Alex's L&D Thoughts: Learning Absolutely Is a Skill That Can Be Improved

A popular Harvard Business Review article from 2018 is making the rounds again on LinkedIn: Learning Is a Learned Behavior. Here’s How to Get Better at It. Its author makes the point that learning isn't about smarts, it's about strategy. It's how you learn that matters, and everyone can learn to get better at how they learn.

What I like about that frame is that it positions learning as a process and as as skill that can be improved:

A growing body of research is making it clear that learners are made, not born. Through the deliberate use of practice and dedicated strategies to improve our ability to learn, we can all develop expertise faster and more effectively. In short, we can all get better at getting better.

This is indeed the right way to think about learning, be that academic learning, personal learning, or professional learning and development. It makes sense that the better you get at learning, the more and more deeply you'll learn. If you have a solid toolset and process for how to learn, you'll get much more out of what you do learn.

A few of the L&D leaders I've spoken to have a background in adult learning. One of them started his career in training before his role evolved over many years to encompass organizational development, talent development, leadership development, culture, and D&I. With his background, it's probably easier to deploy his knowledge of how people learn to the work of developing the company's employees along the axes that matter to the business.

For example, consider the following questions:

• which learning programs do we need?
• how should we design those programs?
• what do our learners need to experience as they go through these learning programs?
• what are our organizational priorities around revenue, retention, talent development, etc?
• assuming our L&D programs are well-designed and well-attended, how will our learning programs tie to these priorities?

What I'm hearing is that having clear answers to these questions makes it likelier that an L&D team will achieve its mission, without a disconnect between learning design and learning operations—and with less chance of missing the mark on tying learning outcomes to clear business outcomes.

But the above article makes me think of one additional question that should be asked:

• how can we improve our learners' ability to learn what we've designed for them?

The idea here is that you can play an active role not only in designing and delivering effective L&D programs but also in equipping your learners with strategies (and tools) for learning more effectively. It's the difference between "We've created great programs and trainings" and "We've helped our people develop skills and behaviors that help them get the most out of our programs and trainings".

Learning is a skill, and it's one that everyone, adult learners included, can improve. By incorporating this fact into your work and optimizing both what (and why) they learn and how they learn, you'll make strides in how effective your learning programs—and your employees—become.

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Enjoyed this? Here's the next one: Alex's L&D Thoughts: The Excitement of Building L&D Teams from Scratch.