'The evolution of executive training and how to make it effective in Hybrid models'.

Have you wondered about the evolution of how adults learn? Over the last decade significant research has happened in this area and some non-western perspectives have made our understanding a lot more holistic. 

Before we get to how executive training needs to evolve for hybrid models it will be good to baseline our understanding on how adults learn.

How do adults learn?

To answer his question, we need to understand the following 4 dimensions of adult learning:

• Andragogy is the art and science of teaching adults. It enables us to understand the learning imperatives, style, and motivations. For examples:

  • Adults are self-directed learners. They take charge of their own learning. 

  • The motivation for an adult to learn is guided by his role in the society and is usually tool and application driven. They will prioritize immediate application of learning to future application. 

  • Adult learning is more problem centred learning than subject centred learning.

• Contextual Learning: also called situational cognition is about learning within a real context or situation. Adults need to have the context to learn. Contexts change depending on culture, geography, history, habits etc. Learnings from one context might not be applicable in another. 

• Transformative Learning: this form of adult learning is about changing, attitudes, beliefs, and perspectives. This is essential in leadership skills learning. This occurs when adults can synthesize the learnings from their experiences, with the context, and cognitive process to be able to see a whole new dimension and open new perspectives for themselves. 

• Holistic Learning: The latest work in adult learning theory has been focussed on more holistic concepts of learning. These concepts go beyond the simple outlook of cognitive processing to involve body, spirit, and emotions. The brain, body and emotions are interconnected and understanding how the mutual interdependencies help us learn a lot about our reactions and attitudes and beliefs. 

To summarize adults learning needs to be contextual, problem solving oriented, self-directed, involving body spirt and emotion.

Couple the above with the fact that on an average an employee is online 30 times / day and will not watch a video greater than 4 min. The attention spans of learning have reduced, and the preference is for shorter modules which can add immediate value. This learning trend is called micro learning. ~30% of an employee’s time during the workday is spent on mobile. Hence mobile enabled learning eco systems are a necessity. 

Keeping in line with the above the new world of Learning and Development is evolving to this: 

Driven by experiences, learning is largely going to be self-directed by employees and the role of the organization will be to provide an interconnected and flexible eco system. 

In this new world people own their careers and not companies. COVID has given rise to its own set of challenges:

• 17% of employees are going to be made redundant

• 35% of employees need up-skilling

• 40% of employees will work remotely

Dealing with high numbers for up skilling will require digital & scalable solutions.  Couple the remote working numbers and you need a hybrid model that is driven by the following 4 key trends which need to emerge in executive training:

• On the Job, training that is contextual & self-directed

• Just in Time, training that solves for real world problems

• Personalized, training which considers an individual’s body, spirit, and emotion make up.

• And Micro-Learning which means delivering training in short digestible capsules of up-to 5-10 minutes.

The good news is that with AI and Cloud you can make the above not only a reality but scalable and affordable too. Using Sentiment Analytics, NLP & Deep Learning today AI can give contextual and personalized feedback. 

Let us understand what this does for the Business: -

• By providing training at the time of need you can increase the ROI on training spend by as high as 70%. 

• This is driven by the fact that a human brain learns faster by applying skills than just reading/ learning about them. 

Taking a scenario, the global sales head of the company has a team of 100 sales executives. He wants to get a pulse on the communication skills of his team. While his top 20% is particularly good but he does not feel greatly confident of the rest. 

His Asia sales executive is negotiating an extremely critical deal. His emails are either too passive or too aggressive. Being in different time zones hand holding is not an option. If someone could review his mail before its sent, make it sound right, it would help close the deal faster.

An AI solution can parse the email and give you the predominant tone along with suggestions on how to improve. Over time it will mine your data to show the inherent derailing patterns. Soon the AI coach will know you better than you know yourself.

And as a global sales head you will have a communication skills heat map of your team. It will enable you to know the coaching you need to provide to each employee as well as give invaluable insights on talent development and management.

Just in time training can impact your business outcomes very positively. 

Design your training solutions to match with how adults learn to maximize outcomes. Some interesting data completely tying to what we understand about adult learning:

• 70% of us like to learn at work

• 60% like to learn at their own pace and 

• 50% prefer learning at the point of need. 

Providing on the job, personalized and just in time training solutions is the future and is what will make hybrid work models successful.