Give credit for everything I learn
When someone asks you about your education, what do you tell them? Usually, you tell them which school you went to and perhaps the university degree that you hold. However, for most people this paints a very small picture of their actual education. Think about how much of the knowledge you use on a daily basis came from traditional education and how much came from learning and accumulating knowledge from various different sources over time.
As we’ve seen from the Degreed study, people are prepared to put in even more time to learn on their own if they get some kind of professional credit for doing so.
Learn with and from others
“As you start driving conversations between learners, experts and mentors, there’s an increased level of engagement because people are now contributing, not just taking,” says Michael Miller.
People want their input to influence the system, and feel empowered when they are allowed to do so.
With this model of learning, people need to be able to:
- Follow managers, experts and mentors to see what they are learning in order to build their own expertise.
- Share crucial take-aways from their learning with their co-workers.
- Influence what other people see, so that if they don’t find a piece of learning beneficial, their colleagues will not waste time on the same content.
At Google, 55% of training courses are delivered by an ecosystem of over 2 000 peer learners.
Josh Bersin claims that “Learning owns probably 30% or 40% of the employment brand in your company. The issue of how we learn and how we share information in companies is very essential to the employee experience at organisations.”
The good news is that L&D is not obsolete, it’s just incomplete
As Janice Burns, Chief Learning Officer of MasterCard, puts it: “We play the role of facilitators and motivators more than anything else12.” Karen May, Vice President of People Development from Google, said: “Put the support structures in place to make [learning] happen and then get out of the way13.”
The role of the employer is to put the right technologies and infrastructure in place to learn, and ensure there is a culture and ethos that supports and inspires learning.
Learning and development is far more than a regulatory function
Deloitte’s 2017 Human Capital Trends Report for South Africa14 found that 21% of South African organisations believe the learning department exists to comply with regulations. Only 16% believe learning departments help employees grow and navigate their careers within the company – there clearly needs to be some reassessment.
South African companies have something else to realise: learning and development is far more than just a regulatory function. There is the Skills Development Levy to consider, as a hefty chunk of cash is paid for each company for this. Skills development is also an efficient place to earn BEE points. However, these regulations cannot be the driving force behind a company’s learning strategy.
The Skills Development Levy (SDL) has a significant impact on the L&D practices of many organisations. It provides a financial incentive for implementing specific learning programmes. The South African Board for People Practices (SABPP) recently commented in a factsheet that “At 1% of payroll per month, or R13 billion per annum in collected revenue, the SDL represents a sufficiently high financial incentive to shape L&D practices, especially in medium and large organisations with the administrative capability to claim back 20% - 49% or more of the Levy available to employers. Unfortunately, the design and delivery of many of the new programmes under the National Qualifications Framework suffered from an overemphasis on formal, quantitative and supply-driven types of learning, resulting in the neglect of informal, just-in-time, demand-driven learning. While the former programmes may be suitable for foundational education contexts, the latter programmes are an essential component of workplace learning for modern employers15.”
The levy needs to be looked at in context and the payback should not be looked at in isolation. If an employee needs to learn about Excel, it makes more financial sense for a company to direct them to a $20 (R256) Udemy course that is not accredited, or even use free online resources, rather than spending R4 000 for a one-day accredited course where you can receive almost R2 000 in return.
If a company looks at overall spend, a quality, online on-demand resource from Udemy makes sense. In fact, it would be at least eight times cheaper. If you’re focusing only on maximising a skills levy payback, you could be costing your company a lot of money.
An employee survey was done by Purch, a digital commerce company servicing more than 100 million customers worldwide16. Purch found that 73% of employees said that self-directed learning is more effective in helping them be successful in their professions than learning directed by their employer. In fact, employer-provided resources are one of the last places people go to when searching for knowledge and skills development, as seen from the study below17. When they need to learn something new, though, they are most likely to ask their boss or mentor (69%) or their colleagues (55%) for recommendations. Many people also take matters into their own hands – literally. Around 47% search the Internet and 43% browse specific resources. But just 28% search their employers’ learning systems and only 21% rely on their L&D or HR departments18.
