If you’ve read our previous posts, you know that we believe the need for learning to be at an historic high. The knowledge and skill requirements of available jobs far exceed the collective talent of the jobless and underemployed. And this is happening alongside “The Great Resignation,” where the most-cited reason people give for leaving their job is “lack of career development and advancement.” Meanwhile, course development costs have soared, slowing the creation and delivery of structured learning. We need options.
And at this pivotal moment, learning must have a solid ROI. Our conceptual proposal, the social learning sandbox (SLS), is built upon the insights of Albert Bandura who found that an individual's knowledge acquisition can be directly related to observing others within the context of social interactions, experiences, and outside media influences. An SLS produces a market-leading relative ROI by delivering learning alongside work production and employee talent identification. SLS designs may even enable reductions in required management.
There’s another aspect of SLS that bears discussion: motivation. Learners must be motivated to learn or they must be driven to do a task that begets learning or its a non-starter.
The ARCS model of instructional design was born out of John Keller’s desire to boost the motivation of learners. His structure sprang from Tolman's and Lewin's expectancy-value theory which posits that people are motivated to learn when value is perceived from the learning and there is expectation for success.
By embedding learning into a workflow, its value is self-evident. And in an SLS, the activity may not even be perceived primarily as learning. The challenge may be in supporting learners’ expectation of success. The winner-take-all aspect is difficult to overcome when an SLS is designed around production of an artifact or selection of an individual.
This is why we recommend that the SLS concept not be used here and there, but that it be integrated in all processes where it is feasible. If a broad range of activities are offered, participants will more readily find arenas wherein they expect to succeed. (We will discuss in future posts how to design an SLS to help participants find challenges which inspire confidence of success.)
When considering motivation in the modern workplace, we are far more attuned to the need for “carrot” approaches than “stick” ones. This is among the most positive developments of our time. At the start of the Industrial Age, the converse was true. Motivation was primarily about the stick.
Sadly, to think we have completely left that world behind may be optimistic. Massive layoffs have already started. Most U.S. CEOs (91%) believe we’re headed toward a recession, based on a recent KPMG survey of 1,325 CEOs. Fifty-one percent of them say they’re preparing for that downturn by reducing headcount.
Economic slowdowns justify layoffs. Costs must be reduced. Many jobs will be lost. And this comes at a time when AI and robotics are making startling breakthroughs. By the time the economy comes back to life, we may see many more job functions efficiently performed by low-cost automation. Many of the jobs lost in the weeks ahead may never return. What will this mean for L&D? Please offer your comments.