The Dis-Integration of Learning

For a while now, new technologies have been made available to help deliver training in small chunks, little bits of information delivered just when they were needed…just-in-time training.

These are great but, they have their limits. I am speaking with more and more people who tell me that employees go through all kinds of training but then they can’t “put it back together” they don’t know what to do on the job or apply the “chunks” they’ve learned.

The problem is the dis-integration of training. Learners seem to have a lot of pieces of information, but we’ve dis-integrated the content too far from the context and learners can’t put it back together.

We’ve decided to create powerpoint driven downloads of content without immersing the learner in the context of where they will be actually performing the work. We don’t put learners in scenarios or role-plays instead we give them lists of policies and procedures to memorize. We don’t provide learners “tough” questions because we don’t want to “trick them.”

We’ve missed the boat, learning is not meant to be fun or exciting, it is meant to be purposeful. It is meant to drive performance. Think of how kids learn to speak. They sometimes laugh and giggle but often they are frustrated and cry because they can’t properly express themselves. They work to learn to speak so they are no longer frustrated.

We need to allow our learners whether in the classroom or during online lessons to be frustrated, confused and upset. This leads to learning. The greatest time to learn something is right after a failure, but trying telling this to a corporation who’s lawyers won’t let you use actual cases from the company. Or only allows you to show scenarios of doing the right thing and not the consequences of doing the wrong action.

We conduct training in classroom environments which are nothing like the actual work environment, we assess knowledge with multiple choice questions which we are almost never confronted with on the job, we are asked behaviorally oriented questions so they can be measured but we never get to what managers really want…employees who do “understand”.

We have to re-integrate learning into the work process. The apprenticeship was a great model, people learn completely and not superficially and they truly became “masters” at their craft.

I dare say I haven’t met too many masters lately. Not all learning opportunities need to be immersive or role-play based or truly meaningful but, every once in a while would be a good start. Instead, we settle for dis-intgrated learning experiences that don’t translate to job performance. It’s sad.