Organizations in the USA spend between $75-$100 billion on training
each year (and have done so annually for almost the past 20 years). Still, only about 10% of that training and development investment
results in transfer to improvements in the workplace.
Most business leaders would demand a better return on their investment.
Here's my question to you, dear readers.
In your personal experience, why doesn't training and development get the job done?
Isn't it incredible? We are wired from birth to be lifelong learners.
We gather information and store it. We can't do anything else but learn: learning is automatic!
New experiences are measured against older experiences to give them value.
The more we learn, the better value we can give to new experiences and the more we want to learn to appreciate any new experiences.
Learning, therefore, is a desirable quality in our make up; not only is learning desirable, learning is an absolute necessity.
We would be dead without learning. So, yes, I believe we are learning machines. We cannot stop ourselves from learning.
In fact - purposeful learning is gathering more of our share of life.
Increasingly, firms find that it is necessary and prudent to expose their promising talent to international assignments. Sometimes it works out fine, other times it doesn't.
One of the reasons cited by expats that leave posts (or firms) is "career blockage", or better known as the feeling that working abroad has gotten their career sidetracked, while people back home are climbing the corporate ladder.
I used to travel abroad extensively, and would frequently run into an expat that after a few drinks would admit “the home office has forgotten about me”
It doesn't seem to matter whether you are doing your job or not, it's just a human nature response to conditions. It appears to the expat that there is a lack of collegiality and communication when working abroad, especially when surrounded by cultural natives who are in their natural setting, and receiving support and personal communications routinely.
The role of "HQ" managing this common concern is significant.
HR needs to ensure that expatriates know that an international assignment helps in terms of advancement within the firm. This also needs to be periodically reinforced by upper management. Sometimes this is hard to do, especially when there is a lot or organizational "churn" at the upper management levels with people moving to different jobs, or leaving the firm altogether. Remember that the initial expectations that may have been set, if not committed to a written agreement, may not survive if there is (as if often the case), changes in upper management.
Likewise, planning needs to take into consideration, the very real concerns that expats have about their return to their "home base." I have declined some overseas posts because the company was unwilling or unable to describe what would happen upon my return to the states.
Will the firm respect (and value) the unique new skills that I have acquired
while overseas? Will my return represent a "loss of status" (either real or perceived)? Will there be a plan for re-integrating me into the stateside business? Reverse "Culture Shock" can also be a factor, (and an adjustment period is a wise idea for the expat, as well as their family) If firms are not prepared to do these things, it can really impact on the willingness of personnel to go overseas on assignment.
It is food for thought, hmmmm?
One of the great educational challenges we face today is the shortage of individuals want to teach and who can teach our youth what they will need to know to cut it in our rapidly changing world.
Why does this article resonate with me?
For one thing, the teachers "in the system" are in many cases struggling just to maintain their existing teaching load, and are themselves challenged by school district bureaucracies and policies. Where are the "real world" perspectives to come from, amidst a rapidly changing jobs landscape.
For example, how many teachers and guidance counselors are introducing our youth to careers in construction, where the pay, benefits and job security are above average? Do the current faculty see construction as much more than the "summer job" that they may have held before, where they were little more than job site general labor? Does such an attitude dissuade them from encouraging youth to learn about jobs in this industry?
Do our current cadre of teachers and guidance counselors have an awareness of the types of match, science, or communications skills that these youth will need to be able to enter the field at the "skilled worker" level? Are these teaching professionals even aware that people without a degree with just a few years of experience with these skills are being actively sought after and snagging annual pay in the high five and low six figures?
Yet because of youth making misinformed academic choices they often end up competing after graduation for "commodity" jobs that are often not fulfilling. If they had chosen a path that enabled them to grasp basic math/algebra/geometry skills, they would likely find themselves in a better bargaining position for jobs.
So it boils down to how to get people from the professions to step into the teaching profession to expose our youth to some of these possibilities.
Check out this story about a St. Paul schools program, designed to find candidates for hard-to-fill jobs by making teachers out of professionals coming from other fields.
read more | digg story
Have you ever taken a really dry and boring online course?
Most of us have at one time or another...
However the days where online learning choices are limited to boring and static "page turner" type of experiences.
Take a look at some of the methods that leading eLearning course developers are putting into learner-paced instruction in order to more actively engage the learner in the process (not to mention helping reinforce important teaching points):
Matching:
Hangman:
Active Listening Techniques
Crossword
Learning Wheel
So if you're still learning the "old fashioned" ebook way, you may want to consider that there's a more engaging and fun way to learn "out there"
Make sense?
I am always on the lookout for resources that help explain how people and organizations learn.
I've discovered "The Fifth Discipline - the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization" (an earlier book by Peter M Senge) that brings word of "learning organizations," organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.
Five disciplines are described as the means of building learning organizations. Case studies are in the book are provided to show how the disciplines have worked in particular companies.
Each of the five disciplines represents a lifelong body of study and practice for individuals and teams in organizations.
1. Personal Mastery
This discipline of aspiration involves formulating a coherent picture
of the results people most desire to gain as individuals (their
personal vision), alongside a realistic assessment of the current state
of their lives today (their current reality). Learning to cultivate the
tension between vision and reality (represented in this icon by the
rubber band) can expand people’s capacity to make better choices, and
to achieve more of the results that they have chosen.
2. Mental Models
This discipline of reflection and inquiry skills is focused around
developing awareness of the attitudes and perceptions that influence
thought and interaction. By continually reflecting upon, talking about,
and reconsidering these internal pictures of the world, people can gain
more capability in governing their actions and decisions. The icon here
portrays one of the more powerful principles of this discipline, the “ladder of inference” depicting how people leap instantly to counterproductive conclusions and assumptions.
3. Shared Vision
This collective discipline establishes a focus on mutual purpose.
People learn to nourish a sense of commitment in a group or
organization by developing shared images of the future they seek to
create (symbolized by the eye), and the principles and guiding
practices by which they hope to get there.
4. Team Learning
This
is a discipline of group interaction. Through techniques like dialogue
and skillful discussion, teams transform their collective thinking,
learning to mobilize their energies and ability greater than the sum of
individual members’ talents. The icon symbolizes the natural alignment
of a learning-oriented team as the flight of a flock of birds.
5. Systems Thinking
In
this discipline, people learn to better understand interdependency and
change, and thereby to deal more effectively with the forces that shape
the consequences of our actions. Systems thinking is based upon a
growing body of theory about the behavior of feedback and
complexity-the innate tendencies of a system that lead to growth or
stability over time. Tools and techniques such as systems archetypes
and various types of learning labs and simulations help people see how
to change systems more effectively, and how to act more in tune with
the larger processes of the natural and economic world. The circle in
this icon represents the fundamental building block of all systems: the
circular “feedback loop” underlying all growing and limiting processes
in nature.
Senge is also the author of a more recent work, "The Dance of Change"
that is also
groundbreaking work, that among other things recognizes
that the impact of learning culture on organizational performance takes
many years to track.
(Many people claim to espouse the Kirkpatrick model, and when I ask HOW they are tracking results of learning, provide me an answer that is really not tracking the results of learning, but rather, the ACTIVITY of providing learning experiences.)
It's important for us who are responsible for development of the workforce to understand how learning models work. This is as good a source as I've found to date. Check it out, and let me know what you think...
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