It’s time to disrupt the ‘why’ of learning and development
Now is the time to disrupt the ‘why’ of learning and dramatically shift toward valuing lifelong learning.
First published at apolitical.
The problem: Critical skill shortages in public service continue to grow. The response has been to focus on addressing closing the skills gap and delivering in different ways. There is a need to disrupt the ‘why’ of learning and development to refocus on lifelong learning.
Why it matters: Continued skill shortages heighten the risk of public service policy and delivery failure.
The solution: Elevate learning and development as a strategic component of organisational capability. Rebuild learning and development systems to focus on supporting employees as adaptive, lifelong learners.
In Australia, the number of Australian Public Service (APS) government departments and agencies reporting critical skills shortages is increasing. The top two skills shortages were in the more obvious areas of ICT and data. However, the next four places on the list were core management skills: people management and leadership; portfolio and project management; change management; and policy. It is unlikely that Australia is alone in this challenge.
The persistent prominence of these basic leadership and management skills raises fundamental questions for public service leaders. Is there sufficient investment in education and training, and perhaps more systemically, is the current education and training effective?
In focusing on the ‘what’ (the skills list), have we lost sight of the ‘why’ of learning? In practice, have we separated the act of learning from the learning experience?
It is time for the government, industry and the education sector to reconsider the purpose and effectiveness of work-relevant learning.
Our skills fetish
Our fascination with listing skills shortages or forecasting the skills that will be required in the future has become a fetish. It skews our conversation about learning by focusing on the ‘what’ and ‘how’. It also presupposes a specific ‘why’ for investing in learning, which is to close a skills gap.
Our conversation about future skills has two major camps. The optimists describe the way new technologies augment human work, opening up new opportunities for more people to engage in better-quality work. The pessimists describe the risks of automation leading to job losses and the displacement of people from work. These positions have a long history. Futurists have always spoken about the workforce with the force of prediction, but it is rare for these futures to come to pass.
Skill shortages are not a problem of imagination. They are an immediate, pressing and practical issue for leaders and managers. A recent Australian Human Resources Institute survey of senior leaders found that 24 percent of public service employees are not considered fully proficient in the jobs they are doing today compared with 18 percent in the private sector. Doing what has always been done will not ‘fix’ the workforce capability gap.
Learning at the centre of a career
A recent global employee survey conducted by the ADP Research Institute concluded what many employers already know — employees want more from their employers than they did four years ago. Investment in ongoing skills development is among the top three expectations of employees; for Gen Z, it is at the top.
Gen Z workers in Australia are embracing career changes more frequently than previous generations. A 2023 study by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) estimated almost 30% of Australians under 30 expressed their intention to move careers within the following year.
Gen Z explores multiple jobs, industries and work arrangements because of their adaptability and willingness to pursue their interests. Job and career flexibility are possible because this generation embraces continuous learning and skill development; and they will be attracted to employers who share that commitment in practice.
More ‘why’ and less ‘what’
Why do we invest in learning and development?
There is more to learning and development than acquiring a new skill. It is not something that happens ‘out there’ and then gets applied ‘over here’. Learning is integral to the person, the job and the organisation. John Dewey, a founder of pragmatism, described learning (in 1897) as the “continuing reconstruction of experience”.
In focusing on the ‘what’ (the skills list), have we lost sight of the ‘why’ of learning? In practice, have we separated the act of learning from the learning experience? Has learning become a performative box-ticking exercise separated from its purpose?
More recently, the doyens of experiential learning David and Alice Kolb defined learning as “the basic process of human adaptation”. This purpose of learning carries within it an evolutionary approach of continuous adaptation — coevolution with the job and the organisation.
These views offer a broader understanding of the purpose of learning in the workplace. For example, both accept that adaptation through learning can be backward-looking or forward-looking. We learn from experience, and we create new ideas. There is a lot of discussion about innovation in public service but less focus on the tight relationship between the ability to innovate and the quality of learning.
A more productive approach would be to invest in learning and development as a critical organisational system that builds workforce capability, enables organisational performance and creates a mindset for innovation.
Valuing the investment in learning
While an organisation’s commitment to learning might be clearly expressed in its employee value proposition, the reality can differ. Most managers find that the training budget is often the first sacrifice when efficiency measures are needed.
There are three reasons for this.
First, the ROI on learning is often difficult to express clearly in unambiguous business outcomes. While everyone will agree that continuous learning is important to business success, few leaders willingly defend that position when faced with the need to produce ‘efficiency’ savings.
Second, learning and development budgets are often decentralised to business units, providing limited opportunities to employ training and education strategically and making the argument for business impact more difficult.
Third, ‘learning and development’ is a broad umbrella of activities ranging from conference attendance to degree learning programs and everything in between. When the budget is cut, it is often unclear what is being cut.
In short, learning and development budgets are often small, distributed, diluted, tactical and, it could be argued, ineffective.
Disrupting the ‘why’ not the ‘how’
Learning and development has experienced and continues to experience significant disruption as a function. However, it is a disruption of the ‘how’, not the ‘why’ — a disruption to delivery, not purpose.
The disruption to ‘why’ must come from organisational leaders, not educators or those delivering training programs.
Learning is a fundamental organisational system that provides resilience and sustained performance improvement. Leaders are responsible for defining the system's purpose. What are we learning about the ‘why’ of learning from the pandemic and the rapid evolution of technology?
One clear lesson is that ongoing learning and skill development will become a way of life. The often talked about ‘cultures of continuous education’ are now a reality.
The questions for leaders are:
How do the organisational systems support employee lifelong learning and adaptation?
How can we transform learning and development from an ‘out there’ activity to an investment in an experience?
How do we design on and off-ramps to learning that disrupt the conventional thinking of learning as a linear activity across the lifespan?
How do we stay focused on learning to embrace and manage contradictory demands, manage increasingly complex technology and integrate knowledge quickly across local, and dispersed, teams?
Now is the time to disrupt the ‘why’ of learning and dramatically shift toward valuing lifelong learning.
