A coaching culture is essential if learning is to be integrated into the corporate strategy of an organisation, and development is to be more than just a top-down intervention: that is one of the main principles to come out of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s (CIPD) latest research into how people learn.
Martyn Sloman, adviser in learning for the CIPD and author of Training in the Age of the Learner, has been tracing the shift in how organisations treat development – from conventional, training course-based solutions, to learning as an informal, ongoing process designed around individual and team needs – for the past four years. A new How Do People Learn report comes out in September with guidance and case studies on what organisations can do to create a climate in which people not only learn, but choose to do so.
In the modern organisation, competitive advantage is all about people learning and sharing, according to Sloman, and conventional training courses won’t deliver the results organisations need to maintain that advantage. “People learn best when they construct their understanding from their own experience, but can express and relate in groups with colleagues,” said Sloman. “If there’s a general principle of our time, it’s that.”
The other guiding principles cited by Sloman in addition to a coaching culture were the need to clarify how learning underpins the business strategy, how to design interventions with the learner in mind, and identifying and removing barriers to learning.
See our in-depth report in October’s Training Magazine
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