Forum

Executives at a manufacturing company acknowledged they had a “people pipeline problem.” They were grappling with two major workforce issues: How would the company be impacted when a significant number of employees retired and took their know-how with them? And how could the firm address the needs of younger, tech-savvy workers transitioning into senior management ranks while sufficiently advancing the corporate mission and improving its strategic speed?

These are mission-critical issues and are challenges that executives are confronting on a global level, as we at The Forum Corporation learned from the senior-level interviews and research we recently conducted.

At the manufacturing company mentioned above, the Learning and Development group was charged with figuring out the course of action. Its first steps involved establishing a comprehensive, community-centric program for the next generation of leaders in the organization. Over 18 months, community members attended classes, participated in expert roundtable luncheon discussions, and worked through business problems together. They moved through the program as a group, but also created a space where individual competency development and concerns about their unique needs were shared. Participants were encouraged to seek out organization experts—regardless of age or corporate rank—and use threaded discussions and ongoing communities of practice to solve business issues. In addition, participants documented their learning in a program blog.

This type of layered, continuous learning environment opened up several opportunities for the manufacturing company. Primarily, it helped executives avoid the leadership vacuum they anticipated would exist when senior managers retired and younger workers stepped into their positions. It also engaged teams in a collaborative, cross-generational, skills-swapping dialog and leveraged various community-building tools aimed at improving the groups’ learning goals. As a result of the program, a significant number of promotions were credited to the relationships formed during the course of the program.

Companies—and more specifically, their Learning and Development (L&D) groups—are confronted with challenges like this more and more every day. The workplace, already a multi-faceted web of complexity, demands innovative, learning-centric management solutions as the face of the global workforce continues to change. While researching this report, we observed some common patterns emerging among leading companies addressing these issues, and we will provide those insights here.

We will also answer two pressing questions weighing on many executives’ minds: How exactly does the L&D industry leap into this brave new world? And how can it better prepare itself for these inevitable workforce shifts while, at the same time, keeping the company moving forward in quick time toward its business objectives? This report provides guidance by building on tried-and-true business wisdom Forum has acquired over the years and by challenging companies to go even further in embracing cutting-edge tools, practices, and learning concepts.

The irony is that nonstop action leads to zero cultivation of experience and, in the end, less speed.
— Jocelyn Davis, et al., The Forum Corporation, Strategic Speed: Mobilize People, Accelerate Execution

Forum’s original research on the topic of workplace learning was published in 1978 by several authors, including George Litwin, under the title “Principles of Adult Learning.” This seminal work was updated by Joan Bragar and Kerry Johnson in 1993. Building on that solid base, Tom Atkinson and Jocelyn Davis published the foundational “Principles of Workplace Learning” in 2003. As we reflected on that work through the mirror of today’s most urgent challenges, we found that our six foundational principles remain mission-critical L&D levers for any business struggling to make heads or tails of the current learning climate.

• Link Learning to Value for the Individual and the Organization
• Connect Action and Reflection in a Continuous Cycle
• Address Learners’ Attitudes and Beliefs in Addition to Their Behaviors
• Provide Learners with a Balance of Challenge and Support
• Create Opportunities for Participants to Teach as Well as Learn
• Design and Cultivate Learning Communities Along with Learning Media

Content can be googled, but context is king. It is amidst the fast-paced demands of the workplace that performance improvement is required in pursuit of business goals. This is where individuals and teams interact and work—this is the future of workplace learning and the future home of L&D.
— Elizabeth Griep, VP, Advanced Workplace Learning, The Forum Corporation

Despite our best guesses, we’re still living in an uncertain business world. No one really knows how deeply the millennials will change a company’s learning footprint or what new technologies will be available. Geographically, different regions will also likely see cross-generational trends crop up at different times, and maybe even in completely different ways. Culturally, too, organizations will have to match learning strategies against what best fits their business models and organizational climate. And, of course, it will take time—and future hindsight—to really see how these shifts fully played out and what the outcomes were.

Even so, we can be sure that a company’s focus on learning and its capacity to flexibly adjust learning tools and techniques to meet change demands of its workforce will affect business performance, speed, and competitiveness. In what’s becoming a general truism, continuous learning creates sustainable business advantages, and successful companies constantly seek out innovative ways to cultivate learning.