Rounding the Learning Curve
dvances in technology, the rise of the global economy, and unremitting pressure to become more efficient and more responsive to customers have profoundly transformed workplace learning. Federal agencies have been forced to adopt new processes and ways of organizing work. The rate at which new information is created has increased dramatically. Employees must have a broader range of knowledge and must somehow keep up with new developments in their field.
The increasing complexity of work changes the nature of learning because ready-made solutions to problems are fewer. This places a premium on employees' ability to work themselves out of problems.
As a result of these changes, individuals and organizations are finding that the line between work and learning is becoming blurred. Learning is part of getting work done.
The capability to learn continuously is quickly becoming a source of competitive advantage for many organizations in the private sector. This means the most promising avenue for greater productivity lies in learning better and faster, thus improving employees' abilities to solve problems, innovate and change. Traditional classroom training has produced few tangible productivity gains. In their book Transfer of Training (Perseus Press, 1992), Mary Broad and John Newstrom found that an average of only 10 percent to 20 percent of training resulted in changing or enhancing an employee's performance on the job. Perhaps the major reason is that it artificially separates learning from real-world problems faced on the job. Adult learners are pragmatic - if the training isn't readily applicable to problems they deal with, they are likely to lose interest quickly. Another problem is that classroom training rarely is offered when employees need it in today's fast-paced workplace.
Learning is an output of work, not just an input. The learning potential in work situations can be tapped through activities such as on-the-job coaching, developmental assignments, sharing of lessons learned and assigning real work to learning-project teams. These informal, unstructured situations are precisely the way most adults learn best. Studies of workplace learning consistently show that as much as 70 percent of the skills and knowledge people need to do their jobs are learned outside the classroom. Research at the Center for Workforce Development has revealed that employees relied on informal learning opportunities for about 70 percent of what they needed to know in order to perform their jobs.
Continuous learning offers other important benefits. It is often less expensive than classroom training. An agency with a good program of continuous learning will attract Generation Xers, who view continuous learning as critical to remaining employable.
Learning Tools
Many agencies have begun to improve their employee development programs. Employees are being encouraged to take responsibility for their own development and careers. Decisions about how to spend training funds increasingly are made by line managers rather than central personnel offices. Last year, the Fish and Wildlife Service became the first agency to issue a formal policy endorsing continuous learning. The policy sets an annual goal of 40 hours of learning experiences for all permanent full-time employees. In addition to classroom training, the policy credits learning through self-studies, conferences and workshops, shadowing assignments, developmental details and on-the-job training. Nonetheless, most federal agencies are slow in responding to the transformation of workplace learning. Many managers traditionally view training largely as a tool to prepare employees for new positions. Training funds are still the first to go when it comes time to cut the budget.
The challenge for federal managers is to provide leadership in moving from training to continuous learning. The following steps can help them get there:
Perhaps the greatest challenge to creating an environment that supports continuous learning in government is the fear of failure. This fear leads to the belief that it is always safest to plan, and then plan some more, before actually doing anything. While this response is quite rational in many situations, it is at odds with the need to learn by doing. If most of what we learn, we learn by doing, it is reasonable to expect failure to be a fairly common part of the learning process - call it trial and error.
Many studies have shown what most of us know from personal experience: The lessons we learn best are those taught by failure. The Organizational Learning Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded by Peter Senge, encourages the creation of "practice fields" to foster individual and organizational learning. These are places where it's OK to make mistakes and learn from them. The best management development programs accomplish this goal by giving managers rotational and "stretch" assignments, fully expecting that most will experience mistakes and failures as part of their learning journey. The Army has been a pioneer in the use of after-action reviews to capture lessons learned from things that have gone wrong.
Managers need to encourage and support prudent risks that result in learning - even from failure. As the chief executive officer of Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing said recently, "We don't find it useful to look at things in terms of success or failure. Even if an idea isn't successful initially, we can learn from it."
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