Creating Impact Through Future Learning

The High Impact Learning that Lasts (HILL) Model

Filip Dochy, Mien Segers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351265744
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Organisations today operate in a fascinating world where change is constant, fast and continues to accelerate. It is the combination of evolving developments such as technological advancements, globalisation and new ways of communicating through multimedia technologies that drive us to reorganise how we live, how we work, how we create value, and how we learn. These developments call for a Learning & Development policy and practice that supports professionals to be or become successful in this fascinating changing world. In other words: one of the core goals of Learning & Development is to support sustainable employability.

Creating Impact through Future Learning introduces a model for High Impact Learning that Lasts (HILL) that is very much in synch with the demands of an agile organisation. The HILL model is about the learning of young adults, professionals, and experts. It is about the many possibilities to inspire and to support adults in their continuous learning and development process, aiming to create value for today's and tomorrow's society. It is about how designers of learning programmes – be it L&D officers or teachers in vocational and higher education preparing adults for professional life – can take a step forward to build the future of learning. A new mindset is needed to create a real impact.

1

The future of learning

Introduction

‘Those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, usually do.’

– Steve Jobs

Organisations today operate in a fascinating world where change is constant and fast and this will even accelerate in the near future. Evolving knowledge in many domains, with technology probably as the most salient as well as being accessible worldwide, pushes organisations and in fact all of us to take the next step. With respect to technological advancements, over the next decade we can expect new smart machines to enter our lives in numbers we cannot imagine today, which will change every domain of our lives, such as teaching, health care, production etc. With regard to working life, one of the interesting consequences is that routine tasks will no longer be part of employees’ jobs. Moreover, the availability of enormous quantities of data will change how we run a business, or manage work and our lives. We will be required to interact with data and make decisions based on patterns in data. Furthermore, our mode of communication is changing due to multimedia technologies. Moreover, demographic changes all over the world challenge us to rethink how to organise this next step. Given that in Western countries an ageing population is coming to the fore, we might expect that multiple careers will be commonplace, requiring us to engage in lifelong learning to be prepared for the occupational changes ahead. Moreover, for business, turning an ageing but well-experienced workforce into an advantage will require rethinking our traditional career paths and looking for more flexibility. Finally, globalisation is a trend that will continue in the near and far future with increasing exchanges and integration across cultural and geographic borders.

It is the combination of these developments that drive us to reorganise how we live, how we work and how we create value. In this context, for business, in order to create competitive advantage, the main challenge is to be (at least) one step ahead in dealing with the changes that appear on the horizon. Therefore, successful organisations position the topic of innovation high on their strategic agenda. Being oriented to innovation has multiple effects, not only on the work processes but also on the careers of professionals and their job content. Phenomena such as ‘boundaryless careers’, flexible jobs and job crafting are clear examples of this. Boundaryless careers result in the increased mobility of employees between employers and jobs. Fast changes in the labour market imply that we no longer work for a lifetime at a single organisation, such as our parents and grandparents did. Functional job flexibility leads to employees taking on different roles, tasks and functions as the organisation changes its strategies. Job crafting implies professionals that are designers of their own jobs. When I did my first job interview back in 1984, I received a phone call from the director the day after. He said: ‘What do you want to know first: the good news or the bad news?’ I insisted to get the bad news first. ‘You don’t have the job,’ he said, ‘we had another much more experienced candidate, with the specific expertise in the field,’ he argued. That was a clear statement: I had no chance since I just graduated. ‘The good news is that you can start next Monday,’ he continued. ‘We have some financial resources at hand, and you can create your own job at the skills laboratory,’ he specified. Three days later, I started exploring what colleagues at the medical skills laboratory were doing daily. This idea was decades ahead of its time!

These phenomena have one thing in common: the search for sustainable employability. This means that in addition to professional expertise in terms of knowledge and skills as a basic condition, a great deal of flexibility to deal with change, and to anticipate it, is necessary for individual employees as well as for the organisation. In order to anticipate market dynamics, organisations use different ways to organise work than was the case a decade ago. A fascinating example is the rise of multidisciplinary teams as innovation incubators. By co-creating new ways of looking at and analysing the wicked problems we face in many domains of life, innovative thinking is boosted in these teams.

The developments that we have outlined and illustrated here call for a Learning and Development (L&D) policy and practice that supports professionals to be or become successful in this fascinating changing world. In other words: one of the core goals of L&D is to support sustainable employability. In this respect, there is a plea for organisations not only to invest time and resources in organising and optimising the quality of regular formal training programmes, but also to take advantage of the power of informal learning at the individual and team level by facilitating it. However, as Colin Powell stated: ‘A dream doesn’t become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.’ So, where to start when building L&D that creates sustainable impact and how to make it happen?

High Impact Learning that Lasts (HILL)

For over 20 years now, scientists, Nobel Prize winners and practitioners have been warning that we are not learning effectively in our current training programmes. Our upcoming generations of young (and older) adults could learn with greater impact. Moreover, the traditional teaching and learning methods such as plain lecturing have also been clearly proven to be largely ineffective. More up-to-date, active methods such as class discussion and collaborative problem-solving assignments have been shown to provide up to more than double the impact compared to passive methods of teaching and learning (Deslauriers, Schelew, & Wieman, 2011). What constitutes such an impact and why do we simply not increase the learning impact to that extent in all our organisations?

That is what this book is about, and that is what the High Impact Learning that Lasts (HILL^®) model explains.

The HILL model is about the learning of young adults, professionals and experts. It is about the many possibilities to inspire and to support adults in their continuous L&D process, aiming to create value for the society of today and tomorrow. It is about how designers of learning programmes, be it L&D officers or teachers in vocational and higher education preparing adults for professional life, can take a step forward to build the future of learning. The developments described above make clear that there is an urgent need to rethink the future of learning. A new mindset is needed to arrive at a different approach where learners are in the driver’s seat of their own L&D process and are supported in ways that create real impact.

This book makes abstraction of any kind of pursuing goals, qualifications and competences. The central question is: If we had to reduce a training programme to its essence or the key actions that create impact on learners and their learning, what would such a learning arrangement look like? It is thus time to take a step further: working and learning in teams, workplace learning, trust in partners, problem-solving, searching for information, selecting accurate and reliable information, being critical, creating engagement, entrepreneurship, and so on.

Recent developments in the learning society

Seeking knowledge is like opening many different doors.

New knowledge is being developed as never before. Mankind needed 14 years to double the amount of knowledge from 1930; in 1976 only six years were needed for the same and in the year 2000 knowledge could double in just one year. Nowadays, it seems almost scary to think about how quickly new knowledge evolves and grows exponentially. Universities and schools no longer have a monopoly in creating and transferring that knowledge. Certainly, in disseminating information and increasing its accessibility, the internet started playing an important role in the year 2000.

In the world of L&D, the fast-evolving and highly accessible knowledge should be a major asset. However, training programmes have for a remarkably long time stuck to the traditional learning paradigms. Content is well defined and ordered, lectures accurately programmed, and one can exactly control whether what has been learned can also be reproduced. And although such an approach is increasingly being heavily questioned, aspects such as active learning, learner agency, lifelong learning, openness, flexibility, problem-solving and other generic competences are still underdeveloped in many educational and training systems.

The traditional model of learning originated at a time when knowledge was inaccessible to most learners. Trainers and teachers acted within this model as gatekeepers that owned the keys to knowledge access. Today, many different learning tracks provide access to knowledge. Our gatekeepers see their function hollowing. Nevertheless, new questions arise, such as: How could the learner cope with this new stream of information? How to select a particular learning track? Which information is relevant? And reliable? Which criteria to use for that? How should all this information be structured?

L&D professionals and teachers have a crucial role in supporting the learner in effectively dealing with such a massive stream of information, finding a way in the jungle of information technology and, most importantly, transforming information into knowledge.

The labour market and generic competences

Do you realise that many jobs did not even exist ten years ago? Just to name a few examples: digital marketing specialist, social media manager, blogger, big data analyst. Moreover, many people no longer have a single ‘job’ that fits the kind of generic descriptions used before. Instead, given the dynamics in most organisations and the flexibility needed, professionals today fill a unique combination of roles and they switch and trade roles according to the needs of the organisation.

As a consequence, current HR practices move away from generic job descriptions. Instead, they stress the competences that current and future employees need to fulfil in their different roles, tasks and functions.

In almost every vacancy, organisations ask for employees with competences such as: flexibility, problem-solving, working in a team, creativity, critical thinking. This is in line with the many lists of generic competences that are published in different sources. We mention a few examples.

In 2001, the OECD published a list of core workplace competences that are most agreed upon by different analysts, surveys and country reports. In terms of interpersonal skills, this report lists teamwork and the ability to collaborate in pursuit of a common objective as well as leadership capabilities. With respect to intrapersonal skills, motivation and attitude, the ability to learn, problem-solving skills, and effective communication with colleagues and clients are mentioned. In addition, the report refers to the importance of analytical skills as well as technological or information and communication technology (ICT) skills.

In 2003, the National Centre for Vocational Education Research in Australia summarised the generic competences that most are commonly presented in listings. They ordered them into six categories: Basic/fundamental skills (such as literacy, using numbers, using technology); People-related skills (such as communication, interpersonal, teamwork, customer-service skills); Conceptual/thinking skills (such as collecting and organising information, problem-solving, planning and organising, learning-to-learn skills, thinking innovatively and creatively, systems thinking); Personal skills and attributes (such as being responsible, resourceful, flexible, able to manage own time, having self-esteem); Skills related to the business world (such as innovation skills, enterprise skills); and Skills related to the community (such as civic or citizenship knowledge and skills).

Looking to the future, the Institute for the Future of the University of Phoenix (Davis, Fidler, & Gorbis, 2011) published a list of ten competences needed for the 2020 workplace: sense-making, novel and adaptive thinking, social intelligence, transdisciplinarity, new media literacy, computational thinking, cognitive load management, cross-cultural competency, design mindset and virtual collaboration.

With respect to the workplace competences that have received most attention in research, Grosemans and Kyndt (2015) published the following list based on a systematic literature review: Theoretical business competences; Practical business competences; Problem-solving and analytical thinking; Learning to learn (in new domains); Time management; Managing self; Communication; Working in teams; Leadership competence; and Interpersonal competences.

Investigating what the labour market wanted in 2016, we came to the conclusion that priorities were given to the following competences:

•Working in teams	•Creativity
•Lifelong learning	•Knowledge creation and problem-solving
•Perseverance	•Information-seeking (accuracy)
•Critical thinking	•Engagement
•Entrepreneurship	•Self-responsibility

But how do you turn learners into problem-solvers if they cannot experience how to deal with problems and learn from these experiences? How to develop self-responsibility, meta-cognitive reflection and planning if learners do not have space to go their own way? How to learn to work in teams and to seek accurate information if the format is dominantly lecturing and individual rehearsal?

Although in 2017 many L&D programmes and professional learning tracks have moved away from traditional teaching methods, lecturing is still a dominant model in training, adult learning and higher education. Given the competences that the workplace is looking for, development/training programmes should offer real chances to practise communication and interpersonal competences, self-responsibility, acquiring new knowledge in a diversity of ways, self directedness, critical thinking, problem-solving, en...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• 1 The future of learning: Introduction
• 2 An executive summary of the HILL model: High Impact Learning that Lasts
• 3 Scientific background of HILL
• 4 The HILL model in practice: Tips and guidelines
• 5 Why can they do what we cannot?: Ten secrets of future learning in top training programmes
• 6 Applications of HILL
• Bibliography
• Index