Build It

8Learning

Chapter Objectives

In this chapter, we will:

• Discuss what we mean by a learning culture.
• Show how learning requirements and tools have changed, and the importance of organizations adapting to them.

Key Points

• Technology has fundamentally changed learning by making huge amounts of free content available.
• Learning is a personal investment—it should be owned by individuals, giving them freedom to learn in their own time, at their speed and on their terms.
• For learning to happen, companies need first to have a learning culture, inspiring and driving learning.
• Job design and culture are key—without freedom and responsibility, there is no learning.

Introduction

You can hire the best people, design the best jobs and have the most engaged workforce, but if you don't get learning right, your organization is destined to underachieve. But we all know that, don't we? When we talk about providing training or learning opportunities to our staff, no one really disagrees—we're all in vehement agreement that it's a good thing. But then training is the first thing that gets cut, last in the line for budget because we know we can always do it next year.

“People at McDonald's get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs don't. It makes no sense. Would you want to stand on the line of the untrained person at McDonald's? Would you want to use the software written by the engineer who was never told how the rest of the code worked? A lot of ...