and Eichinger 1996; Figure 33-1).
The 70-20-10 Framework
The 70-20-10 framework of learning focuses heavily on supporting people during their day job. It also creates the ability to provide mentoring and coaching remotely to support online training.
Figure 33-1. The 70-20-10 Framework
Why is this framework relevant now more than ever? The reality is that most learning happens on the job, and classroom training isn’t enough. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the need to deliver education in more flexible and tailored ways (for example, remotely) to adapt to customer needs is critical to make the learning stick.
Experienced trainers know firsthand that, even in normal times, many teams are co-located. In fact, teams and trainers have been adjusting to real-world situations for years to offer support to distributed delivery, off- or near-shore, and multinational companies. And if the pandemic didn’t heighten this awareness, then nothing will. By placing the emphasis on the team’s work items and goals, work-based learning enables flexibility and has proven to be as effective when done remotely as it is in person.
After working closely with businesses for years, we’ve observed some similar patterns. We’ve used this knowledge to tailor the learning experience through a collection of outcome-based learning modules as well as a selection of online courses and role-based education pathways, where the knowledge is applied over time.
If you’re a business leader or an HR specialist, some of the most pressing concerns in uncertain times are keeping the motivation of employees at a high level while discovering ways and tools that enable better communication, collaboration, and coordination.
Comparing Training and Work-Based Learning
The principles behind work-based learning have been around for several decades and have been analyzed by academics as well as adopted by numerous companies. As disappointment with the poor or unmeasured results of traditional training increases, work-based learning methods are gaining ground. This is crucial because we know that increasing our employees’ skills is essential to our success. According to The Global Skills Shortage, a 2019 report from SHRM, 83 percent of respondents had trouble recruiting suitable candidates in the past 12 months, and more than a third reported a decrease in applicant quality across the board. Another 45 percent reported a decrease in quality of applicants for specific positions.
Work-based learning is a golden opportunity to develop employee skills more cost efficiently. But let’s be clear—work-based learning is not e-learning designed solely to cut costs. Virtual classrooms using webinars, presentations, and digital content have similar problems to traditional training. Lowering the cost of transformation is excellent, but only because work-based learning is also more effective (Figure 33-2).
Figure 33-2. Traditional Training Failures Versus Work-Based Learning Advantages
Agile Ways of Working Are About Mindset, Not Method
When describing Lean and Agile, commentators and experts are very keen to stress that they are more of a mindset than a method (Figure 33-3).
Figure 33-3. Agile and Lean
Figure 33-3 tells you something very important—if something concrete like “how to set up an Excel chart” is not taught best through a traditional training course, you can imagine how difficult it would be to teach a philosophy intended to change the essential way we develop software. Agile and Lean do not suit a one-off training session, no matter what the duration. Many organizations use coaches and mentors to help implement the practices, but this is an expensive option and mistakenly hands responsibility for success to those outside the core team.
The Agile Manifesto, which presents the original expression of Agile principles, emphasizes that “we are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.” That’s work-based learning in essence: You learn and discover through action. The very name Agile reveals what its proponents value: the ability to respond to change, adapt, and evolve. That’s why any Agile course needs to teach principles rather than tools or methods. The reason we choose to deliver in increments, for example, is far more important than how to write a user story or how long an iteration should last.
The poet Rudyard Kipling summarized the attitude needed in a poem in which he described a child’s natural curiosity:
One million Hows,
two million Wheres,
and seven million Whys!
Consider the UK government, which has long been one of the main creators and consumers of training. Perhaps it’s not surprising that this should make the government supremely aware of both the failings and opportunities that exist in training.
A switch to online learning is expected to save £90 million a year (more than $123 million) on training staff in the Civil Service alone, with HMRC leading the way in the number of staff taking e-learning courses. However, according to the National Audit Office (NAO), there is still plenty of room for improvement. The NAO wanted the HMRC’s spending on skills to be “linked explicitly to the organization’s overall business objectives.” Finally, only 38 percent of staff believed that the training had improved their performance.
This is why work-based learning remains the most attractive option. Because skills are developed while solving real problems on the job, they are immediately relevant to both staff and managers trying to assess the impact of training on the business. No training can guarantee success, but work-based learning enforces evaluation of actual results and helps develop skills naturally as you work.
There are many good tools in the market to help TD professionals apply new ways of working. Value, Flow, Quality (VFQ), from Emergn, is an example of a work-based learning program in Agile and Lean principles. Comprehensive and practical, VFQ offers a critical analysis of solutions that can be implemented immediately in the workplace. Sessions cover the thinking and principles behind popular methodologies, including Scrum, Kanban, and XP. It starts with asking teams 12 questions based on VFQ principles developed to help bring immediate clarity to which areas can be most improved. These 12 questions are included in a team self-assessment that you can download on the handbook’s website, ATDHandbook3.org.
Motivated Learners Are the Most Effective Collaborators
So, what does digital literacy have to do with motivating people? News stories and statistics speak to how many digital transformation programs fail or how new technology implementations don’t meet the expectations of an organization. When you look closely at the reasons behind these challenges, you can see that much of the impediment to success stems from how people in the organization viewed the change, and how their uncertainty of where they fit and adapt slowed the expected outcomes.
If you couple that with a growing need for people to work and learn from the comfort of their homes, it’s only logical for business leaders, HR specialists, and TD professionals to worry about motivation and productivity levels dropping. It’s hard for people to stay engaged and connected to one another, and the work they do, while being dispersed. It feels more difficult to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate naturally and informally.
So, how can we do better? While remote training and learning are growing rapidly and are even more widely accepted than ever before, studies have already shown the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on our stress and anxiety levels not only about our wealth but also about our well-being. Thus one of the first things TD professionals can emphasize and work on is motivation toward improved ways to communicate and collaborate.
A motivated person or team will adopt knowledge quicker and be more likely to foster success within the organization. Motivation is difficult to command given that its drivers vary from person to person. As such, rather than trying to motivate certain behaviors or people, TD professionals should examine other factors and how they may help or hinder a person’s ability to get the job done. This harnesses the intrinsic motivation that stems from our human desire to want to contribute to something meaningful. Given how much it can generate success for business, intrinsic motivation is something we should seek to preserve and bolster.
Key things to consider:
• Work is a highly regarded outlet for our natural desire to participate in a purpose larger than ourselves.
• Motivation and commitment to a purpose can make us do work that we would not ordinarily do because we can see the benefits for the whole.
• Ask yourself: Do people have the right working environment to learn more effectively? Do they have the right tools?
• Are schedules realistic? We are all trying to adjust to a new virtual reality over time; make sure to coordinate time commitments so that a person’s ability to learn is maximized and not full of distractions.
• Give people responsibility and accountability.
• If the primary reasons for motivation struggles are personal, be sensitive when providing assistance—when restored, the individual’s commitment and sense of loyalty will increase.
• Explore various topics for an individual who needs training and development.
As people struggle to adapt to the digital ecosystem with greater demands on skills and capabilities, it is critical to support them through team communication, collaboration, and coordination.
We have all been asked to be great team players if we want to succeed in our careers, but we also know that it is not always that easy to collaborate. So, what stops us from collaborating? There are four main barriers to collaboration and it’s important to think hard about which barriers are most prevalent in a person’s or team’s situation before deciding how to tackle them. Because overcoming or lowering the barriers involves awareness and investment, you must decide what to focus on.
Overall, the command-and-control style of management is a highly efficient way of handling large groups to coordinate their activity. There is clarity about who makes decisions and how communication flows. In fact, it keeps the need to manage communication, collaboration, and coordination to a bare minimum. But while coordination by decree works in simple situations, it is not effective in complex situations.
BARRIERS TO COLLABORATION
• We frequently see managers unwilling to accept advice or solutions from those “below” them in the hierarchy (even when they have the most direct experience with the problem). Similarly, brilliant new initiatives may be dismissed because they come from “overpaid consultants” or other outsiders. We see teams hiding problems because they don’t want to be seen as ineffective or risk losing their bonuses. And there’s a straight-up unwillingness to speak to others because we are too focused on our own concerns to think of asking for help.
• In this situation people deliberately avoid helping their colleagues, even when asked. Although it sounds extreme, the attitude is actually not that unusual in companies where departments or teams are in competition for respect and resources. It does not have to be malicious. Imagine that you’re going head-to-head with another group to see which project will get funding. You probably like those people, but right now you need to make it clear that their crazy augmented reality project is vague and risky compared with your fabulous project.
• The bigger the company, the more geographically separated the business units; the more information there is, the harder it gets. Often when we give people tools to help them find or receive information, we simply overwhelm them.
• When someone new joins your team, you need to help them learn all sorts of things. The difficulty is that much of the knowledge they require is not so easy to hand over. This is tacit knowledge—the kind of understanding that comes from doing, through years of experience and a shared history. Many people fall into the trap of grumbling “Oh, it’ll be quicker to do it myself,” and so never try to pass on what they know.
The opposite style would be one encouraging a great degree of autonomy within teams or functions, but that could lead to various problems as well. It could create chaos where each “self-organizing” team creates their own processes, ways of working, and practices that don’t match one another, creating huge coordination errors that can be detrimental for optimizing the flow of the business and its ability to deliver value. A standard process, vocabulary, and set of tools or metrics can help avoid such coordination errors.
Figure 33-4 shows the four focus areas of learning, which are directly linked to what we are discussing in this chapter. For most trainers and learners, the emphasis is typically on the first two areas, but the requirement to maximize the learning and help people adapt quickly to the shifts before us also rests on the last two areas. Why does all this matter to the TD professional? It matters, because if the work they do with people on modern technology and digital strategy doesn’t account for the nuances of behavior and mindset, then the information simply won’t stick.
Figure 33-4. Four Focus Areas of Learning
Another way to view this is to consider the fixed approach that many organizations take toward learning and change versus the discovery approach, which is predicated on new ways of working and thinking. Table 33-1 compares the two and it’s immediately evident why the right column is more impactful now than it’s been even in the last decade. Underpinning most of the modern frameworks and methodologies for developing new products, services, and software is a mindset of discovery. There are many complexities to deal with when bringing new ideas to life, and they require a new way to manage work, lead teams, and mitigate risk.
Table 33-1. Two Approaches to Learning: Fixed and Discovery
Fixed | Discovery |
• Methodology focused • Follow published standards • Optimize silos and functions • Organize around expertise • Follow a prescribed workflow • Solution centric • Resist change to standards • Do as you are told • Deliver to dates • Plan-driven and fixed | • Outcome focused • Context sensitive • Transparent and collaborative • Work in cross-functional teams • Continuously improve workflow • Customer centric • Embrace change • Challenge the status quo • Experiment, invent, and create • Discovery and growth |
The way that organizations are structured and how we work often ends up looking like the first column in the table. We follow that way of working—creating standards and ensuring that we’re maintaining those standards. We decide almost completely based on what needs to be done, when, and how before we even start, and completely forget to communicate why we need to do something or the outcome it is meant to create.
Today, work requires us to adapt to the change of the world around us. Old standards may no longer be suitable. We need to work together as a team with departments we may not have in the past, such as IT or procurement.
Making the Learning Last
So, how can we as TD professionals embed the right principles to help the learning last? To wrap up, I’d suggest that the emphasis is on three specific principles and three specific practices, all of which can be leveraged by adopting the VFQ body of knowledge shared earlier in this chapter.
• Guiding Principles
Deliver value early and often. Breaking work down to better prioritize, manage risk and return, generate real feedback, and bring value and innovation to customers faster can, in turn, allow you to create and deliver value faster.
Optimize end-to-end flow. Improve the overall flow of value by examining the entire value stream, removing the waste and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the end-to-end working practices.
Drive quality using fast feedback. By embedding the ability to solicit faster feedback and improve products throughout every stage of their development, companies can deliver the quality products their customers want, with a focus on simplicity and usability.
• Essential Practices
Experimentation is at the center of understanding our context and our world, be it to discover our value, how we organize work to deliver it, or how we ensure that we are collecting the necessary feedback to make our decision.
Value definition helps us ensure that we are focusing on solving a user need, and that those needs are worth the effort required.
Visualization is needed because most of our work is now hidden and conversations are too far and few. This will help us have better conversations, collaborate more, and ensure that our work is visible to the team.
Using these principles and practices will help learners realize some of the key benefits that we teach, which are critical to any digital adoption and change program. These include:
• Fewer dependencies. The success of your organization is dependent on the skills and capability of your people. Accelerate their learning and adoption of modern practices and minimize your long-term dependency on external coaching and consulting. Get only the help you need and let your teams do the rest.
• More control. Your way of working will drive the best results and outcomes for your organization. Applying the right mix of practices and principles will help you shape the best approach for accelerating and controlling your business outcomes.
• Better decisions. Your culture is largely shaped by how you make decisions. Applying the most effective methods and techniques will allow your organization to better optimize for innovation and get the most valuable ideas to market faster.
• Ability to scale. When transforming an organization, it’s important to ensure everyone gets support. You don’t want to create a situation where some people get a lot of training and others get very little. But it needs to be done in a way that can scale in terms of cost and reach. Using the different delivery mechanisms can support companies of any scale and in any location. This allows you to get the right balance between in-depth learning programs, on-demand and self-study content, and the ability to develop internal coaches and trainers in different locations and roles. All to match your budget.
Final Thoughts
In the words of Peter Drucker, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Therefore, let’s all remember that no matter how good the content and training are, the ability to help people think differently about their work is ultimately what shapes the best outcomes for the learners and the organizations they serve.
About the Author
Alex Adamopoulos’s career spans more than 30 years working in technology products and services. Along with founding Emergn in 2009, Alex has had the good fortune and opportunity to serve in several leadership roles in well-known global companies, advisory boards, and thought leadership programs. Alex believes in translating values into recognizable behaviours, starting with caring for and investing in people. His work has allowed him to learn from some of the best leaders in industry and in life, with an emphasis on building high-performing teams, and developing people to help them do their best work. You can reach Alex at [email protected] or learn more about his company at emergn.com.
References
Lombardo, M.M., and R.W. Eichinger. 1996. The Career Architect Development Planner, 1st ed. Minneapolis: Lominger.
Recommended Resources
Adamopoulos, A. 2018. “Five Mindset Shifts to Get the Most Value From Your Organization.” Forbes, August 20. forbes.com/sites/forbesbostoncouncil/2018/08/20/five-mindset-shifts-to-get-the-most-value-from-your-organization.
Adamopoulos, A. 2021. “You Upgrade Your Technology, So Why Not Upskill Your IT Staff?” Forbes, June 1. forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2021/06/01/you-upgrade-your-technology-so-why-not-upskill-your-it-staff.
Angelo-Eadie, S. n.d. “Why VFQ Develops a Growth Mindset.” Emergn. emergn.com/articles/vfq-growth-mindset.
Seggebruch, A., M. Alter, and R. Webb. 2020. “Scaling Transformative Businesses.” The Emerging World of Work. Emergn Podcast, Season 2, Episode 12. emergn.com/insights/podcast-scaling-transformative-businesses.
SHRM. 2019. The Global Skills Shortage: Bridging the Talent Gap With Education, Training and Sourcing. Alexandria, VA: Society for Human Resource Management. shrm.org/hr-today/trends-and-forecasting/research-and-surveys/documents/shrm%20skills%20gap%202019.pdf.