How can you *really* develop competence?
Many years ago I was a passenger in a car crash. I was cut out of the crumpled mess of metal by emergency services and rushed to hospital. Amazingly nothing was broken, but I was bruised to the point where it looked like I was wearing a wet suit — and it really hurt.
Years later, the real damage caught up with me and I had to see a physiotherapist, then an acupuncturist, and then a hypnotherapist — each one convinced that my problem could only been solved by their discipline. Eventually, a detailed scan revealed that surgery was needed to fuse badly damaged discs in the spine.
But what has this got to do with competence?
Here’s the issue: when searching for a solution to the problem of competence development, it is far too easy to simply apply well-sold but inappropriate or ineffective treatment.
For instance, colleges will want to sell you their day release training, e-learning providers will want you to have their touch and tick on-screen packages, coaches will recommend their weekly visits, and LMS and similar system providers will tell you their multiple methods of storing, recording and tracking learning materials and progress is the answer to all your competence development problems.
But amongst all the snake oil, you must remember that competence can only be the key to productivity if — and only if — it is clearly defined as understanding, skill and confidence in the chosen role.
It is perfectly reasonable that one solution provider may develop understanding, another skill and another confidence, and that others may provide a mix — or indeed all — but you need to take care not to confuse a knowledge development package with a skill development package or a confidence development programme.
So how is it done?
There are many routes to competence and pros and cons of each route. In my father’s day, apprentices developed competence slowly and carefully by observation, trial and error, making tea, running errands, cleaning the workplace, and standing and watching for days on end, until the waters of experience finally rose up around them and soaked them through. Back then, they were not aware of any particular methodology — it was a case of ‘eyes open, ears open, mouth shut and do as you’re told.’
Times have now changed. The current and future generations demand a route to competence that is quicker, easier, tailored to their needs, and egalitarian.
And — thanks to incredible developments in education and technology — it can be all of those. But, and it is a big but, only if those tools are used effectively and appropriately by the right people at the right time in the right way and for the right reasons.
Despite all the advances and investment in making learning entertaining and engaging, the old adage still holds true:
“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”
So the more doing we can engineer into our learning the better. The more that learners can engage with discovery, curiosity, problem solving, experimenting, trying, failing, and trying again until they get it right, the sooner they will get it and get it right.
The completion of learning modules for completions sake becomes a box ticking chore and not an adventure in proving your worth or discovering your value.
Tomorrow’s workers and managers and leaders are impatient to be famous or rich or successful or respected or just good at their job. Yet we slow them down with programmes and processes and courses that have no sense of urgency.
Who says that it needs to take a year to become a good sales person or two years to complete an apprenticeship? Ask learners how soon they want to be great at their job and earning good money, and they would probably want to halve those times. Ask employers how quickly they want new recruits to be delivering a return on their training investment and they would halve that again!
So, when new starters leave jobs early because they are bored, unfulfilled, unchallenged and feel they are not adding value — or because there is no momentum to their development, no sense of urgency or direction to their learning journey — the solution to competence development is to ensure that learning moves at the pace of a person not at the pace of a programme.
In the next post, I’ll look at how we do that.
