Upskill employees to close the “learning gap” and maximize talent within your company
Ready. Set. Go! The race for organizations to stay competitive has opened the gates to the market of learning solutions. Management has unlimited training choices including learning management systems (LMS), online learning platforms, and consultants that bring customized training into companies.
One would think that keeping up with the rate of change, onboarding new employees, and planning to re-skilling or upskill employees would be a trivial matter. It is not. It’s often frustrating and overwhelming.
How can managers zero in on the right learning solutions to get the best out of their people? What is the best way to provide growth opportunities to retain top performers? And how do you provide the right learning solution to upskill employees who are hardworking but seem to struggle with training?
Identifying the Learning Gap
Buying into learning solutions without understanding the learning process of your employees is wasteful. Training that is incorrectly targeted will be lost on many of the employees who sit through it.
Here’s how experts who guide training and management initiatives typically work: They look at the structure and process of current training. They advise managers to provide coaching and mentoring to employees. They assume that employees are able to learn on their own and consequently recommend formal training and online platforms.
This is fine for most employees, as the solutions these experts provide will help employees keep up with the rate of change, encourage retention by providing meaningful growth opportunities, and maximize the skill set of longstanding employees.
But they tend to miss one critical element: the learning gap.
Today’s training structure focuses on integrating knowledge between the learning platform and the information it delivers, but not so much on HOW the employee learns.
The Biggest Blind Spot in Hiring
Consultants — and managers within some organizations — are aware of the learning gap and think that by hiring agile learners, they can avoid it. That means excluding applicants who don’t fit the agile metric. That’s right: HR departments assess potential hires to derive an agility score and eliminate candidates who score low. They make the assumption that if someone isn’t currently an agile learner, they can never become one.
That’s a huge blind spot for an organization.
There could be a brilliant mind out there ready for you to hire that could develop the next innovation and give your company a competitive advantage. But if those in charge of hiring are cherry-picking the agile learners and leaving out those who may struggle with more formal learning settings,what is that costing a company?
A solid percentage of the workforce struggles or has struggled with learning. It’s not known exactly how big that percentage is because even those who know they have a learning disability are reluctant to disclose it to their employers. A 2008 survey found that only 55% of adults diagnosed with a learning disability were confident enough to reveal their struggle to employers, and only 12% requested accommodation.
(https://www.verywellfamily.com/learning-disabled-adults-in-the-workplace-2161950)
But workers who have struggled with learning in a formal environment for their entire lives have often developed strong skills in other areas. They can be resourceful, creative problem solvers. Some have higher emotional intelligence because they’ve had to look for cues from the person speaking to them to know when they need to pay attention to certain information. They may be much more empathetic to others because of their struggles.
These are things that an agile metric may not pick up on.
And remember, it’s not that an employee who has difficulty learning the traditional way can’t learn anything new. They just haven’t learned how they learn. And if they have struggled for many years — especially if they are undiagnosed — they may be telling themselves, “I’m not good at learning.”
With the right learning techniques and metacognitive strategies, that mindset can be changed to one of confidence, hope and growth, enabling the employee to learn.
Tap Into Motivation
Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton conducted 850,000 surveys in their research assessment at Culture Works, titled “What Motivates Me.” They discovered that employees who don’t seem to be motivated actually have different motivation drivers and identities. When a manager or trainer taps into their true motivation it can spur an employee to learn, to do well in their job, and to explore new skill sets.
But even Gostick and Elton missed a key piece: empowering employees to learn.
I know this because, as a teacher, I have seen this pattern through my entire career. If an employee believes they cannot learn, they won’t be motivated to do so. They may feel hopeless, that they have limits on what they’re capable of. If we cannot change that belief, they will never realize and maximize their talent.
To change an employee’s outlook, managers must:
- Stay open-minded
- Learn the employee’s true skill set
- Stop making assumptions about their capabilities based on past experiences
- Test different strategies to see what works for them and what doesn’t work
Organizations assume that students graduate from high school and college knowing how they learn. In a perfect world, students would have self-awareness, self-knowledge, and realize the individual ways that they learn. However, schools today are focused on getting students to pass tests. That means teaching them to conform and only to study what’s necessary — never beyond. They don’t learn to discover their own strengths and passions. They only do enough to pass.
Until we change that educational paradigm, organizations are stuck doing the work that was supposed to be done in the primary educational system.
A Prescription For Leaders
What does that mean for your organization? It means making a few adjustments to the training systems and consultants you use. Here’s how:
- Work with managers to help them figure out the motivation drivers for employees on their respective teams. The best tool out there is The Motivators Assessment, developed by The Culture Works.
- Re-evaluate the employee training consultants you’re working with. Are the consultants experienced and qualified to address varying learning rates? Are they willing to incorporate the assessment results above and adjust their training methods to meet employee needs?
- Evaluate the LMS the company is using. Is it adjustable to the capabilities of the employee? Is there room for customization?
Leaders have the capability and the resources to help all of their employees learn and grow. They can be directly responsible for changing an individual’s mindset, confidence, and career trajectory. And they can develop motivated employees who may become true innovators for the company.
When making a plan to upskill employees, it’s worth the work involved to help them learn what kind of learners they are.