It is said that a great teacher can ignite endless curiosity among learners.
Assuming the best of the best teacher out there, the true test of curiosity building happens when the learners starts getting deeply involved in the learning process by asking back questions. Not once, not twice but many times, each day, every day of learning, without fear, doubt or inhibitions.
At Enqurious, we’ve got an opportunity to work with L&D teams at some of the world’s top Analytics Consulting firms like Fractal AI, Tredence Inc. and Tiger Analytics, we’ve mostly dealt with thousands of new learners in the experience group of 0–3 years with majority of them being fresh college grads with varied backgrounds ranging from Engineering to Economics.
What’s been our hardest challenge?
How to ignite curiosity to learn something new among the 20–25 old fresh grads with the same zeal as my kid would?
Hold on. Why is this important?
You see, curiosity fuels problem solving. In the world where knowledge is getting increasingly commoditized with abundant videos, blogs, podcasts over the internet and finally chatGPT, the know it all chatbot, organizations are caring less and less about how much you know. They care about how good you are at asking the right question to sift through the ocean of information out there and apply the ideas to solve real world problems and hence bring value to business faster and better.
The north star metric of academia has always been to produce life long learners. However, for corporates, the north star metric is : Fast and effective deployability.
So, for an L&D it becomes a little tricky to balance the life long learning culture with the reality of business which is : Producing measurable outcomes like faster time to deploy and grooming of high performing problem solvers.
Almost every L&D dreams about the utopian world of enabling great learning experiences. But what for? To serve the business which works under constraints of time, energy and money. If it’s business, it’s about return on investments in learning initiatives
Great! So, coming back to our earlier question :
How to ignite curiosity to learn something new among the 20–25 old fresh grads with the same zeal as my kid would?
But wait. This shouldn’t be problem right? These grads have already spent 16 years (12 years of schooling + 3–4 years of graduation). They must be transformed into a question asking machine, right?
WRONG!
Blame it on our education system, peer pressure or societal norms, the urge of asking questions which starts at its peak amongst kids tapers off exponentially over the years with learners slowly shutting down their curiosity engines and get into safe, do-not-disturb mode.
By the time the student enters industry, he/she is well trained on :
1. Following a preset curriculum
2. Clearing exams by hook or by crook (as the motivation has always been clearing cut-offs) and
3. Smartly dodging the question : Any doubts?
Enter a new client project. The newbie is allocated to the project with a simple ask : Solve the problems the best way to bring value to customers. However, there is a small problem. The problem space is vaguely defined with many times the customer itself not being clear about the ask. With all the tech skills imbibed, the newbie is now in a spot. How and when to apply them?
It’s just like being aware of tools like hammer, drill, nails but not able to figure out what to build out of it and whether what’s built is of any value to the end customer?
So, what’s the expectation from the newbie? Ask Doubts
And here we are : Catch 22 situation .
To gain more clarity on the requirements, the newbie has to ask questions to customers/to peers/to seniors/to Google or to chatGPT.
And to ask questions, he needs to have clarity on what to ask? In his/her 16 years of life, this exact skill has been undermined and somewhere along the way, it got buried to rest at peace.
The impact?
- Loss of credibility of L&D from delivery teams as they find a huge expectation mismatch between the skills they need for seamless project execution and the skills they perceive in the newbies coming fresh out of trainings. Their take : L&D doesn’t work :(
- Loss of productivity of team as seniors need to retrain the newbies into client like problems and the real world skills needed to solve them. This takes a toll in their own productivity leading to loss of time, energy and trust in the capabilities of newbies
- Loss of quality of deliverables as the inability to handle real world problems leads to errors, deadline misses and a subpar delivery
Finally, all this impacts the most critical north star metric of every organization : The CSAT score
So, the obvious next question is : How to address this problem?
While the L&D industry is not new to this challenge, there has been a plethora of solutions offered by a variety of Education institutions/Ed-Techs.
In the next article, we’ll explore the following questions :
- What are some of the solutions already available?
- What problems have been these solutions offered to address?
- Which of the solutions have worked for the L&D to address the organizational pain point of Grooming an industry ready workforce?
Are you an L&D professional who has been grappling with the above mentioned challenges?
As an L&D professional, how have you addressed the above challenges?
We consult world’s leading Analytics consulting firms design and deliver top notch learning experiences leading to discovery and deployment of industry ready workforce on the go. Happy to talk, learn and share experiences.
Would like to explore how Enqurious can help you execute a seamless learning experience? Talk to us here : https://www.enqurious.com/lets-connect
