Whether you’re  a CEO, a manager, or an employee, adopting a lifelong learning mindset is key to personal and  professional success. Going hand in hand with lifelong learning is organizational learning.

 The concept of organizational learning comes from the idea that employees can gain new knowledge and skills through work.  

In this article you’ll learn:

• What is organizational learning
• Why is organizational learning important
• How to promote organizational learning
• 4 tips on how to apply organizational learning in your organization

Understand the concept of organizational learning

Organizational learning can be defined as any and all forms of obtaining knowledge, training, and development within the organizational environment. 

The organizational learning theory focuses on the creation of knowledge and the use of that knowledge within an organization.  As a result, innovative solutions are created in an effective and practical way.

This learning happens specially when employees interact with one another to solve problems, so it’s  important to foster a learning culture within an organization that prizes knowledge sharing.  It can help develop both hard and soft skills – such as communication skills, team problem-solving skills, emotional intelligence, leadership traits, and much more.

It’s a great way to scale professional development and  promote a collaborative workforce envirionment.

How to promote organizational learning within your company 

It’s impossible to promote it without developing a company culture that prizes knowledge sharing and encourages employees of all levels to learn continuously through projects and mentorship.   

Here are some ideas on how to promote it! 

Encourage knowledge sharing

Develop a culture that values  interaction amongst employees, so that acquired knowledge can be shared in a positive and effective way. The exchange of experiences not only fosters learning, but also favors the creation of a collaborative environment.

Promote constructive feedback

Encourage the act of constructive feedback around projects and deliverables,  allowing teams to reflect and create an opportunty to understand and learn from each other. 

Foster Lifelong Learning 

A Lifelong Learner is an individual who never stops learning. In recent years, lifelong education has become a strategy widely discussed by CEOs around the world.  Encouraging employees at all levels to continue their education is  key to increase employee satisfaction and to create new opportunities for workforce and business growth. 

Invest in learning that happens anywhere

 COVID-19 pandemic propelled companies around the world into an inevitable future: the ever-increasing digitization of learning. As new generations of employees (Millennials and Generation Z) demand a learning path that fits their fast-paced routines, the advance of technology has emerged as an opportunity to enable learning anytime and anywhere – whether through videos, courses, digital materials, podcasts, and more.

Why is organizational learning so important?

Including organizational learning in your business  has many benefits. Some of these include increased employee satisfaction, higher customer satisfaction, lower turnover rates, increased productivity, professional development at all levels, and greater organization growth. 

Businesses that encourage and invest in learning become more competitive in the marketplace and are better able to react quickly to changes in their industry.

Measure Organizational Learning! 

If you want to measure the results of implementing organizational learning in your company, invest in benchmarking research.  Observing and comparing employee performance can be an important tool for implementing changes that will improve your operation. 

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Finding qualified professionals who are prepared to fulfill all of the necessary requirements employers seek today in the job market has become a difficult task for recruiters. 

Our traditional forms of education can no longer qualify professionals with the  new evolving skills and abilities needed to remain competitive in today’s market. The employees who seek to further develop their skills and continue learning after formal education, are the ones with better chances of securing a job and remaining employed.  In other words, becoming a professional who never stops learning is part of the solution for closing the talent skills gap.

 The Annual Global CEO Survey conducted by PWC,  which discusses the main agendas of leaders around the world,  states that today’s talent skills gap is a global topic of major concern.  In recent years, due to the increase of this competency gap, continuous learning has become even more fundamental, so that both hiring and workforce strategies become successful.  

Learn more about Lifelong Learning and how to foster it amongst your employees: 

• What is Lifelong Learning?
• The 4 Pillars of Lifelong Learning
• Why is Lifelong Learning important?
• Benefits of Lifelong Learning
• How to implement a Lifelong Learning strategy

What is Lifelong Learning?

Lifelong Learning is the ongoing pursuit of knowledge and learning throughout life, regardless of what career you have chosen to pursue or if you’ve received a traditional education.  

A Lifelong Learner is a person who chooses to build new skills or strengthen existing ones throughout their professional career and personal life.    

When Lifelong Learning is applied and promoted in the corporate environment, teams become more qualified and aligned with the organization’s overall direction and growth. Learning can happen through training, social interactions, lectures, workshops, podcasts, and educational courses. With the right tools in hands, learning opportunities become endless.

The 4 Pillars of Lifelong Learning 

According to The Lifelong Learning Council Queensland foundation, Lifelong Learning is based on 4 main pillars:

1. Take pleasure in learning: 

For knowledge to be properly absorbed and retained,  take pleasure in learning. Curiosity, applicability to real life scenarios, skills targeting, and critically analyzing what’s been learned all contribute to Lifelong Learning success. 

2. Apply what’s been learned: 

Turn learning into skilling: through training, work, projects and other forms of opportunities, put learned skills into action.   

3. Learn socially: 

Share acquired knowledge with others and receive feedback to foster learning habits in a scalable way. 

4. Take charge: 

Become proactive in the learning journey by creating personalized learning paths and a strong learning routine.  

Why is Lifelong Learning important?

With the fast changes occurring in the workplace, accelerated by the pandemic and other factors, such as the on-going creation of new types of job roles to keep up with technology, knowledge and skills acquired by traditional education cannot keep up.  

The result of all this impacts organizations and individuals directly: professionals have become unequipped skillswise to conquer the modern day job market. Because of this, there is a very large gap in the journey of education to employment. While millions of candidates with potential to work find themselves without job opportunities, on the other side, recruiters cannot find enough skilled professionals to hire.

After Covid-19, problems generated by this skills gap have become even more evident. Research conducted by the International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that 205 million jobs will be lost by 2022. At the same time, for growing businesses, the trend causes a major concern: by 2030, the demand of skilled workers outruns supply. 

This is where the importance of Lifelong Learning comes in. While our education system doesn’t go through a massive transformation to adapt to the current scenario, professionals must continuously keep learning so stay updated with market trends. 

The  skills gap doesn’t only affect candidates and hiring teams. For employees, continuous learning is essential for career advancement. For organizations, investing in training and developing their workforce, through reskilling and upskilling, is important in order to avoid talent shortages. 

According to the research “Lifelong Learning: Why do we need it?”, conducted by the University of Tehran, professionals who have greater opportunities to update and adapt their skills, are more likely to reach higher positions and win better career opportunities. 

Reskilling

Even though some professionals still believe that learning ends after earning a degree, technological changes are here to prove that this mentality is outdated. The world has changed, and the way in which people learn must follow suit.

In order to have a successful career, individuals must be aware of the constant changes that arise in a demanding job market and always look for new ways to update themselves. Reskilling means to  acquire new skills, and for this to happen, people must be prepared to embark on the continuous learning journey to increase their readiness  and competitiveness in the job market. 

Benefits of Lifelong Learning

The main focus in the Lifelong Learning concept is to keep individuals up to date in their education and interests so that they can achieve their goals and face either personal or professional challenges. 

   9 benefits of Lifelong Learning for companies and employees:

•  Qualifies workforce 
•  Keeps corporate training efficient 
•  Promotes business growth 
•  Fosters team collaboration and engagement 
•  Increases employee satisfaction 
•  Increases career and professional value

How to implement Lifelong Learning habits in your organization 

There’s no perfect formula when it comes to instilling Lifelong Learning habits throughout your organization, as each individual takes on a different approach to learning. However, there are some common steps and strategies that can guide companies who wish to develop their workforce in the right direction.  

1. Find a learning strategy that makes sense for your organization 

Learning is not the same experience for everyone. Find out which learning strategy makes the most sense for your company and employees depending on its size, industry, skills needed, how scalable, flexible or compliant learning needs to be, amongst other factors.    

2. Create learning goals 

Learning becomes more efficient when learners can see a “finish line”. So it’s important to set goals and objectives around learning journey’s to give employees a clear direction of the skills they should be learning and why they should be learning them. 

3. Be transparent 

In order for employees to create learning journeys that are aligned with their career goals, it’s important for their employers to be as transparent as possible about the company’s direction. By communicating which skills the organization needs and what future roles will be opened  employees can make more informed decisions about their learning journeys.   

Foster lifelong learning with a platform that gives your workforce the power to grow. Join Plooral. 

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As school systems and teachers were forced to adhere to a remote learning model, this new experience gained traction and, depending on the specific scenario, brought positive results. Consequently, many key decision-makers in this space have considered implementing a remote learning hybrid model into their school systems. 

However, remote Learning is not the only change in our education system that resulted from the pandemic, and that is here to stay in the post-pandemic world. The mass implementation of technology in education, the autonomy to learn independently online, creating your learning paths, and personalizing your individual learning goals, is a reality that we should start getting used to in the next five years. 

How will our learning experiences be impacted in the post-pandemic world?  

Skill-building courses focused on career paths.  

With a focus on building skills that land students an opportunity in the job market, courses and classes are tailored to specific professional goals. Education becomes a true catalyst for employment in the digital age.  

Lifelong Learning as a new approach to “life.”

Traditional learning experiences have a beginning, middle, and end. A student could begin an MBA and finish it in under two years to apply that learned knowledge into securing a job. Lifelong Learning is a new concept and buzzword gaining popularity. By definition, a lifelong learner never ceases to learn and evolve their skills. This concept combines continuous Learning for personal and professional development. 

Artificial Intelligence 

In this new world of Learning, educational tools will be working hand in hand with Artificial Intelligence to bring increasingly personalized and individualized experiences to students. According to the World Economic Forum, our education will be based on four main pillars: virtual teaching, learning assessments, matching opportunities for internships and jobs, and peer/expert mentoring. 

More autonomy for students

Students will become the protagonists of their learning journey. With remote Learning, teacher’s become educational mediators and develop a new role based on content curation and support. Still, it’s up to students to decide what exactly they want to learn.  

How can you implement these changes into your employee development and recruitment processes?

All these new changes in education will also impact how companies recruit, reskill, qualify and develop their potential candidates and employees. Here are some quick tips on how to ride this new wave of learning transformation and implement these changes to your company for the benefit of your employees and candidates: 

Make a current diagnosis of your company’s L&D efforts: 

It’s essential to understand what your company does to train and develop its employees and if these processes are aligned with the new learning trends that are beginning to appear.  

Some questions to answer to diagnose your internal L&D efforts: Do you offer a career path development program to your employees?

• How do your employees build new skills in their careers? Independently or through your company? 

• Do you qualify candidates for potential job opportunities through external company courses?  

• Do you track, manage and analyze your company’s intellectual capital (aka employee skills)? 

• What experience do you offer your employees if they’d like to switch career paths within your company? 

• How personalized are your company L&D efforts to employees/teams? 

Define your goals

What do you aim to achieve with the changes that you have identified? Begin by creating short, medium, and long-term goals with possible results and metrics so that you can keep yourself accountable. 

Here are some long term goals to think about: 

• Do you want to improve internal employee mobility?

• Do you need to attract more qualified candidates to your positions? 

• Do you want to increase employee retention?

D- o you need to invest in skills-data management?  

Engage with your team

Communicate with key leaders and educate them about the importance of implementing L&D strategies in your company. Working side by side with managers to create clear goals is essential, also give them the resources to identify what is working and what is not. Managers should work directly with team members to develop a personalized learning and development plan based on each employee’s professional goals and aspirations. 

 Additionally,  speak to your recruiting or HR team to work hand in hand with them and understand their hiring needs. Can roles quickly be filled by internal mobility, or should external hires fill them? It’s essential to understand the types of skills needed for open positions in your company and if you can quickly identify these skills internally or recruit externally. 

In the post-pandemic world 

Remote Learning, access to technology, and the rise of innovation in educational tools are catalysts to the abrupt transformation we witness in learning experiences worldwide. The life-long learning concept and the autonomy students now have to develop their learning paths is a trend that is here to stay and disrupt education and the future of work. 

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