Active learning helps you thrive
Do you want to emerge stronger and fulfil your goals as a business? Be intentional about making a growth mindset and resilience part of your culture. You need to encourage and promote opportunities for sustainable life-long learning. Support your people to continuously evolve themselves and prepare for what the future brings. Emerging stronger doesn’t mean surviving, it means thriving.
To that end, learning must be purposeful. It must be in the service of personal growth in line with business strategies. Skills today have a relatively short life-cycle. Skills that are no longer aligned with business goals are doomed to fade away and give space to new skills to emerge and develop. Gone are the days when people only needed a set of skills to perform their job over the course of their career.
The 2020 Future of Jobs Report predicts that by 2025 in-demand skills across jobs change at a high pace. And guess what’s on top of the list? Critical thinking and analysis as well as active learning and problem-solving. The report estimates that around 40% of the workforce will need reskilling to stay relevant. It also revealed that 94% of business leaders expect their employees to pick up new skills on the job – that’s a sharp uptake from 65% in 2018.
The need for growth is human’s strongest motive in the 21st century. Developing your people and enabling them to make meaningful career changes will eventually help you innovate and prosper. Many companies are playing very active roles in this space. Amazon invested over $1.2 billion to provide upskilling training programs for 300,000 employees to support them to plan their own career paths. NextJump is another company, known as a Deliberately Developmental Organisation, that actively promotes the right culture and mindset to support learning as an integral part of everyday work life.
People in hunter gatherer societies were driven by survival. During the industrial revolution, people were driven by carrot and stick or award and punishment. Today, we are driven by a sense of autonomy, mastery and purpose.
Businesses are responsible to unleash the power of their workforce and support them to achieve what they’re capable of achieving. There are a few ways to shift the mindset and move toward a better future both for the workforce and the business:
- Democratising learning: Identify what skills are needed to achieve the business goals. Then provide the right opportunities as well as the right tools for people to decide what to learn and how to learn it. Be a supporter not a controller. Trust people to take ownership of their personal development. Provide different opportunities for your people to develop the skills they’re interested in. These could be stretch assignments, mentorship, volunteering, etc.
- Providing stretch assignments: People don’t go to work to learn. They go to work to work. Learning for the sake of knowledge accumulation is not a drive for normal people. We as humans are driven by a sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness as Deci and Ryan describe in their self-determination theory or autonomy, mastery, and purpose as Daniel Pink describes in his book Drive. People have an inherent desire to feel competent. Providing opportunities for them to stretch their muscles will not only help them practice their skills but also moves the needle from learning for the sake of knowledge to learning for the sake of mastery and growth.
- Creating psychological safety: Encouraging people to walk outside their comfort zone and learn and apply new skills is critical for the success and growth of the business. However, people may develop a risk-averse attitude if they feel afraid of making mistakes or being judged. Creating and encouraging a safe environment where everyone is empowered to run experiments, fail fast and learn from the experience requires a shift in culture and a revisit of how success is measured and evaluated. When you provide different opportunities for your people to deliberately practice outside their comfort zone, fail and learn from the insight, you will open space for innovation and growth.
