Learning is Personal and Capability Development is Organisational

How often have we had heard or used the word training program interchangeably for learning intervention or capability development initiative or for workshop towards organisation development. The answer would be more often or most often till a few years back. With the advent of digital tools and techniques into our learning curriculums, with the advent of you tube based videos for trouble shooting, with the usage of what’s app for sharing interesting presentations , with us attending webinars to gain knowledge on important topics , with us going through simulation techniques on our laptops or IPads, with podcasts happening globally slowly  across levels and functions in organisations we have started  believing in the fact  that training program is not the panacea for all development oriented initiatives and  most importantly  realizing that learning is location or medium agnostic and not necessarily requires to be instructor led training program for the best impact .

This is a change in the right direction as for many years we have not emphasized or valued the importance of learning styles or methodologies of transfer of learning into our learning curriculum as corporations, as much as we  should have done .The digital age has enabled us to break various myths on how peoples learn and also strengthen the impetus of learning styles and methodologies of transfer of learning in our learning design frameworks .We now believe much more than ever before that all of us learn differently( eg some by reflecting , some by doing ,some by writing or some by observing etc ) and there are preferred mediums of learning for us to absorb the most for each of us and many of us have a preferred time in the day when we learn the most .

Hence in the Digital age as we create the capability development agenda for Organisations ,some of the things we must be cognizant about are :

1.      Learning is personal. How and what makes me learn the best has a strong bearing on me as a person .Hence look at the cross section of employees for whom the capability development agenda has been made , how they learn effectively ,what makes them learn the most and design the curriculum accordingly .Dovetail the learning platforms accordingly to the overall agenda .

2.      Capability Development is an organisation priority and the various sub units in the ecosystem needs to be broken down and then driven in terms of enabling the same, it’s a business need and hence a macro approach towards building capability within each subset needs to be firmed up keeping in mind the subset of employees, their personalities, their learnability of a particular topic and how they can learn together effectively. It needs to be a mix of macro approach of capabilities and to the possible extent of micro approach on learning styles, personalities, effective mediums etc. The mix needs to be well thought through before implementation.

3.      Personalized approach towards Capability Development for Hi Po. Once the talent management framework has created the Hi Po for the organisation ,its important that a personalized 3 E (Experience , Exposure ,Education )based individual development plan is drawn up for each Hi Po and this should be a complete personalized approach to learning basis the learning styles , personal preferences and organisational tools available .