Where is the Learner?

According to a report on Learning and Development, most of the organisations are now revising their learning strategy to focus more on the learner and his learning needs in order to form a stronger link between a learner’s learning and the organisation’s performance. The organisations are eventually exploring different learning modalities and use of different technologies to make the learning more effective for learner.  Considering this to be a positive step towards recognising the learner and his learning needs in sync with his and the organisation’s performance, we can hope that this practice gains momentum and the present facts that I am going to share with you become glimpses from the past of learning and development functions and practices:

The primary objective of learning and development is to help the learner to develop the required behavioural traits and skill set needed to effectively achieve his functional/performance objectives.  (Refer to the post: WHY ASK?) Therefore, the learning and development process begins with the learner’s Training Need Analysis or Skills Gap Analysis, which requires profiling of the learners’ educational, demographic, functional background along with the learners’ working environment.  The Need Analysis also comprises of:

Learner Analysis in terms of: Entry Behaviors, Attitudes toward content, Academic motivation, General learning preferences and the characteristics of the learners’ group. The next step of Context Analysis to study the context in which the skills learnt will be applied in real life. The analysis comprises of physical and technical study to analyse the desired level of performance, socio-cultural background and the geographical location of the learners, resources and constraints of the existing learning support.

Learner and Context Analysis is incomplete without the Content Analysis which requires the study of the efficacy of any existing learning intervention, learning content along with existing information resource or Knowledge pool available to help the learners develop necessary behavioural traits and skills needed for performance improvement. The objective of the study is to define the learner’s learning objectives and design effective learning strategy to help the learner achieve their learning objectives.

All these steps require the involvement of the management in the form of the functional heads, managers, supervisors, subject matter experts, trainers or training providers, learning strategy designers and learning content developers, but the most important person in this whole process is the learner who should be involved from the beginning to the end of the process. (Refer to the post: Agile Learning Design for Workplace Learning).

It is not so in reality. The entire learning process beginning from the Need Analysis to the design and development of the learning intervention is meticulously done by all the stakeholders in complete absence of the learner. The Management, the SMEs and the Content development professionals focus on the requirement of the organisation and develop the learning solution. Often, the Learning Strategists and Content Developers develop the entire solution based on inputs from SMEs with prime focus on the Trainers for ILT solutions and the management and their budgetary sanction to design technology based learning solution with practically no interaction with the real customer or the real user of the solution: The Learner.

This results in the learning and development to be a mere formality that most of the learners consider to be a paid holiday and they give a rather deceptive feedback on their learning experience and its benefits. The feedback cannot be validated in the absence of effective evaluation process to assess the performance of the learners post the learning intervention.

Therefore, it is time for most of the organisations to not treat the learning and development function as a regulatory compliance  that will earn them the status of a progressive organisation that gives due importance to the development of its human resource. Therefore it was heartening to read that the organisations are now trying to realign their learning and development functions and make it learner centric and not management, SME, Trainer or Technology centric.

This also holds good for the academic learners studying in various educational institutions. The curriculum and the design of the learning strategies do not focus on the target learner group and its learning objectives, but on the educational institutions and their teaching staff, which results in the learners dropping out of the learning process. Another living proof is the mushrooming of the Coaching Institutes across the country and most of the learners making a beeline to them with the aspiration of improving their academic scores and performance.