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How To Upskill Corporate Training And Development: The 4 Missing Links In Online Learning

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How important is upskilling and leadership training? The World Economic Forum reports that 42% of the core skills required for jobs will change by 2022. And many of those changes are already in evidence today. Fostering a safe and successful recovery means expanding access to the digital skills that can get people working again - and make companies more efficient. Clearly, upskilling and training is vital to the future of work - and to your future career success. The pandemic has driven all training online - showing corporate leaders new possibilities while introducing participants new levels of boredom, zoom fatigue, and overwhelm. Thanks to the coronavirus, the traditional educational model of the “sage on the stage” has proven ineffective for corporate training and all forms of leadership instruction. So how can online programs adapt, to drive greater engagement and accelerate upskilling, in the quarantined classroom?

If you’re wondering why your training programs are struggling, how students can stay more engaged and what we can do to adapt educational approaches to our time, consider these four missing links - four ways to create greater engagement and results in an online training world.

  1. Rethink Relevance - Founded in 1997, Sessions Colleges emphasizes the unique challenges of adult learners and non-traditional students. Here’s what’s different at Sessions: all of their courses are offered online only - and they have been since Day One. Gordon Drummond, President of Sessions College, shares insight based on observation. His institution has been catering to adult learners since long before the pandemic began. “Learning happens in a new context - that’s not just an online context. It’s a context of immediate relevance,” Drummond says. “Upskilling isn’t just about gaining skill credentials, it’s about massive retraining around relevant and applicable knowledge,” Drummond explains. If you don’t start with relevance - explaining why a concept matters - it won’t.
  2. Applied Science - “Adults want education to be applied,” Drummond continues. “They don’t want it to be about information - it needs be about application: things they can do.” Turning the tables in our phone interview, he asks me, “What do you know about andragogy?” It’s the study of adult learning principles, put forward by Malcolm Knowles - an educational scientist whose work was foundational in the development of modern training and upskilling programs. “Adults need to be involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction,” Drummond points out. Unlike children in elementary school, adult learners have the capacity to be more self-directed: leveraging that self-direction is key to making progress. Asynchronous learning (the ability to take training offline and digest it at your own pace) is a centerpiece of this approach. Consider how you are allowing your audience to be involved in co-creating your upskilling, training or onboarding program. Are you giving them what you think they need, based on outdated models? Or are you listening and applying what you’ve heard from your employees - to create a customized and highly-applicable learning environment?
  3. Feedback Feeds Upskilling - who has time to listen to a three hour lecture and take a test to demonstrate what they learned? Saleh, a 35-year old professional from San Antonio, says, “I can’t sit and listen to somebody explaining stuff. I need to learn in a different fashion - I need to be able to work,” she says, as a tiny voice asks for a something that’s fallen on the floor and she steps out of frame for a second. The mother of two comes back online to finish her thought, “I need to be able to listen but also to be doing things myself.” Today’s learners are balancing working from home issues, family obligations and a split focus unlike anything we’ve seen before. Drummond says that feedback - not testing - is the key to creating engagement in any upskilling or training program. In my work with corporations, business leaders and entrepreneurs, my business model has shifted to adapt to a feedback-driven model. That means less talking and more doing, for all participants. Assignments, polls, questions and scenarios allow people to learn bite-sized concepts through application and experience. Discussion fuels reinforcement and retention. Because the best teacher isn’t the one leading the zoom meeting. Often, it’s one of the experts in the online conversation, making a discovery and seeing a new way to apply a particular concept. How does your training program create feedback, particularly peer-to-peer learning, on a consistent basis? The one doing the most is the one learning the most. Application-based group work, with consistent feedback and peer sharing, is best - especially when the trainees are creating their own experience of concepts and ideas.
  4. What’s Better than Information? - upskilling, at its core, is about transformation. The desire of every L&D professional, adult educator and trainer in corporate America: changing behavior to change results. On the surface, information looks like the path to knowledge. Except that it’s not. I mean, don’t you know that you should eat more vegetables, floss more often and get a good night’s sleep? Yep, we all know that. My question is: do you do that? Information is everywhere - just google it if you don’t believe me. The challenge of our times is parsing that information into pieces we can use. And that process begins with how we experience new concepts, through application and peer-to-peer learning. What effective trainers (and leadership coaches) provide isn’t just a how-to. Consider: do you really need more information on how to do something? Or is there something else that’s missing, something that you could call, “want to”? During these days of overwhelm, burnout and pandemic fatigue, where does your training focus: on delivering information, or creating transformation? If you want to change high-performing managers into the leaders of tomorrow, or you want your engineers to communicate more effectively, let me inform you of a secret: the path to powerful cultural change (and corresponding results) doesn’t come from an avalanche of information. Relevance, application and feedback leads to desire - a desire to put knew skills to work, through an experience that goes beyond information transfer. It’s funny how “I don’t know how to do something” changes to “I’m going to figure this out” when I’ve got an objective I care about. Do you know that feeling? Knowles calls it a “readiness to learn” - motivation shifts when there’s an immediacy of application. Learning changes when upskilling is seen as an important investment for the participant. You take on new skills in a different way, when application provides both insight and empowerment.

“Adults want education to be applied. They don’t want it to be about information. They want it to be about what they can do,” Drummond explains. Upskilling is about an educational format that allows adults to learn independently. The motivation to learn anything, in this online world, is internal. Finding that internal desire, in the middle of millions of zoom meetings, isn’t easy. Adult learning is problem-centered, not content oriented. (Seems like this pandemic has given all of us plenty of problems to solve - starting with taking business online more effectively). If solving real problems is where real learning takes place, what’s the first problem to solve? For learning leaders and corporate communicators: consider how to get people more engaged and activated, via online training that has adapted to these new and strange times.

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