Learning cultures in practice.

On my first day on the job as a learning and development manager, I tried to understand what a learning and development manager should do! I knew that my job was now to support individuals to do their job in the best way possible - but the question as to how I would achieve this did not click as fast as one would have hoped.

I met with many of my stakeholders hoping I would get very tangible and practical answers, asking them the question 'but what do you need from Learning & Development?', many did give me those tangible answers I was after, but one manager, in particular, said "I think that learning is really all about culture and for learning to be successful then it must be ingrained in our way of doing things"

Fast forward to today, 3 years after my journey in L&D began, this statement does really ring true, as the links between learning cultures and organizational success become evident. A learning culture is when an organization puts a strong emphasis on encouraging its members to understand its values, practices, beliefs, skill sets, and conventions. This enables employees to gain the knowledge and abilities needed to perform at their best.

Quoting directly from the CIPD, learning isn’t the norm in every organization.?Fewer than half of UK employees believe their job offers good opportunities to develop their skills, while?case study research suggests?learning provision is seldom fit for purpose when it comes to implementing new technologies in the workplace. Moreover,?just over a third of L&D practitioners feel they’ve successfully developed a positive culture for learning, despite the vast majority wishing to do so from the outset.

Investing in this is supported by various reports by the CIPD (2020) (Creating Learning Cultures: Assessing the evidence) organizations who put learning at the top of their agenda have more resilient workforces, have greater retention, and reap the benefits in many areas. However, a cultural change such as this requires support at every level of the organization. This report states that there is a lot of evidence that suggests that learning cultures are linked to organizational outcomes, and heavily suggests that this will help drive transformation.

Ultimately, creating a learning culture is not as easy as it sounds; it takes commitment from the organization to really put learning on the agenda and align this with the organizational goal. In order to encourage take-up of learning opportunities, it is important to do this from the top down, and without the commitment of top management, learning can never become a cultural norm.

The role of L&D is not only to organize and administer learning, but it is also to empower leaders and managers to make learning a priority. To empower those subject matter experts to generate and share learning content. To use social learning and self-directed learning by giving the content a voice and a life, to get teams talking about lessons learned, challenges, and best practices. It is also appreciating that learning does not only happen in the classroom, but it is a state of mind everyone can share collectively...

What do you think about Learning Cultures??

[i] CIPD. (2020) Creating Learning cultures: assessing the evidence. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development