Explain in a few sentences the type of learner today's knowledge worker needs to be, giving reasons for this proposition.

[4 Objectives / 4 Pages]

Human Learning Model

Professionals need to be self-directed learners
with a good social system support.

Most professionals are others-directed learners in poor social system support. Result ? Little improvement in their work competencies as the years go by.

You cannot outsource your critical thinking to someone or something else.

You cannot let another person do the brainwork for you. Not your consultant; not your manager; not your text book to give you a standard answer; not your inert piece of equipment called a computer or a standard FAQ database.

YOU need to analyse incoming information and make it meaningful to you for you to use. YOU make sense of it. Most data you get is not configured to your real world, your 'context.' YOU have to CONFIGURE IT. You have to configure external data/code to your own 'operating system.' Your own mind operating system has taken decades of societal and individual learning to form. This is the 'social constructionist' school of human learning that is favoured today.

When you place personal, subjective meaning
to the information then you have "made sense" of it.
You have transformed information into .....KNOWLEDGE.

Knowledge is MEANINGFUL information. Go to Knowledge Vs Information tutorial for fuller explanation.

For instance, how do you train for new attitudes and skills in Safety ?
How do staff acquire high levels of safety competency if this is a key performance indicator ?

Does the traditional half-day workshop and performance measurement procedures produce the desired results ? Trainers and managers would largely confess these learning 'events' have proven inadequate on their own.

Every staff member must personally convert company protocols into personal skills. It doesn't happen with a half-day Safety Protocols workshop.

IT TAKES TIME FOR A PERSON TO ASSIMILATE NEW DATA AND CONCEPTS INTO NEW ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOURS.

It takes time in a supportive social system to make personal sense of complex topics. Would you agree ?

For a more academic explanation to how we learn complex concepts like safety,
view here.

So professionals need to be primarily "self-directed learners"... not teacher-centred, not my-manager-centred, not sports-coach-centred but self-directed- centred learners. You more than anyone else knows what is best for you to perform well in your endeavour. Yes ? If not, then you have outsourced your thinking to someone else... who does not know your working environment nearly as well as you. True ?

So professionals also need a "supportive social system." Without it, even high self-directed knowledge workers struggle to assimilate new teaching into new skills.

Some practical exercises are as follows.

   Exercise 1. The Book.
   Look at your bookshelf - textbooks,
   business books, magasines.   You have read parts of    them.

   Now summarise five insights you gained from each    of  them…. without picking up the book or article and
   reminding yourself. Write your insights down then
   return to this page. Your level of self-directed learning    can be shown by how well you can demonstrate this exercise.

Finished ?

Can you honestly say that you have learned five things from each of those books ? Well... what about your most recent book ?

Some typical responses I seem to get are "Aaaah, No" or "It was so long ago... I can't." In other words, you spent somewhere between three to ten hours in a book and you cannot spell out five things the book emphasised to you ? ! ! !

Is that efficient use of your time ?

   So.... did you learn anything ?

            No... you didn't.

You were reading 50 pages of information but you never transformed it into personal, meaningful useable information - knowledge.

You wasted ten hours of your time by not analysing information that you could apply to your context. You did not learn anything.

Your behaviour remained.... unchanged.
You read but you did not study.
You were entertaining yourself.
You were not educating yourself.

Most corporate training ends up as wasted. Research shows less than 10% of any training sticks after one year of being exposed to it.

I have seen dozens of sales people lavished with sophisticated, expensive two day sales training programs not even showing a rudimentary set of these new behaviours back in their sales territory. "The training didn't stick."All training must be accompanied by on-the-job learning to make the new skill awareness transform into new behaviours. Information transformation happens primarily in your real world..... IMPROVISATIONAL learning... in your social setting...on-the-job. But it only happens if you are critically reflective of your actions... that you are taking dozens of "time-outs", "debriefs", "post-mortems", "wrap-ups"

Humans learn by improvising generic information through self-directed learning given the time and motivation.

Exercise 2. The Swing.
What percentage of a professional sports person's time is spent practising/reflecting versus performing ?

Humans develop high competency in sport or business only when they constantly engage their analytical faculties. Sports players debrief themselves virtually after every shot they make... after every 'set' of psychomotor activities ! They can immediately see the outcomes of their efforts. They make hundreds of shots in a session.

Business people ?

Business people, from customer service reps to marketing managers rarely properly debrief themselves even once a month. Often they are into activity mode - 'doing' and ticking off To- Do lists - rather than complement it with profound thinking and learning. They don't take a critical stocktake of their skills which the knowledge worker is paid for. But athletes do every day. Who is the more professional ?

The sporting analogy does break down in one part. Business people often lack the immediate environmental feedback on their efforts. A golf ball is tangible and obvious where it goes when the golfer hits it. Not nearly as clear are the outcomes to the many duties such as report writing, customer follow-ups etc., we carry out every day in business. Process measurements have been hard to identify. Nevertheless, today's current workplace often disregards a healthy reflection on one's professional practice.

Proactive, structured, improvisational learning is needed.

So much for books and work duties. What about classroom instruction ?

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