With new trends shaping every day, the business environment has become extremely dynamic. Organizations are facing disruptive change due to digital technologies and find it difficult to cope up since skills are becoming obsolete at an accelerating rate. The only way organizations can thrive in this volatile business environment is through continuous learning in the workplace.
To promote continuous learning in organizations, learning managers need to act merely as facilitators while the leadership and employees have to play a proactive role. Creating a culture of learning requires encouraging the employees to develop an independent quest for knowledge, unlearn the old and learn the new regularly. It not only increases productivity and on- job performance, but also helps in talent retention. A report by Deloitte suggests that companies that promote continuous learning in the workplace, have seen 37% higher productivity and 92% of them are more likely to innovate and find new avenues.
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However, the question is how can a company cultivate a continuous learning culture?
The best way to encourage learning culture in an organization is by incorporating it in the flow of work. This way employees enhance their skillset and abilities proactively rather than being guided by occasional training programs where the learning is usually involuntary and outcome is hardly satisfying. It can help employees access fresh knowledge and skills through their work day, with the help of the business applications they use frequently. For instance, valuable learning content can be accessed directly on Salesforce, Microsoft Office, Slack and many other popular applications. It makes the learning process more effective and seamless and promotes continuous learning and development in the organization.
Continuous learning in the workplace requires bringing multifunctional teams together, thus, promoting collaborative learning. Different disciplines like sales, marketing, design, finance and IT are brought together to find solutions faster and promote interdisciplinary thinking.
Peer to peer or informal learning forms the foundation of a continuous learning culture and creates an easy path towards knowledge sharing in the organization. Use of effective learning technology can help by connecting employees and subject matter experts and make it a collaborative process without any barriers. On the contrary, when learning in workplace is pushed from the top it can create an environment of resistance.
Establishing and maintaining a continuous learning culture in the workplace is not very difficult. What is required is the right tools and the right perspective to direct the organization in the right direction and set the right foundation. There are various new tools in the market that provide curated content, mobile learning solutions, micro-learning and aid in assimilating and connecting the extensive library of external MOOCs and learning videos available on the internet.
In organizations with continuous learning culture, employees decide what needs to be learnt on the basis of the teams’ requirements along with individual career goals and corporate L & D doesn’t own the learning process but only curates and creates a useful learning experience. Also, the mode of learning goes beyond classroom and online to micro-learning and collaborative knowledge sharing experiences.
Considering how automation and technology is changing the nature of jobs, organizations need to invest in continuous learning in the workplace to make sure they do not become redundant. They cannot look at learning in the workplace as a cost burden anymore but as something that is essential for the business to sustain and grow.
References:
- Continuous Learning is the Key to Future Success for Organizations- HRK News Bureau, 11 June, 2019
- 2 Steps to Building a Continuous Learning Culture (and Why It is Crucial)- Jeffrey Rothblogo, 28 February, 2019
- Careers and learning: Real time, all the time- Bill Pelster, Dani Johnson, Jen Stempel, Bernard van der Vyver, 28 February, 2017
- An agile organization is a continuous learning organization- Vinay Pradhan, 02 May 2019
