When ‘Work’ is no longer work

Enablers and Inhibitors: Training & Learning

11 min readJan 6, 2017

Enabler / Inhibitor — Training & Learning

Definition

Organizations have long provided training and learning experiences to ensure their workers developed skills to meet current and future needs. However, new complexities requiring access to a wider range of capabilities are fundamental drivers of a new Talent Marketplace. When companies go to the marketplace to match assignments with willing workers, how will they know for certain that the agile workers in this environment have the capabilities they claim?

Completing even the most effective training has never been a guarantee the learner has mastered the capability, so university transcripts, lists of courses completed, and even previous jobs are not evidence of ability. Platforms like LinkedIn solicit endorsements of individual capability claims, but agile workers still face challenges of transporting their expertise when they move beyond working within traditional organizations where one’s track record is easily discovered and validated.

Companies have long invested in internal corporate training programs and their branded “universities” hoping to create a competitive advantage through focused development of their own employees. However, as agile workers accept temporary assignments and fluidly travel in and out of organizations, what is the role of training and learning in developing and certifying expertise in a broader talent ecosystem?

Dimensions

Traditionally, training and learning in organizations was composed of sponsored educational activities designed to develop skills and capabilities in internal employees. The objective of these activities was to ensure a steady source of capable workers to meet that organization’s unique requirements. Large, well-resourced training programs were perceived to be a competitive advantage, so their employees could develop more profoundly than external workers who could not access these learning opportunities.

In these traditional employment settings, stable organizations offered their employees exclusive opportunities to develop:

Job skills such as specific production processes, negotiation skills, or creating Excel spreadsheets;
Broad career skills such as active listening, time management, or influencing skills;
Technical or functional skills specific to trades or professions such as computer languages, Computer Aided Design (CAD) skills, or infection control methods.
Supervisor, management or leadership development processes and experiences.
Learning support that promoted behaviors valued in their unique organizational cultures.
Some companies created their own certifications of comprehensive capabilities that evolved to an industry-acknowledgement of a discrete and valuable capability set such as the Project Management Professional (PMP) or Cisco Certified Network Associate.

So what will become of these exclusive, company-specific training programs when the talent marketplace drives greater mobility of internal and external workers across and through previous organizational boundaries?

Dimensions of Training and Learning in a Talent Marketplace will include:

• Individuals with careers as unique as thumbprints will seek and drive their own learning based on their interests, capabilities, and assignments they pursue to fulfill their personal aspirations and life requirements.

• Technology-mediated learning will provide individual access to vast offerings and certifiable, personalized learning opportunities.

• Many self-selected learning opportunities will be uncurated or uncertified, which will require individuals and organizations to validate whether required capabilities resulted from the learning.

• Companies will compete for the best agile workers by allowing them access to their internal training programs where these workers can further differentiate themselves in the market by accessing to these exclusive learning opportunities

• Trades and professional organizations will re-emerge as recognized developers of expertise.

• Individuals will collect recognizable, open-standard learning units from employers, education institutions, and industry and professional groups, to confirm and convey their expertise.

Training & Learning in an Agile Environment

Agile environments will require systems of responsive and adaptive learning support to reflect rapidly changing organizational requirements for skills and a multitude of individual learners seeking to fulfill their unique learning goals. Training and Learning will move away from longer curricula and be constituted through a high number of shorter and relevant nuggets as required at a certain point.

The talent marketplace as a common platform will require and enable organizations to

Describe precise capabilities and experiences required for individuals to be considered for emerging assignments in a standardized way
Link assignment descriptions to available training and learning resources for individuals to develop these capabilities and
Search and find individuals or teams who have completed training and learning in these capabilities on the same platform

The talent marketplace as a common platform will require and enable individuals to

Discover and anticipate the most sought-after capabilities in the marketplace by tracking requests and requirements for skills and capabilities to meet available assignments
Seek and acquire training or learning support that is a match for assignments on the platform
Find assignments matching their certified capabilities on the same platform

The benefits for the individual include

All open assignments and their capability requirements will be visible and accessible
Transparent confirmation of completed learning activities associated with their career passports
Pervasive access to learning support informed by current market data enabling entirely self-driven learning
Links to learning communities, trade and professional organizations, and commercially available learning opportunities linked to available assignments
Fewer boundaries between traditional education and workplace-learning to support lifetime learning support
Discussions of ascending and descending capabilities and predictive scenarios enabling individuals to safeguard their employability with current and accurate data about demand for current and emerging capabilities

The benefits for the organization include

Individuals co-investing in their readiness for assignments
All marketplace players (employing organizations, commercial training providers, agile workers) motivated to ensure requisite training and learning for available assignments is widely recognized and available
Trades and professional groups easily engaged in refining requirements and learning support for all vocations and professions through the platform
Market forces dictating content and availability of learning instead of internal training departments
Higher education facing indisputably defined requirements for workforce preparation
Platform-based learning as an economical alternative to internal offerings for non-proprietary learning
Non-valued internal learning is identified, replaced with economical alternatives, or eliminated
Internal learning opportunities opened to agile talent to attract discerning agile workers with high learning agility
Platform analytics enabling modeling and anticipation of future learning needs

Enabling a marketplace approach to training and learning will require:

Precise descriptions of desired capabilities for available and emerging assignments
Constant inflow of data describing demand for ascending and descending skills to fuel analytics
Capacity for immediate revision of training based on descriptions of exemplars, best practices and changing requirements
Analysis of efficacy and connection to a wide range of developmental modalities (MOOCS, mobile, communities of practice, simulations, on-the-job, experiential, coached/mentored, etc.)
Development of a validated system for recognizable, open-standard learning units for agile workers to convey their expertise

What will it take to transition your organization?

It is important for an organization to understand where it currently falls and desires to be on a spectrum of levers that will shape its transition to platform-supported training and learning. Below are a few areas to consider and our view on their evolution’s direction from a stable into the agile future state.

The Intertwined Nature of Enablers and Inhibitors

New approaches to Training and Learning alone will not create an agile environment. Interdependencies with other enables and inhibitors are presumed. This is just one of several interdependent factors, which have different degrees of influence on how an organization will move toward benefiting from a Talent Marketplace. Below is a guide to the relative importance and dependency of both internal and external enablers/inhibitors. The company’s journey and current environment impacts where it wishes to focus to become more agile in its approach to Training and Learning in a talent marketplace.

Starting at 9 o’clock, clockwise. Training and learning in a platform-based environment will:

Drive validated expertise and so drive capacity for individuals to earn increased rewards
Enhance individual reputation and brand as they develop additional capabilities, as well as drive organizational reputation and brand when an organization actively contributes to the learning of agile workers and makes this part of its reward package
Be influenced by assignment attributes published on the platform. A pervasive talent platform will generate enormous amounts of data on ascending and descending skill requirements to drive training content and availability.
The role of the manager will be less of an influence on training and design, as data from the platform will create a more accurate portrayal of skill requirements for current and emerging assignments.
Training and learning will shape internal and external individual’s abilities to work within organizational cultures.
Continuous, lifelong training will influence employee lifecycles, which will be entirely personal as individuals can configure their unique learning and contribution paths.
People attributes will drive learning, as they exercise the ability to customize their learning based on personal aspirations and opportunities. Similarly, platform-supported learning will significantly expand their personal attributes and competitiveness for valuable assignments.

The bottom of the illustration shows six external drivers strongly influencing training and learning in this environment:

Trades and professions will emerge as significant influencers in a global, communal commitment to grow capabilities for all platform participants. They will have a broader perspective to see and respond to rapid changes driven by technology and global, economic shifts.
Traditional education systems will be disrupted, making way for new relationships among education providers and a blurring of distinctions between education and workplace learning.
Certifications might provide reputation validation, but will have to be relevant, differentiated, and valuable to achieve the status of currency in the marketplace.
The transportability of expertise will require collaboration and trust of all platform players, and will be a foundational condition for the effectiveness of the talent marketplace.

Potential Hazards to Guard Against

It is equally important to assess hazards and hinge factors that could disrupt a re-imagined approach to training and learning in a marketplace environment. Here are some key areas for consideration:

Organizations will need to balance the benefits of market-enabled, pervasively available training and learning with the competitive advantages of truly differentiated, proprietary learning support. Preserving this closely held development will require a parallel approach to training that prepares enough talent to meet organizational needs while keeping vulnerable strategic and proprietary intelligence from view.

The transition period for organizations from maintaining highly resourced internal training and learning support to leveraging a talent platform — and for individuals transitioning from a stable-employee to an agile-worker mind set — will be a period fraught with risk of having prepared enough talent with the needed capabilities to meet business requirements. A staged transition of capabilities based on uniqueness, demand levels, ease of preparation, value to business, and other factors will need to be orchestrated. That said — those organizations that are early adopters will attract the most agile talent, which could make it difficult for the more cautious organizations to attract the best contributors later.

The economics of training and learning will be up-ended, as individuals outside traditional organizations could see more requirements to pay their way and fund their own learning unless this becomes part of the preferred reward package from organizations seeking the most valuable agile workers.

A further risk will emerge for vast numbers of workers whose learning drive has atrophied from years of institutionally determined training. These individuals are already at greatest risk of losing more of their employment opportunities to automation, and could represent a lost generation with low viability in the talent marketplace.

Transformational Trajectory

How could the journey from a stable world into an agile one unfold?

The key states and the related activities are:

Environment

Advancements in pervasive technology-enabled, uncurated, self-driven learning
Knowledge-workers and creative workers seeking novelty and more capability enrichment in their careers
Velocity of change in professions and vocations
Requirements for higher returns on investment in organizational training and learning
Increased cost and decreased relevance of higher education to the workplace

Diagnosis

Which capabilities (and required learning) should remain internal for differentiation and competitive advantage?
Which assignments and associated training should be made available to external talent?
Which assignments have the greatest potential for agile workers and what is the requisite training and learning for them to be prepared?
What are more cost-effective methods of preparation for non-competitive roles?

Incubation

What alternatives for training and learning could we experiment with immediately?
Who could we collaborate with to leverage training and learning investments more effectively for internal and external workers?
Where should we allow attrition to reduce ranks of internals in identified roles and migrate toward greater use of externals to rapidly infuse new capabilities?

Transformation

How can we build reputation for the organization’s unique and valuable internal training and permit external talent to participate as part of their reward package — especially in prioritized fields?
Where can we create learning consortia to develop training and learning for non-competitive roles?
How can we create global outreach to ensure societal preparation of future talent in current geographies and begin preparation of future talent pools in emerging economies to develop access to additional sources of talent?

2020+

How will we participate in an ecosystem of talent where all seeking to participate in bringing their capabilities are prepared and matched with fulfilling and valuable assignments?
How will other social support systems evolve to provide psychological and wellbeing safety nets in a transformed workplace?

Questions to Get Started

In an environment where many factors are changing at once, here are a few simple questions to help assess whether Rewards and Recognition is a primary area for a company to focus on or if other enablers and inhibitors must be addressed first..

Customer / Business Strategy

What are the core competencies that drive the value proposition of your organization? What will you want to preserve as core, unique or proprietary capabilities exclusive to your organization?
What non-exclusive capabilities could be the first to be sourced and prepared through external talent platforms?
What do you anticipate will be the most valuable and possibly scarce talent you will want to attract and develop internally or externally?

Technology

How are you progressing toward providing, current, relevant, pervasive, on-demand training in your organization?
What external partnerships and providers do you have relationships with to enrich your learning ecosystem?
What will be the impact on your current workforce of automation and other shifts, and how could you leverage a platform approach to shift training and learning to help affected workers reskill?

Employee Learning

How have you lowered boundaries to mobility and deployment of talent within your organization?
How have you begun to make your organizational boundaries more permeable to allow external talent to enter and be effective within your teams?
Who is allowed or encouraged to participate in learning opportunities within your organizations? All — or only some — of your own employees? Any of your external workers?
How is employee and agile worker capability and expertise validated and trusted?
How much of your employees’ learning is inside your organization? How much of your employees’ learning is outside your organization? How can you integrate, expand and possibly merge all their learning opportunities with a larger learning ecosystem?

There are 7 other fundamental factors that will enable or inhibit the transformation… View the entire article here