A guide to Agile Learning and how it helps in better Training and Development

Agile Coach in Transforming Your Agile Methods

Agile Learning is the buzzword that is doing the rounds in many industries, especially the technology industries. It has become an important tool for industry leaders to rapidly evolve their teams and businesses to the markets. Organizations have successfully transformed their businesses using agile learning to overcome barriers in response to changes in technology, economic conditions, market demand, and other unforeseen situations such as the latest Pandemic.

Agile learning, therefore, is not just a process but has become a culture that shows the focus of an organization toward speed, flexibility, and responsiveness to market demands.

360 Learning defines Agile learning as an “approach to content development that focuses on speed, flexibility, and collaboration implementing continuous feedback loops to regularly iterate on course creation and create highly synergic working environments.” Among all the definitions found on Agile Learning, this one seems to cover all the details of the learning process.

Agile is a well-known project management methodology for developing software as an iterative process within a smaller timeline to produce a minimum viable product. This helps in getting immediate feedback on the implementation process allowing realignment and efficient timeframes for improvements and delivery of the final product.

An Agile approach to training and learning has a similar practice where learning is designed in a more iterative way, with activities occurring over recurring sprints. These sprints facilitate quick detection of any issues and hence, immediate remediation actions can achieve desired quality sooner than later. Agile also provides the flexibility to shift directions whenever the business direction changes. Agile learning design is also a collaborative process that needs scrums, and stand-ups just as in Agile Methodology coordination and transparency between the stakeholders.

How Agile can help in better training and development

1. Flexibility and Adaptability: Agile learning allows swift response to changing markets and trends which is a very important skill to develop for success and long-term survival in our constantly changing world.
2. Rapid Re-skilling or Upskilling: Whenever an organization transforms its technology, or during agile development processes Agile learning can enable the team to be upgraded to the desired demands quickly by launching learning programs to support their upskilling.
3. Increased Collaboration: Agile learning improves cross-functional information sharing among the project teams to enhance collaboration within the organizational silos and helps in improving communication channels within the departments.
4. Cost-Efficient: Since the learning is collaborative and rapidly improving over a limited timeframe, there is very less cost to run the programs making it efficient for implementation and pricing.
5. Customer-Centric Learning: Training can be developed based on the client or customer or the product that needs to be learned and thus, agile learning can be very specific to meet the customer's expectations.
6. Overall Productivity: With agile, flexible, quicker, and collaborative learning, teams not only benefit from knowledge retention but also get many opportunities to develop novel solutions or innovative approaches, improving on overall productivity and agility across the organization.
7. Risk Management: With Agile learning,?risks can be identified sooner and the management opportunities can help in reducing the time taken in resolving issues making it a very good design for risk management.?

Organizations have to re-think the way learning has been designed and implemented and adopt agile models that best fit their company goals and direction. Changing the learning culture from traditional to agile may take time and needs a flexible and carefully designed agile learning module that can replace the older practices one at a time.

There might be unforeseen blocks or boons that might need attention as one experiment and treads on this agile path. However, when done right, Agile learning can be a huge stepping stone toward the transformational journey of any organization and it can soon be the most prevalent training and development methodology in the industry.