Research On Learning At Work

... And its implications for our work as development professionals

We have been researching learning at work for nearly ten years. Our initial study was based on interviews with 140 people in ten organisations. The evidence from that study showed that work based learning was the main mode of learning. Training and education accounted for just 10 to 20 % of what made a person effective at work. This result has been replicated in research at various UK universities such as Lancaster and Sussex (see, for example, Burgoyne and Reynolds, 1997; Eraut, 1998; Eraut et al, 1998) as well as in the USA (see, for example, McCall et al 1988; Wenger, 1998).

A typical response from our interviews is in the accompanying example (figure 1). Here you can see that the person learned most in the work place and was very reliant on the people around her.

Figure 1. The following is a quote from our research. It comes from a former secretary in the National Health Service.

"1 was very lucky to work at (x) Hospital in the (y) unit where there was very much an atmosphere of, you are not just here to do typing but can get involved in what is going on, "If you want to help us with the research or if you want to stay late and sort out the computer, that's great" and I learned an awful lot there and it was that experience which motivated me to get on and make a career. I put a lot of my time into it, using weekends and evenings working on the computer database we were using for the research. I also learned an awful lot from (z) who was in the unit and let me do a lot of the administrative work that was part of her job.

The atmosphere of the unit was very motivating. Everybody in that unit was in it because they wanted to develop their career and they were very motivated to get on, and this just motivated everyone else. My particular boss had the confidence in me to let me do things that she was responsible for and the fact that she let me do them increased my confidence.

So in the unit I was seen as the person to go to first of all, especially by the nurses. My boss would tell them to see me if there were things they wanted to know. So they came straight to me, they didn't even bother to go to her first, so my role in the unit was much more than that of a secretary. Sometimes my boss would pass on things to me. She'd say, "I'll hand all this over to you to sort out" and I would often have to go to other people to find out information I needed to know, and then I’d get it all sorted out.

It was a close unit. Although I was a junior I sat with the senior staff in the coffee room and joined in their conversations. They would talk about things in front of me and they obviously trusted it wouldn't go any further. The job I'd had before had been as secretary in a laboratory in another place and there it was just a matter of putting in the allotted hours. I got very bored, very quickly. There was no motivation at all and I left after six months. I need a challenge. If I stop learning, then I'm not going to be motivated, and that means I couldn't be doing my job very well."

This quote is very typical – the secretary concerned learned in the work place through a range of processes including being delegated to, listening to others, everyday conversations and having a good manager. Also the work context was one that fostered learning. And the kind of learning she quoted varied from practical computing skills to gaining self confidence. 

Follow Up Research

We followed up this research with a number of more in-depth studies in specific organisations. For instance we asked people from Board level to junior manager about what made them effective in their roles and how they came to be effective. The answers were focused on learning. (A typical process in the research is indicated in the figure 2.) The most common initial response was that the person learned from ‘experience’. However when we unpacked that notion there were many factors that people identified. For some it was difficult for them to characterise precise learning events – they felt that it was the passage of time in their work. Others could identify specific features of their learning, from mistakes and trial and error learning to being in a supportive environment or doing developmental projects.

Figure 2. The process asks people to go through a series of logical stages and we usually use a form for the purpose.

1. Everyone is asked to write a few notes on the purpose of their business. They may take this from a mission or vision statement. Wherever it comes from what we want to get out is: why does the organisation exist? What is it here for?
2. We then ask people to make some notes on their own role in contributing to this purpose. What do they get paid for doing that relates to the organisation’s raison d’être?
3. Next we ask them to indicate the skills, knowledge, competences, qualities, etc that they bring to this role.
4. The last piece we ask of people is to look back at what they have just written and to note down where these abilities (knowledge, skills, competences, etc) have come from. What comes out is that pretty much everything they mention at the last stage is to do with learning. Even if they say ‘experience’ we can usually unpack that to show that they learned from their experience.
5. A final piece is to get the person to reverse the order of questions in the above; that is to get them to recognise that if they learned better they would be better at their job; this would mean that they would contribute better to the business. We can then explore how learning could be more effective in supporting organisational performance.

A further study was based on asking people about good and bad learning experiences. (When did the person learn well and when did they want to learn but it hadn’t worked out.) We have done one piece of simple analysis of this material by subtracting bad experiences from good ones. The only situations that produce more negatives than positives – that is, produce a negative score - are education and training. All others come out more positive than negative – for example travel, visits to other organisations, being coached, working in a good team and having a good manager.

Linked to the above, we have asked people about the value of particular courses and then how able they were to transfer what they had learned to the workplace. For instance we would often find that people had been on a course to develop IT skills such as a course on PowerPoint or Excel. We asked if a) they had learned everything they needed on the course and b) if they had applied everything that they had been taught. As one might expect every person questioned said that a) the course did not give them everything they needed and b) they only applied a limited range of the things that they had been taught. 

When asked about ways that they did learn to use computer software, typical answers included asking colleagues, trial and error, consulting IT staff and using the ‘help’ function. Very few people had consulted manuals and most did not go back for more training. These results are similar to those found in other studies.

The final study I want to mention has was completed in December 2003. In this one of our team, Dr Graham Dawes, has analysed what 146 managers put into learning contracts when they were on Self Managed Learning programmes. These programmes normally require the person to gain diagnostic evidence about themselves (increasingly via 360 degree feedback) and then get assistance to think through their learning goals. They work in a learning group which provides an arena for the person to check their learning goals and produce a learning contract, which they also check with their manager.

The process of creating a learning contract is usually quite rigorous and not at all like the standard ways of creating a personal development plan. The evidence of what managers want to learn (and how) is therefore much more valid than questionnaire based studies or the use of focus groups. The research has provided rich material. One simple piece that has come out of it is that the learning goals are incredibly varied – and they do not support the use of generalised management development programmes or standardised lists of competencies. However Dr Dawes did identify the numbers of managers coming up with similar learning goals and the top ranked were: Learning in one’s own professional area (marketing, HR etc) 42.5%; time management and personal organisation 41.1%; influencing skills 40.4%; work life balance issues 38.4% and personal development (for example increasing confidence, having less stress, etc) 36.3%.

Implications for Trainers & Developers

The research strongly supports the trend for trainers to become learning and development professionals in the widest sense. Training clearly has a role to play and if people gain 10-20% of their capabilities from this route some use of courses is likely to be sustained. However the overwhelming response from people studied was that there needs to be a better link between courses and real work needs and that, in any case, most useful learning occurs in the workplace. Time and again people said that they wanted practical help with real issues that they faced and not generalised advice or theory. 

The good thing is that learning and development professionals are identifying the need to respond to these requirements. The problem is that many managers still assume that if a development need is identified in a performance review or appraisal then training is the answer. One consultant, who has just left a training post, emailed me as follows (as a result of reading about some of our work):

‘Too often training courses are seen as the knee jerk reaction to any problem. I have lost count of the number of times I have had managers phone me (when I was an in house provider) to say ‘is there a course you can find for x to sort out their time management/communication/writing skills’.  

I also confess to sometimes just finding an external course of some kind as an instant solution because developing a proper learning solution is a time consuming process and hence many training managers find themselves reinforcing the knee jerk tendency. 

I guess this will continue to be a problem until organisations adopt a much more holistic approach to learning. 

We have for a while recognised this need to develop ‘proper learning solutions’ and a ‘more holistic approach to learning’. One result of this has been for three of us to write ‘The Handbook of Work Based Learning’ so that both managers and developers can have usable information on the alternatives to off-the-job training. We are aware that, on its own, the existence of such a resource won’t necessarily produce radical change. However we hope that learning and development practitioners will be able to use it to engage with managers so that the latter can learn how to create more cost effective development strategies.

Indeed, being more strategic is one key change that is needed. The example of the former trainer above shows that the lack of a clear and comprehensive learning strategy is unhelpful. Merely reacting to unanalysed requests for training is not the way forward. Organisations need coherent development strategies within which the tactic of the appropriate use of training courses can be located. However you cannot have a training strategy – training, in and of itself, is not strategic. Training is best seen as one potential tactic within an overall learning and development strategy; a strategy that encompasses coaching, mentoring, team development, projects and other work based approaches. 

This has been a difficult stance for many trainers to get to grips with. Indeed many organisations still continue to develop training plans as though course provision can be separated from other learning modes. 

In one organisation we discovered that the Board had compelled all customer-facing staff to go through a training course in order to improve customer service. The result of this massive expenditure was almost no impact on customer service. So the Board demanded that the trainers re-train everyone.

What the Board did not look at was the overall context of performance and how to encourage more effective learning. For one thing, managers and supervisors needed to improve their coaching skills. However other cost effective methods might have included team development, visits to other organisations, linking rewards to learning, e learning, action reviews, work shadowing and so on. We have identified an array of similarly effective methods in our Handbook of Work Based Learning.

What the organisation needed was a coherent overall strategy for improving learning, within which off-the-job training could have been located, rather than a one dimensional approach that ultimately failed to deliver. This case is not an isolated example. Quite a few organisations have closed down or outsourced training departments as they have not been seen as part of the core business of the organisation. Yet learning has to be part of the core of any business – if people in organisations don’t continue to learn the organisation will die. So trainers might want to locate their work in a broader context and get involved in the wider learning agenda for their organisations. Otherwise they may find that they too are not seen as central to their organisations.

More on the research, and more on how to make work based learning effective, is in ‘The Handbook of Work Based Learning’ by Ian Cunningham, Graham Dawes and Ben Bennett, published by Gower Press, 2004

 

References.

BURGOYNE, J. and REYNOLDS, M. (Eds.) Management Learning. London, Sage, 1997.

ERAUT, M. ‘Learning in the workplace’. Training Officer, Vol 34, No 6, July/August 1998, pp172-4.

ERAUT, M., ALDERTON, J., COLE, G. and SENKER, P. Development of knowledge and skills in employment, Research Report No. 5, University of Sussex Institute of Education, 1998

McCALL, M. W., LOMBARDO, M. M., and MORRISON, A. M. The Lessons of Experience. Lexington, Lexington Books, 1988.

WENGER, E. Communities of Practice. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

 

Published in ‘Training Journal’.