The importance of learning in the workplace

Pic­ture a typ­i­cal home office: there is a desk next to a win­dow with a lap­top on it, a steam­ing cup of cof­fee, a print­er, a chair, a rub­bish bin and maybe a notepad or plant. Now imag­ine this pic­ture of a home office is actu­al­ly an image on a screen in front of you and you have 45 sec­onds to iden­ti­fy the poten­tial secu­ri­ty risks of this set­ting. 

You click on the bin and a voiceover says: “One man’s trash, is anoth­er man’s trea­sure. Crim­i­nals love old bank state­ments, util­i­ty bills, per­son­al data; it’s all a crim­i­nal needs to steal your ID. This trea­sure in your trash is also use­ful to social­ly engi­neer your trust; a scam­mer can sound legit­i­mate if they have a lit­tle of your accu­rate per­son­al infor­ma­tion.” 

Next you click on the win­dow. “Imag­ine acci­den­tal­ly talk­ing about an unre­leased prod­uct or sen­si­tive cus­tomer infor­ma­tion with the win­dow wide open,” says the voiceover, which goes on to out­line the risks involved with each object you have select­ed.

This is a course devised by Vivi­da, a tech com­pa­ny that cre­ates immer­sive learn­ing expe­ri­ences for cor­po­rate train­ing in areas includ­ing cyber­se­cu­ri­ty, and diver­si­ty and inclu­sion for com­pa­nies includ­ing Sky and Lloyds Bank­ing Group.

Sime­on Quar­rie, the company’s founder and chief exec­u­tive, grew up in the 1980s and says he strug­gled with the tra­di­tion­al class­room envi­ron­ment of work­sheets and copy­ing off the black­board. “It did­n’t res­onate with me,” he recalls. His par­ents were wor­ried, he was wor­ried. “But then I realised that when the learn­ing involved cre­ativ­i­ty, sto­ry­telling and inter­ac­tiv­i­ty, then I got it.” 

This expe­ri­ence inspired him to set up Vivi­da. He began with video learn­ing, but soon dis­cov­ered vir­tu­al real­i­ty and immer­sive envi­ron­ments. “We get to build an envi­ron­ment that aids the learn­ing and places peo­ple direct­ly with­in that envi­ron­ment,” says Quar­rie. In these cours­es, par­tic­i­pants become cyber-dig­i­tal foren­sic experts. They get to “exam­ine the evi­dence from a past crim­i­nal case and under­stand how crim­i­nals attempt to scam you and your col­leagues”, he says. 

Quar­rie argues that this approach changes how we learn, includ­ing our pos­ture. Instead of lean­ing back while watch­ing a video, par­tic­i­pants lean for­ward and engage with the dig­i­tal sce­nario. They review crim­i­nal inter­view tapes, con­sid­er the evi­dence and then analyse what they have learnt. 

“We’re now com­pet­ing with oth­er devices, dif­fer­ent dis­trac­tions,” he says. “The envi­ron­ment that we learn in is no longer the care­ful­ly con­trolled cor­po­rate envi­ron­ment.” It is there­fore cru­cial to pro­vide learn­ing expe­ri­ences that are engag­ing.

New digital learning environment

In the past, employ­ees were encour­aged to learn new skills by going on a spe­cif­ic train­ing course. Today, con­tin­u­ous learn­ing is an inte­gral part of people’s work­ing lives; whether they’re employed or self-employed, peo­ple learn new skills from online cours­es and YouTube and Tik­Tok videos, for exam­ple.

So, what gets clas­si­fied as learn­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly in a dig­i­tal world? Glob­al human resources ana­lyst Josh Bersin says: “Any form of dig­i­tal con­tent is a form of learn­ing. It could be doc­u­ments, emails, record­ed con­ver­sa­tions, record­ed meet­ings, videos. That’s why cap­tur­ing dig­i­tal con­tent is so valu­able because some­times you’ll be in a staff meet­ing and some­body will say some­thing and every­body will go, wow, I did­n’t know that; all of a sud­den you’ve cre­at­ed a live learn­ing expe­ri­ence.” 

He adds that “a lot of the learn­ing that’s going on in busi­ness right now is actu­al­ly being devel­oped by employ­ee groups for each oth­er, with­out train­ing peo­ple being involved”. 

What’s more, accord­ing to research by LinkedIn, 75 per cent of learn­ing and devel­op­ment pro­fes­sion­als say com­mu­ni­ty-based learn­ing is now more impor­tant to their busi­ness­es than before the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic hit and 94 per cent agree teams that learn togeth­er are ulti­mate­ly more suc­cess­ful. A third of busi­ness lead­ers say reskilling and upskilling employ­ees is a top pri­or­i­ty for 2021.

Com­ment­ing on the impact the pan­dem­ic has had, Janine Cham­ber­lin, senior direc­tor at LinkedIn, says: “I think it has lit a fire under dig­i­tal learn­ing, because the envi­ron­ment that com­pa­nies are oper­at­ing in is chang­ing so quick­ly right now. To make sure com­pa­nies can keep up with that, their employ­ees need to con­tin­u­ous­ly build new skills to get ahead of what’s com­ing next.”

Teaching soft and hard skills

Cham­ber­lin points out that com­pa­nies are not just look­ing for peo­ple to learn hard skills, like learn­ing to code, they are also look­ing for them to devel­op their emo­tion­al intel­li­gence and improve inclu­sion in their busi­ness. 

When it comes to the for­mer, the most pop­u­lar cours­es on LinkedIn Learn­ing over the past year have includ­ed learn­ing Python com­put­er pro­gram­ming lan­guage, train­ing in Excel and the foun­da­tions of online mar­ket­ing. Pop­u­lar soft skill cours­es have includ­ed time man­age­ment, strate­gic think­ing, com­mu­ni­cat­ing with con­fi­dence and devel­op­ing emo­tion­al intel­li­gence. Over­all, the plat­form, which offers 16,700 cours­es in sev­en lan­guages, has seen the hours peo­ple spend on its cours­es dou­ble over the past year.

Research has shown that the most suc­cess­ful dig­i­tal learn­ing com­bines var­i­ous inter­ac­tive ele­ments. When peo­ple watch a video, for exam­ple, hav­ing a struc­tured dis­cus­sion led by an instruc­tor after­wards with their col­leagues can be help­ful. It improves people’s mem­o­ry of the con­tent by 25 per cent, accord­ing to a 2018 study led by Dr Kana Okano, a cog­ni­tive sci­en­tist at Tufts Uni­ver­si­ty in Mass­a­chu­setts.

It is clear com­pa­nies that fos­ter a cul­ture of learn­ing are more like­ly to suc­ceed and adapt to future chal­lenges. “A clear sign of a dys­func­tion­al com­pa­ny is when peo­ple say they don’t have enough time for learn­ing,” says Bersin. 

He argues that man­agers need to give peo­ple time to reflect dur­ing meet­ings, encour­age peo­ple to take time to learn how to be bet­ter at their job, send them on cours­es as well as buy­ing learn­ing con­tent, includ­ing books, and con­nect peo­ple so they can learn from each oth­er. Bersin adds: “Com­pa­nies have to realise that giv­ing peo­ple unsched­uled time is a huge pro­duc­tiv­i­ty improve­ment because it gives them a chance to learn.”