Agile Learning — Vertical Slicing Your Training

What do Learning and Development and a cake have in common? And how should we consume them?

Learning and Development has been thought of in layers for many years. The idea is that we teach you the basics, then once you have mastered that we will teach you the next level and the next. Until you are fully trained and working at maximum efficiency.

There are instances where a layered approach to learning is the way that it is best to teach something. The question then becomes “how useful are you with a basic understanding of everything compared with a deep understanding of one thing?”

So what if we ‘ate the cake’ in slices rather than layer by layer?

Let me explain a bit around the thinking. If you take a cake as all the learning that you need to do your job as effectively as possible. Then each slice would be an aspect of that job. The thinking of slices comes from the Agile Methodologies. For those of you that have seen vertical slicing before this is all probably looking familiar.

The idea with vertical slicing is to have a User Story that would touch on all aspects of the system in order for the product to be as useful as possible. With learning this would be to train someone on a single aspect of their job at a time.

An example for a developer may be to learn about bugs. How to find them, fix them and test them. This way when they join a team they are able to start working and being a valuable member of the team. And Vertical Slicing which is the process of making a User Story that touches on all aspects of a system.

As time goes on you can add more and more slices of training making the associate more and more versatile. All while they are functioning in a team, putting their learning into action on real problems. Helping make the training they have received clearer and applicable. [1]

Using this approach, you can see the benefits of the training much more clearly; the person being trained is able to take on more responsibility as well as develop team-working skills, all the while being trained on each functionality slice.

[1] Dunlosky and colleagues report that spreading out your studying over time and quizzing yourself on material before the big test are highly effective learning strategies (Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques — Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology — John Dunlosky)