It’s the Company’s Job to Help Employees Learn

With graduation seasons in sight, we see an increasing number of university talented students pounding the pavement to look for a suitable job for themselves. As competitive as it is, graduates today seek for job opportunities that are able to meet their requirements at work. That being said, one of the important aspects that these new generation of employees look forward to is the ability to gain sufficient industry knowledge at work.

Traditionally as we learned from Frederick Taylor’s principles of scientific management, he proposed that the work productivity will only increase as we simplify each tasks at work. Fast forward to the present, it is the exact opposite. Most jobs today demand employees to continuously embrace the opportunities to learn, and to develop new skills and expertise for their professional development in building up their careers.

With millennials slowly taking up the majority of the workforce, this has also created a change of perception in how employees get hired and trained in the company. As mentioned by CEO of Hogan Assessment Systems, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, higher career security is a function of employability, and that in turn depends on learnability. As much as academic excellence is essential to being one of the aspects in hiring, most organisations have to wake up to the reality that they are able to pay an equal attention towards hiring the “learning animals” who are able to be a standout among the pool of other candidates, by demonstrating their passion in asking insightful questions that may be beneficial to unlock a deeper insights for the clients.

As organisations step foot into providing lifelong learning for employee’s professional development, Tomas suggests how organisation leaders can do a better job at fostering learnability in the workplace by starting with the three (3) most simpler steps: 

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Select For It 

Don’t waste training budgets on employees who have yet to demonstrate learnability, even if those employees are otherwise skilled, collaborative, and productive. To maximise the benefit of limited training investments, focus on employees with higher learnability: curious and inquisitive individuals who are genuinely interested in acquiring new knowledge. Just like some people are more likely to benefit from coaching than others – because they are humbler, more open to feedback, and ambitious – certain individuals are more trainable than others because of their hungry mind.

Nurture It 

Managers who want their employees to learn new things will encourage that behaviour by doing it themselves. We are all time-deprived, but high learnability people make the time to learn new things. What is the last book you read that opened your mind? (Simply reading the articles your Facebook friends share doesn’t count.) When did you last devote time to study another industry? When was the last time you spoke to someone about stuff outside your area of expertise? How hard do you try to break up your default routine at work? How often do you ask “why”?

Paradoxically, instant access to information may suppress our natural curiosity and appetite for knowledge. It is to our learnability what fast food is to our diet: a ubiquitous vice with no nutritional value and the potential to make healthy food tasteless. High learnability enables people to dive deeper to translate information into actual expertise. It is the key intellectual differentiator between those who can go online and those who become smarter in the process.

Reward It 

If you want to change people’s behaviour, you should show them that you mean it. It is not enough to hire curious people and hope they display as much learnability as you do. You should also reward them for doing so.

One of the best ways to reward high learnability is to provide new and challenging opportunities for those individuals where they can continue to be stimulated to exercise their learnability and be rewarded by broadening their expertise and increasing their value to the company and themselves. Another suggestion is to promote people only if they have acquired sufficient expertise in other jobs in the organisation, not just their own.

Or you could give awards for individuals who organise events or activities to promote learnability in the company, for instance, running internal conferences, bringing external speakers, and circulating information that is intellectually stimulating and has the potential to nurture people’s curiosity. Even simpler habits, such as writing a blog, sharing articles on social media, or recommending books and movies, can be rewarded.

Though people differ in their natural curiosity and learning potential, the context will also determine how much learnability people display. Executives and senior leaders should be tasked with enhancing employees’ learnability throughout the organisation. Since leaders play a major role in shaping the climate of teams and culture of organisations, they will act as either catalysts or blockers of employees’ learnability. 

Inspiration: It’s the Company’s Job to Help Employees Learn

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Chia Yi Jing | Bubbling with enthusiasm, bright ideas, and confidence, Yi Jing set foot in the PR world with Orchan Consulting, where she was offered permanent employment after a successful internship. She is determined to make her mark in the industry, and her bosses know that she will.