A gradual shift from training to learning began during the 1980s, mainly in the US and the UK. This was a time of high employment and labour turnover, when organisations were competing with each other for skilled workers and were keen to understand how to retain and develop employees. It was also a time when innovation in the use of technology and of increasing global competition started to be noticed, and there was pressure on organisations to respond quickly to these changes. To make this rapid response easier, organisations increasingly started to move to flatter structures and project-based working, with a marked increase on the outsourcing of work to contractors and agencies. Employees began to work in different ways as new technologies made flexible working and home working much easier and more common. Against this background, new ideas began to develop about how organisations could think strategically about individual and organisational learning and how both individuals and organisations could be helped to learn quickly and continuously in order to develop the new skills demanded by organisational change.
For those employed as trainers, there were major challenges to face, with a shift from delivering training in specific areas of knowledge to finding a range of ways to support and facilitate learning, often through coaching or mentoring. This sometimes meant encouraging individuals to decide for themselves how to learn, and even what to learn, rather than being told or led by the trainer. In this new world, those who specialised in learning within organisations had to think about how their roles have changed and the competencies they would need.
This shift is also related to the different understandings of learning: specifically, the development of theory from behaviourism, through cognitivist and humanism, towards social constructivism. In the social constructivist view, we make active sense of our worlds, we construct our own versions of ideas and we craft our own connections between them (Burr, 2015). This means that social constructivist learners are active, rather than passive; they take ownership of their own learning, rather than merely being recipients of the training specified and designed by others.
In this section you will explore, in a little more detail, the idea that learners take ownership for their learning. Although some of these ideas are quite conceptual and abstract, they do have direct relevance for the practices of learning and talent development. In particular, they signal a move away from relying only on formal training-based approaches towards seeing training as just one component in a suite of different learning experiences.
There has been increased emphasis within HRD strategy on the need to be more agile and responsive in the face of the rapidly changing environment of work and organisations, especially with the advent of new technologies. Specific skills can quickly become out of date, sometimes becoming obsolete even by the time a formal training programme has been defined, approved and implemented. This has led many learning experts to call for a shift ‘from skills to skilfulness’ (Bigelow, 1995).
Such a shift in emphasis represents a change in our understandings of the agency or responsibility for learning, too. Scholars and practitioners are increasingly focusing on the need for learners to develop a sense of ownership of their own learning objectives, methods and outcomes, rather than relying on these being assessed, defined or mandated by their employer. One of the most crucial aspects of an individual employee’s skilfulness (rather than skills) is a proactive attitude and a willingness to take charge of at least some elements of their own development. This mirrors developments in other aspects of organisational strategy, such as leadership and change management approaches, with their increasing emphasis on facilitating and enabling, rather than directing and mandating.
One of the motivations for these developments is a heightened focus on the ethics of organisational and institutional life, especially in the wake of recent corporate scandals. As Vince (2011, p. 344) puts it, instructional designers now think that ‘passive approaches to learning reinforce passive approaches to managing’. So, if we want our leaders, managers and other employees to question wrongdoing, we need to encourage such questioning in the development programmes we design for them, including enabling them to take responsibility for their own learning by questioning whether a particular programme is right for them.
All these developments and contextual factors are contributing to a move away from the assumption that formal, usually classroom-based, training solutions are the best approach to learning and talent development, and towards exploring alternative approaches that both enable and rely on learners making their own connections between theory and practice, and some of their own decisions about their development priorities. The shift from training to learning – from skills to skilfulness – has quite profound implications for the scope of HRD work in this area. It means, for instance, that the TNA is only one tool in a broader suite of methods for articulating learning needs and designing and facilitating learning interventions (see Figure 2). Many educational theorists have started using the idea of a ‘learning needs analysis’ (LNA) to encompass this broader range. The notion of a LNA will be the focus of the next activity.
Figure 4: The broader scope of learning
Allow around 90 minutes for this activity
Return to your reflective notes on TNAs from Activity 1.
In the text box below, write down the ways in which doing an LNA (learning needs analysis) might be different from doing a TNA (training needs analysis). In what ways might your choice of delivery method, your approach to evaluation or your approach to stakeholder engagement change if the focus is on learning, rather than training? Note down the implications of any differences for:
Within this context of increasing emphasis on self-directed learning, coaching and mentoring have become rather popular tools. The CIPD/Cornerstone OnDemand Learning and Development 2014 annual survey (CIPD, 2014) questioned 1000 learning and development UK professionals and reported that 76 per cent of organisations now provide coaching and mentoring; this figure rises to 85 per cent in the public sector. The survey also reported that coaching is perceived by HR professionals as the most effective way to deliver learning and development, and that half of those questioned intend to introduce coaching in the near future. It is also interesting to note that coaching is seen as more effective at present than other kinds of provision including emerging technological provision such as e-learning and MOOCs (CIPD, 2014, p. 8).
Both coaching and mentoring are ways of facilitating and supporting self-managed learning. In the next section we will introduce some basic ideas around coaching and mentoring and give you the opportunity to practise some foundation coaching skills.