Design Thinking and Multi-Generational Learners

The financial industry (including banking, credit unions, credit card companies and others) has a relatively high rate of employee turnover. Rates as high as 18.6% have been reported by CompData in a 2015 report, giving it one of the highest rates of new hires (just behind healthcare). 

How can trainers appeal to learners who may range in age from their mid 20s to early 60s? One solution is to create a flexible, customized approach to learning for new hires keyed to each generational demographic. 

Generational Learning

First, we need to know what works with each demographic we need to find out what motivates learners, from Baby Boomers to Generation X to Millennials, with "boomer" hiring waning as they reach retirement age.

Each generational cohort has its own preferences. The newest, Gen-Z, is just entering the job market as college graduates and adds yet another set of preferences. For this article, we’ll center on just those already in the marketplace. 

I have conducted a number of assessments in the financial industry over the past decade and they have revealed some potential answers to the questions, “How does the current curriculum design effectively address the needs of a generationally-diverse learning environment?”, and, “What changes to a learning program are required to make it more effective for multi-generational learners?” 

Learning preferences are influenced by a number of factors during their formative years including exposure to technologies, expectations set in the classroom, peer norms, familial settings, and so on. These preferences impact how learners respond to in training sessions. But our first job is how to attract new hires, especially the Gen-Xers and maturing Millennial population of available employees. We do that using the same technology they use every day.

From various sources, here is a recent mindmap including descriptors of each cohort. 

Technology has changed the communication preferences and expectations of all generations of workers. Take social networking tools and mobile apps. Baby Boomers have embraced Facebook and YouTube even as their own parents have taken to email. Gen-X made popular Myspace, Friendster and Reddit, but it is the Millennials who have taken to WhatsApp, Tumblr, Snapchat and Instagram. These apps dramatically changed the way individuals communicate. Although e-mail and collaboration software have become the norm in many offices, social media technologies and mobile apps are quickly becoming a preferred tool for informal office networking.

Where Gen-Xers are the “Internet generation,” Millennials are really the “app generation” and expect to work in an environment that reflects their mobile, real-time work environment. They have high expectations on employers to match the technology they grew up with and are much more willing to change jobs and companies if employers do not embrace that technology. Development and use of secure office-friendly peer-to-peer apps would greatly appeal to Millennials.

Organizations need to recognize that to attract and retain Gen-Xers and Millennials they need to eliminate the dissatisfaction factors. These include hierarchical and corporate bottlenecks, barriers to internal communications and lack of portable skills training that they can use in their next job. 

Methods

The data gathering techniques for these studies focused on Contextual Inquiry. Contextual Inquiry is a semi-structured interview method to obtain information about the context of use. Users are first asked a set of standard questions and then observed and questioned while they work in their own environments. I’ve applied this methodology to gain greater insights into the curriculum and courses delivered to staff through learning management systems (LMS) and other technology-facilitated training. 

Because users are interviewed in their own environments, the reliability of data on preferences is generally very high. Contextual inquiry is based on a set of principles that allow it to be molded to different situations. This technique is one of several methods used during the analysis phase of the design thinking process and is well suited to garnering realistic and insightful information about work practices.

According to the User Experience Professionals’ Association website, the four principles of contextual inquiry are:

Focus - Plan for the inquiry based on a clear understanding of your purpose.

Context - Go to the client's workplace and watch them do their own work.

Partnership - Talk to customers about their work and engage them in uncovering unarticulated aspects of work.

Interpretation - Develop a shared understanding with the customer about the aspects of work that matter.

After the contextual inquiry the findings were used to establishing the performance-based learning objectives and preferences for learning as the design thinking process moves forward. 

During this discovery phase, always keep in mind the advice of design thinking guru Tim Brown of IDEO to “ translate observations into insights and insights into products and services that will improve lives.” 

Key Findings

These employees faced a range of issues needing to be addressed in training, including customers expressing emotional stress, confounding or confusing stories, extreme impatience and a range of other challenges. The findings, generalized here, suggest how learning objectives might be designed to better support the values of new hires.

1. Recruiting though smart tools

One standout finding was to reach out to potential applicants using the same tools that will be used during training and their daily experiences on the job. Job listers should use tools that match the networking modes preferred by Millennial and Gen-Xer job seekers. 

For example, Internet-based job search tools such as Glassdoor make reported salaries, company ratings and reviews of employers available to job seekers. Those leaving the firm and looking elsewhere are encouraged to rate their current employers and their CEOs, contribute pro/con reviews of the job and offer advice to management. If former employees can report that their firm provides a learning environment allowing them to excel at their job, this would be a positive enticement for Gen-X and Millennial job seekers to apply.

2. Give the big picture

New hires typically want to know the reasons behind a particular procedure or set of learning objectives. It is not enough to just tell them what they need to know. Let them know the reasoning behind establishing those objectives. One of the respondents described this tendency as a personal “need to know” about why policies are the way they are. 

Learning objectives should include a context for the tasks or processes the learner needs to accomplish. This leads to learning objectives that state the rationale behind the objectives and gives guidance to the learners, empowering them by knowing the larger context. 

Knowing the “big picture” allows them to understand the role of those managing their positions and the motivations of the business unit. Such understanding is a key to Kirkpatrick’s levels of evaluation pertaining to supporting business unit productivity and corporate ROI. 

The recommendation is that learning objectives be couched in a manner that demonstrates how they relate to the overall goals of their department and the company. 

3. State objectives as activities

Another finding was related to chunking the job into small tasks, which is often recommended by human computer interface studies. Learners are asked to “define,” “describe,” or “recognize” tasks, such as, “define an account transaction”. 

Activities, rather than tasks, are a unit of design objective preferred by design author Donald Norman. Norman argues that we naturally aggregate tasks into activities. Activities are larger groupings of related tasks crossing longer spans of time. For example, the activity “get caught up on the day's correspondence” which means reading email, responding, checking calendars, and other related tasks rather than just focusing upon a discrete task. Norman eschews human-centered design’s sole focus on task in favor of activity-centered design. In several of his writings he expresses that it better represents the human experience.

It is true that verbs like define or describe occupy one level of knowledge in the cognitive domain (intellectual capabilities) of Bloom’s Taxonomy. However, they reside at the lowest level, that of mere knowledge. In today’s environment “knowing” is a foundation for more integrated behaviors described with active verbs such as comprehension, application and, the highest level, evaluation. It is the more integrated activities that require learners to generalize, demonstrate, plan and assess activities. Those behaviors require judgement or evaluation of a situation using criteria suited to synthesizing solutions for customers.

Millennials respond better to human experience they consider relevant. By personalizing the outcome it provides a greater impact. The use of personas and scenarios is advised during training so that a relatable potential outcome told through a story, a character and a journey making outcomes more tangible.

The recommendation is to create learning objectives that state specifically how the learning material creates change and what the outcome will be in more relatable human terms.

4. Create a flexible user experience

When content proceeds too slowly for some users it may be beneficial to provide a speed control or other functionality for customizing content flow. Learners (especially Millennials) are used to making efficient use of their time and are annoyed when content slows them down. Being able to speed up delivery of e-learning content is one solution.

Presentation of remedial content also annoys the faster learners. This may be avoided by giving users the ability to skip content if they can test out of it. However, if that is not possible it is better to restrict the ability to skip content to ancillary remedial modules such as basic computer skills until you are sure of the skill level of the learner. 

The recommendation is to provide functional control elements familiar to users and the option to speed up or skip suitable content.

5. Make experiences more visually interesting

Millennial learners in particular benefit from graphical aids. Such aids may be offered as a branch to visual learners, where those who prefer written content could opt out. 

Phone banking may have multiple branching solutions based upon the responses of customers. Making these in-depth branching paths easier to follow is a high priority. Interactive graphical elements common to UX design can give additional visual clues to make those pathways more obvious. Rollover state buttons, graying out of non-active options and so on are just a few. Reducing text to that which is immediately relevant and minimal can also make branching less overwhelming. 

The recommendation is to making multiple branching interactions more visible and allow users opportunity to explore branches several times.

6. Establish Communities of Practice

Communities of practice CoPs are groups of people who share a common concern, problem, mandate, or sense of purpose. CoPs encourage transfer of informal knowledge and new hires often learn important lessons from their co-workers. New hires often have more affinity with their co-workers than with their organizations, at least until they understand better their place within the organization. This is especially true for the generation of knowledge workers with the least work experience.

Communities of Practice were explored during assessments. Both Millennial and Gen-X learners were found to benefit from having a place to both formally and informally discuss training acquired through e-learning and on-the-job mentoring. Both cohorts favorably rated hybrid training situations where knowledgable instructors were available, peer interaction was allowed, access to experienced bankers was given, modeling the behavior of experts was encouraged and where role playing and live practice were part of the curriculum.

In contrast, lower favorability ratings were given when learners encountered low levels of interactivity, high amounts of content, unavoidable redundancy and repetition of content, remedial content, unrealistic simulations, inflexible delivery of content, formal writing style and an emphasis on memorization rather than situational learning.

The recommendation is to create a place to informally discuss lessons learned with more senior hires possessing insights and knowledge about the customers.

________

A sixty-day evaluation validated earlier data analysis of the preferences of Gen-X and Millennial cohorts. Millennial and Gen-X learners were more likely to internalize training when it provided a mix of learning that empowers, presents realistic situations and provides a meaningful connection to the bigger picture.

“Not only is informal learning more personal, contextually relevant, memorable, and applicable in business settings, it also leverages learners’ versatility in adapting to future conditions and establishing greater connectivity within these settings.” (Cross, 2003)

?2018 Gregory Daigle