Competence and learning strategy

OK... that sounds interesting. Can I ask a bit more detail, what is the purpose of your learning academy with respect to providing value to the organisation? I am asking because the danger in such situations has been that you are tasked with something, but we have to be clear as to the problem to be solved by doing that.

Thanks for reply, John.
The goal is that competence development and learning efforts are carried out systematically and strategically with high relevance for both organization and individual. Specifically, this must be done by developing a competence and learning strategy that can ensure more targeted skills development opportunities for all employees.
In addition, overview, coordination and implementation of education, development and learning must be ensured in order to strengthen the learning environments.

By forming an Academy for Learning, new and relevant methods of learning and development must be developed and disseminated and ensure coordination of efforts. It is the ambition that the Academy should have a dynamic form that allows both a range of permanent development and learning activities to be offered, as well as to be able to accommodate emerging needs and to develop efforts to meet these continuously.

Anders, thanks for your reply.
In my humble experience, looking at this from a traditional approach, the design would be to create an Academy that is self contained, has a leader, and its own purpose and ways of working. There will be a schedule for who goes on what development courses, and the courses will be accredited. The measures would be number of people or courses run.
In the new rebel management approach, the question of the purpose must align and the academy must be there to support the business directly, So go into the business and ask those who will need its services about their work and value that then need. Not in a survey, visit, ask, and enquire of their staff.
Then looking at the ownership and leadership, the ownership of development must be retained by the person needing it. So the path of development will be individually and its plan starts with that individual.
The courses will be developed around those needs and will almost certainly be developed with real workplace issues to be resolves as exercises.
The measure of success could be: the proven value added to the people in the business?
As there is little space in a comment, all I am doing is reeling off what is in my head in a very direct way, sorry for that.

This is excellent. I really appreciate your comment. Much appreciated!
And yes, ownership and leadership are key.

Hey Anders - sounds like a very interesting task you have in front of you :-)

I think the Telenor 40hour challenge is very interesting. I like the fact that it is strategically anchored by the CEO and by the fact that Telenor does not decide what to learn. Instead it is the employees that chooses subjects of interested and therefore is much more motivated and possibly more relevant for their day-to-day tasks.

Personally I struggle to understand learning academies in the traditional form. I strongly believe in learning and development, but I think it can be executed much better. My great inspiration is Sugata Mitra - here is a TEDTalk https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud Imagine if we can take the same three principles and apply them in our business!

Best,

Morten

Really appreciate your comment, Morten.
I will definitely have to look into the Telenor-case. The same goes for the TED-talk.
And yes, what is a learning academy? Whatever it was, it will have to be revolutionised something employees ‘want to’ rather than ‘need to’.

Do you have some more information on this available? Maybe some articles on this? Curious to learn more.

Cool, will check it out!

Hi Anders
very interesting task you have. - "Academy of Learning" - will be the key leaver for any company striving for success. One reason is the complexity of operation from globalization and digitalization, another reason is the ability to organise in a way that people want to work for you :-)
A question that comes to mind is - what is learning in your context?
It sounds like "training" - that is a department keeping track of what courses people are attending and maybe even having KPIs controlling / monitoring this - could be you have a bonus connected to number of people trained .... - ironic of cause :-)
In september 2019 Harvard Business Review published an article with the title "It’s Time for a C-Level Role Dedicated to Reskilling Workers"
link is here -> https://hbr.org/2019/09/its-time-for-a-c-level-role-dedicated-to-reskilling-workers

To me this is misunderstanding the term "learning". This is how we have always been responding to the need for "learning" - thinking that it is all about training people - it is not.

If - learning - is important to you and your organisation - training can and will be a means to it, but there is a lot more to it. Learning takes place in may ways. Do you want to develop school like practise learning facilities to train people or are you looking for more "on the job" type of learning moments?? - in any case it is all connected to the culture and leadership of the company.
If you have been given a task of building a "Academy of Learning" you need to consider not only the training catalogue but also the culture - how the leaders in the company facilitates opportunities for learning - how the leaders are learning etc. - is there a culture of openness, having time to reflect on "what just happened", "time-out" or "feed back" exercises? this could be a part of having a learning culture.

I would love to hear how your efforts are coming along and what kind of "department" you manage to create.

Happy learning
Henning

I'm connected to the people responsible for the 40hour Challenge in Denmark. If you want me to connect feel free to email me at mda@acadal.com

Thanks for the awesome comment, Henning.
I tend to define learning as either acquisition of skills, knowledge and attitudes, and/or modification of behavior - the latter being my favourite.
But yes, I must also admit that the organization now has a somewhat understanding of learning being training - as you define. But hopefully the two will mix, as I believe both can be beneficial. We need to both exploit and explore to succeed. And it that relation I always try to remember the 70-20-10-rule.
I will definitely have to look into the hbr-article. Thanks!
And yes, culture is so keen. With the words of Peter Senge, I have to build a learning organization. An organization that sees learning in everything. So coming back to my definition of learning, it must be a culture that changes behavior.