Managing Learning & Development: Effective Strategies for Skill Building

1. MANAGING LEARNING & DEVELOPMENT

2. Terminologies • Education: the system which aims to develop people’s intellectual capability, conceptual and social understanding and work performance through the learning process • Training: is a narrower concept and involves planned instructional activities, or other developmental activities and processes Harrison, 2000

3. Terminologies • Learning focuses explicitly on changes which takes place within the individual and to the process by which the learner acquires knowledge, develops a skill or undergoes a transition in attitude. • Development learning experiences of any kind, whereby individuals and groups acquire advanced knowledge, skills, values or behaviours. Its outcomes unfold through time rather than immediately and they tend to be long lasting.

4. Managing the learning and training process • The planning and management of people’s learning process – including ways to help them manage their own – with the aim of making the learning process more effective, increasingly efficient, properly directed and therefore useful.

5. Formal learning • Typically have a purpose that is measured by a series of outcomes. • By the end of the module; • Learner is able to perform a set of skills • Display understanding of particular issues • Demonstrate competencies in specified areas

6. Skills • Skill and understanding are those aspects of behaviour which are practiced in a work situation. • Motor skill • Manual dexterity • Social skill • Interpersonal skill • Technical skill • Analytical skill

7. Building blocks of learning Knowledge Comprehension Application Analysis Synthesis Evaluation

8. Tacit skills • The ability to perform tasks without being able to explain how – know how • Because this know how is typically acquired through experience rather than through formal instruction, tacit skill can explain much of the high performance and excellent results achieved by business and because they are unique to the people of the particular organisation .. They give competitive advantage

9. Competencies • The set of behaviour patterns that the incumbent needs to bring to a position in order to perform its tasks and functions with competence • Competency is concerned with the individual and his or her behaviour • Competence is related to the dimensions of the job or task in question

10. Generic management competencies • Breadth of awareness and strategic perspective • Oral and written communication • Leadership, decisiveness and assertiveness • Teamworking and the ability to work with others • Analysis and judgement • Drive and persistence • Organisation and planning • Sensitivity to others view points • Self-confidence and persuasiveness • Flexibility and adaptability

11. The process of learning • Gagne sees learning as a hierarchy moving from lower to higher order skills. It does not mean that learning can take place only in this order. • Signal learning • Verbal association discrimination learning • Concepts learning • Rule learning • Problem solving

12. Categories of learning • Association • Cognition • Cybernetics • Social learning

13. Experiential learning, cycles and styles Concrete experiences Testing implications of concepts in new situations Observation and reflection Formation of abstract concepts and generalisations

14. The four learning modes • David Kolb, suggests we look at adult learning as an experiential process. • A learner, to be fully effective, must develop four interrelated abilities. The learner must: • Become fully involved in an experience. • Observe and reflect experience from many perspectives. • Create concepts to integrate observations into logically sound theories. • Use theories to make decisions and solve problems.

15. What is implemented? What is valued? What is planned? What is analyzed? Feeling DOING REFLECTION THINKING

16. LEARNING FROM FEELING(CONCRETE EXPERIENCE) • Learning from specific experience • Relating to people • Sensitivity to feelings and people • CE indicates receptive approaches to learning that relies on feeling-based judgments. • A high CE Learner tends to be empathetic and are "people oriented". • They generally find theoretical approaches unhelpful and prefer to treat each situation a unique case. • Individuals who emphasize concrete experiences tend to be oriented more towards peers and less towards authority in their approach to learning. • In a learning situation, they are open-minded, intuitive, and adaptable.

17. LEARNING BY REFLECTION (REFLECTIVE OBSERVATION) • Careful observation before making a judgment. • Viewing things from different perspectives. • Looking for the meaning of things. • RO represents a tentative, impartial, and reflective approach to learning. • A High RO Learners rely heavily on careful observation in making judgements and prefer learning situations that allow them to take role of impartial objective observers. • In learning situations, these individuals rely on patience, objectivity, and careful judgment, but would not necessarily take any action. • They rely on their own thoughts and feelings to form opinions.

18. LEARNING BY THINKING(ABSTRACT CONCEPTUAL’N) • Logical analysis of ideas. • Systematic planning. • Acting on an intellectual understanding of the situation. • AC indicates an analytical, conceptual approach to learning that relies heavily on logical thinking and rational evaluations. • A high AC Learners tend to be more oriented towards things and symbols and less towards other people. • They learn bets in authority-directed, impersonal situations that emphasize theory and systematic analysis. • They are frustrated by and benefit little from unconstructed "discovery" learning approaches.

19. LEARNING BY DOING (ACTIVE EXPERIMENTATION) • Ability to get things done. • Risk taking. • Influencing people and events through action. • AE indicates an active "doing" orientation to learning that relies on experimentation. • A high AE Learners learn best when they engage in projects or small group discussion. • They dislike passive learning situations such as lectures. • AE individuals value getting things done and seeing the results of their influence and ingenuity.

20. Learning styles inventory • The learning styles questionnaire categorises people into four categories • Activist: who learn by active involvement in concrete tasks, and from relatively short tasks such as business games and competitive team exercises • Reflectors: who learn best by reviewing and reflecting upon what has happened in certain situations, where they are able to stand back, listen and observe • Theorists, who learn best when new information can be located within the context of concepts and theories, and who are able to absorb new ideas when they are distanced from real life situations • Pragmatists, who learn best when they see a link between new information and real life problems and issues and from being exposed to techniques which can be applied immediately

21. Integral learning • Engestrom developed the alternative and has six steps, each of which demands specific learning actions • Motivation – the awakening of interest • Orientation – the formation of preliminary hypothesis • Internalisation: new knowledge is added to enrich and extend • Externalisation: applying the model to solve concrete problems • Critique: a critical evaluation of the validity • Control: by examining the way in which learning has taken place