The difference between Learning, and learning.
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Sometimes words blend into each other to form a single idea in our head, and we forget the meanings of words involved. The classic 1990’s alt rock band ‘the Smashing Pumpkins’ after a few repetitions forms a concept in our head, that has nothing to do in any way with fruit, or how you might come destroy that fruit. The words smashing pumpkins is likely to elicit images of a hairless, sneery Billy Corgan, than a butternut.
The same happens with L&D- the concept in our head is quite distinct from what learning is, and what development is. So let’s break it down.
Learning vs learning
The capital L is trying to do a lot of work for me, so let me spell it out just in case. By Learning (capital L) I mean structured learning; organised, documented, scheduled, recorded. By learning, I mean gathering new information in your brain and keeping it.
What is learning?
You’re doing it now. By paying attention to these ideas, retaining them in your brain and (hopefully) applying them, you are learning. Learning is a human skill (and animals and arguably some plants) of retaining information to provide guidance to future behaviour.
Workplace learning happens all the time, with almost all of it without any HR involvement. Humans learn continuously and reflexively without prompting or structure. Most workplace learning is employees recognizing that they don’t know something and take in the information so they will know next time.
Are you tracking it? Is that what L&D is all about?
I’d be prepared to put money on the following: as the HR person or department, you don’t know what learning is going on, and where, and you’re feeling a little guilty about that. If you do know, you can point to it, maybe in a nice weekly/monthly report, as the evidence that learning is being tracked. But is that it’s all about? Does learning in a school start and finish with the exams?
It’s happening without you, and that’s a good thing.
Well good news, I’m letting you off the hook. Humans are very good at learning, they’ve been doing since day one of life, and they couldn’t stop learning if they tried- it’s in the DNA. Almost all learning goes on without formal codification, documentation or specifications.
What you do need to worry is good learning and bad learning. People will learn, but they may learn the wrong things. For most tasks there are various ways of doing things, and so long as they produce the right outcome, the how isn’t very important. But if how is important, that’s when the organisation needs to control that learning process.
What is Learning?
Generally we need this structured learning if:
Things need to happen a very specific way,
Other ways are identifiably worse,
Left to their own devices, people cannot be relied upon to do things the right way,
we need to demonstrate that we’ve taught them.
The most likely reasons are for safety, whether employee or the customers’ safety. We see structured learning in manufacturing, dangerous working environment, healthcare, or handling sensitive customer information, if there is a risk to harm from doing things the wrong way, that is when learning needs to be structured.
Structured learning comes in many different forms. A good example is the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) where the correct way of performing a task is defined, and all performers are trained to do that task that way. Other examples are Health and Safety training, such as ‘toolbox’ talks, correct lifting techniques and so forth.
Is Learning just about compliance?
Unfortunately the primary driver of structured learning is risk mitigation, as failure to train people correctly puts the company at significant legal risk. This is not wrong, but it does complicate the picture. If compliance is a driver for training, it does mean it will (well, should) get done. But it also means the focus is often on demonstrating that the learner was told, not that the learner actually learnt.
Do you need structured learning in your workplace? Ask yourself (or others), is there a wrong way, and a right way of doing things, and if the wrong way is done, can someone get hurt? To further test this, is there a shortcut? Does the shortcut increase the risk of harm?
When is it good to organise learning into Learning?
So some learning you have to control and document so you can demonstrate it later. But what is learning that is good to do? What are some things that people can learn to do, that will make them better at their job?
Employees and their managers can (and are) typically relied upon to organize most learning in the workplace. Where value can be added by HR is recognizing additional, good-to-know, learning that will unlikely happen organically, but is beneficial to everyone involved.
To keep it simple; if it can make people better at their job, do it, organise it, facilitate it. But do you need to record it? Only if it makes the boater go faster, or people safer.
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