We Are Learning All the Things

“How are we supposed to get any real work done if you want us to spend time to learn all this new stuff and we don’t even know if we’re going to use it?”

“I’ve worked hard for years to be very good at what I do and now you’re saying I have to start over?”

“I have no idea what training I should do to get promoted here. I'm worried I’ll be labeled as legacy before there is a chance to learn the new tech.” 

These three bracingly honest comments from colleagues represent how fear and uncertainty can prevent effective professional development in any organization. When I arrived at the UMass System as Assoc CIO, I had no idea my real job would be an imposter Learning & Development (L&D) Leader. My first project was to figure out how we might create a workplace culture of continuous learning for the digital era. Two years into our learning journey, it remains our top focus.

Our technology department had a high level of expertise in our mature service portfolio and exhibited very low turnover. However, employee feedback revealed anxiety about our uncertain digital future and a lack of direction for professional development. An honest self-assessment revealed many characteristics of the fixed mindset organization: we knew our current technology stack well but lacked confidence and support systems in place to quickly and continuously adopt new skills well outside of our comfort zone. 

Become a Learning Organization with a Beginner’s Mindset

As we begin 2020, we look much different two years later. Learning is a part of everything we do and the most important capability we’ve developed. For those of you trying to figure out how to create a learning culture in your organization, I’ll share some key lessons we’ve learned along the way. We’re not experts and we’ve largely taken a beginner’s mindset, or more candidly, a DIY approach. And yet, we’ve achieved some remarkable results without an L&D department, training database or an employee LMS. Your organization can too. 

Learning is a part of everything we do and the most important capability we’ve developed.

Practice Learning How to Learn in New Ways  

Other than attending conferences and a few unread online book subscriptions, we had nothing formal in place at the start of our journey. I partnered with my colleague, Kerri Hudzikiewicz, to build and lead a cross-functional group of volunteers to form the Learn Team. We chose the opposite of a typical SMART goal. We asked ourselves, “How might we create a learning culture in UITS?” We researched, benchmarked, brainstormed and took this useful course by Brit Andreatta. We skipped traditional approaches, like developing a skills inventory, in favor of just getting started with learning how to learn and doing it as quickly as possible.

Our motto: we’ll fake it until we learn it.

Learning new skills for the digital era requires learning how to learn in new and versatile ways at a rate much faster than we’re used to. We directly addressed widely-held preferences such as, “I only like to learn from instructor-led training,” by acknowledging them but were candid with colleagues. To be effective as a technology professional in this or any other organization, you’ll need to learn in a variety of ways, some well outside of your current comfort zone, and we’re going to give you many opportunities to practice. As we transitioned to our second year, I partnered with my colleague, Allison Bamforth, to evolve and mature our learning program based on what we learned in year one. If you're starting a learning program at work, here are a few ways to think about offering different learning experiences.

Microlearning: Just-in-Time and On-Demand

We use LinkedIn Learning to offer a self-service approach for just-in-time learning. Need to conduct a behavioral interview? Watch this video. Need to learn a specific feature in Tableau? Watch this video. Employees can take full course tracks but many prefer the ability to time-shift and learn in small bursts, seeing this as a productivity enabler instead of another thing to do. The content is focused on business, management and professional skills with a smattering of technical courses. The all-you-can-eat buffet approach worked and employees watch thousands of videos annually without much effort or promotion.

Learning Events

We challenged ourselves to organize two learning events per month but soon exceeded our expectations when energized learners crowdsourced additional events once they saw it as our new norm. Some were as easy as calling a vendor and getting a subject matter to come for a free hands-on-lab. Others publicized local events. We prioritized variety and volume over perfection and that showed in the post-event surveys where some received higher marks than others. The point was to make learning events a regular part of our work life and we could focus on quality later.  

The image above shows our Sr Digital Experience and Accessibility Specialist Kristina England teaching a brief course on inclusive design. These types of learning events have proven to be very popular and we often have attendees outside of the IT department.

The image above shows two colleagues from Tufts University Technology Services, Laura Clarage and Kevin Murphy, visiting the UMass System office IT team to present how to use Tableau to improve service operations and delivery.

Intensive Learning for Depth and Breadth

We challenged all staff to complete one course from a curated Coursera course catalog with a stronger emphasis in technical areas such as cybersecurity, application/web development, and data science.  Only 44% completed it mostly due to time constraints and quality issues. Some chose well while others regretted. This was a relatively low-cost-per-employee experiment in deeper learning that would serve well for year two. Coursera largely has traditional university courses converted to a MOOC model with watch-and-listen videos. Employees found them to be just okay if a bit outdated. Overall return on time invested was low. 

Our leadership development academy proved to be a more successful intensive learning experience. We partnered with Breakthrough Collaboration to send all people managers as a cohort through a six-month program. Content focused on self-awareness of style and applied practice of skills such as giving candid feedback, decision making, and problem solving. Learning together, without their boss in the room, gave managers a safe space to be vulnerable and admit they needed help at getting better at something everyone assumed they could already do. "I'm anxious about telling an employee I personally like they are not meeting my expectations. How can I start the conversation?" This year, all managers are reading and discussing the excellent book, Radical Candor by Kim Scott, to continue practicing how to effectively give praise and constructively coach.

Digital Learning Platforms

Our experience with Coursera in year one along with feedback from employees led us to offer focused digital learning platforms (DLPs) to cohorts of employees around specific areas of technical depth. I didn’t know it at the time but after hearing a great keynote by Accenture’s L&D leader Allison Horn, I learned that we were creating a personal learning cloud for each employee: customized and adaptable to meet them where they're at and take them where they need to go. 

For technology skills in particular, we are in an exciting time of digital learning platform innovation and democratization. Technology providers are quickly developing free and low-cost platforms to expand adoption and create more market demand. We've actually had a hard time keeping up with all the new entrants to the market.

The image above is a screenshot from our internal learn website, designed by our excellent Web Development and Accessibility Intern Andrew Printz from UMass Boston, showing a sampling of curated digital learning platforms we use to accelerate and measure skill development. There are many on the market. A sampling of what we are currently using: Trailhead by Salesforce, Microsoft Learn, Dell Boomi Learn, Amazon Learn, Cloud Academy, Pluralsight, DataCamp, Interaction Design Foundation, Proofpoint Security Awareness, and Upcase. If it sort of looks like an app store, that is intentional. We may swap in or out a platform based on quality, resources, and experience. By the way, many of these platforms have an app so you can learn on your smartphone, anytime, anywhere.

Thanks to intense competition and many different emerging approaches to the learner experience, now is a great time to experiment with DLPs. They typically offer flexible subscription options and you can start with a small cohort to determine value and quality before making a larger investment and commitment. At some point, there will be a winnowing of platforms based on who most successfully tackles learner experience and content quality. For now, why not sample a variety for yourself?

Our experience with DLPs has been mostly positive with strong consistent engagement by employees benefiting from the following capabilities:

• Skill assessments to create personalized and adaptive learning paths that let employees skip what they already know and dive deep into new areas.
• Adaptive and hands-on applied learning. No more playing the video or advancing through the slides on auto-pilot. You have to show your work and build on it in order to gain the micro-credential. Regular checks provide feedback learners can use to reinforce or pivot.
• The ability to time-shift learning and to learn in small doses or conversely, the ability to binge learn should the window of opportunity arise.
• Cumulative learning that builds on whichever path the employee chooses to reach their goal and the flexibility to go back and re-learn something that needs reinforcement.
• Transparent metrics for the manager and the employee to sustain momentum. How can we help you get unstuck? How might we recognize milestones? Where do you stand in relation to your teammates? How long does it really take to get to this skill level?

To reiterate, we don't have an employee LMS (yet). But we can still stitch together a personal learning cloud for each employee that provides a flexible and high quality learning experience at fairly low risk. If something stinks, we can quickly abandon for something better.

Experiential Learning

We had some initial success with our digital assistant pilot and Lex Bot challenges but soon realized we need more structure and focus to make these scale. This year we are asking Learn Track Chairs to develop more projects where employees can apply newly learned skills. Feel free to share your ideas in this space. We could use some inspiration.

The image shows a cross-section of application and infrastructure professionals from our team in a hands-on lab to build Lex Bots for various use cases.

It's not enough to offer multiple types of learning options. You need some sort of program to manage it all. Here's what we are doing given our DIY approach.

Measure Everything

We surveyed the learner experience after every learning event, course and at the end of the year. We wanted a set of enduring measures for year-over-year comparison to track the following:

• Do we foster a general culture of continuous learning?
• How was the quality of the learning experience?
• How was the quality of the content?
• Did the variety of learning formats meet your expectations?
• Do you feel supported by your manager to pursue your learning goals?
• Did you have time at work to complete your learning goals?
• Was your learning activity aligned with your near-term work? Your long-term career goals?
• What was your personal effort level dedicated toward learning?
• How can we get better at promoting learning and helping you learn?

We generate a lot of data but we need it to benefit from experimentation and to inform decision making about what to stop, start, and continue. Even without really knowing what we were doing, we have very positive results from our first year. Our areas for improvement for year two involved addressing time to learn and focused learning opportunities.

Tracks Focus and Prioritize Learning Investments

We identified many learning areas that are aligned with our strategic priorities. Our executive leadership team ranked them by tiers to guide our decision making about investment and effort with a commitment to review annually. All are important but we don’t have unlimited time or resources to equally spend on all of them. How might we diversify our investment in a way that still moves us forward in the most important areas while not completely ignoring others?

The image above is a sample of our learn tracks for the current year. We are literally and unabashedly trying to learn all the things. ??

Track Chairs as Learning Curators

Each learning track is assigned one or two Track Chairs. Track Chairs don't have to be managers and certainly don’t have to experts. Our only requirement was a desire to promote learning in that area. We tasked Chairs with the following:

• Create measurable goals such as produce two certified professionals
• Organize experiential projects so team members can apply what they've learned
• Curate learning resources and plan learning events
• Promote ongoing engagement through recognition and encouragement

We paired Chairs with a success partner from our Learn Team to offer behind the scenes advice and support.

Experimentation is More Important than a Guaranteed Result

So much of our thinking about investing in training revolves around a proven outcome to justify the investment. It seems reasonable to ask, "What will we get in return?" I question whether this should continue to be the default mindset. The pace of business and technology change in the digital era far exceeds an organization's ability to hire its way out of systemic skill gaps. Developing the ability to learn across the entire organization requires intensive ongoing investment and doing it effectively requires experimentation with a wide range of approaches. Allow for flexibility to pivot and explore. Professional development is currently experiencing rapid innovation, intense competition, and uneven growth but there are no one-size-fits-all proven winners yet. Your direct competitors and organizations competing for your talent pool are moving quickly to develop internal learning as a core capability. If you wait to be convinced that a particular opportunity is a sure thing, you're missing the bigger picture and you may miss out on the best candidates.

Foster a Growth Mindset

Inspired by Carol Dweck's excellent book, Mindset, we've worked hard to make learning a most valued behavior in our organization in a number of simple ways. We spent several months as a department to reflect and develop a set of most valued behaviors and the post-it notes in the adjacent image show some early brainstorming that led to one of them: Foster a Growth Mindset.

Interviewing

Regardless of position, a common interview question for all candidates is, "Tell us about something new you learned recently? How and why did you learn it? Have you had a chance to practice it? If so, how?" Seeing how candidates demonstrate curiosity and resourcefulness can be a great way to distinguish who may be a best long-term fit and also expand the talent pool beyond who has direct experience in your ideal technology skillset. Specific tech skills are often perishable whereas the ability and drive to learn new skills endures.

Develop and Support Individual Learn Plans

Many organizations offer individual learning or professional development plan templates but after reviewing dozens, we assessed virtually all of them as overly complicated and bureaucratic. We resorted to design thinking to reframe the question: what are we actually trying to accomplish with a learn plan and how might we best approach it? After a five-month pilot with ten managers and ten of their employees, we concluded that we could add the most value by helping them have an employee-driven structured conversation about how to plan for learning. What do I want to learn? What do you want me to learn as my manager? What should I commit to doing? How will you support me? Very simple but easily repeatable and scalable. Each conversation can be customized to the individual employee's and manager's needs producing the shortest possible document: I will learn these two things this year and you will support me in these two ways. Period. Should we track these in an employee LMS? Sure. Do we have one right now? No. The more important bit here is that you have a simple way for all managers and employees to be deliberate, intentional, and mutually accountable for learning. We view workplace learning as a 50/50 partnership.

The image above is the My Learn Plan conversation guide used by employees and managers to discuss and set learning goals. Visual design by our colleague Candice McManus.

Recognize, Encourage and Reward

Developing new competencies can be a slog. In addition to the time tradeoff, employees put themselves in a vulnerable place only to suck at something new, at least at first. When life, work, or sheer frustration get in the way, how might we help colleagues get unstuck and encourage them to stick with it? How might we create a gentle sort of peer pressure for the reluctant learner? For us, we've used our #learn channel on Slack to crowdsource ongoing recognition for learning milestones, large and small. Anyone can give a Growth Mindset card to a colleague to recognize their contributions to our learning initiative. We have more work to do in this space. Our next phase involves having many more colleagues demonstrate something they've learned through an applied use case as a way of reinforcing learning by doing as the norm. All of these actions are easy for any organization to do but they require deliberate intention and a firm commitment to consistency. You can't do it for a month and slack off or it won't stick.

A screenshot of our #learn channel on Slack where our Cloud Track Leader, Tom Tucker, gives a shout out to just a few of the many team members who have achieved learning milestones and AWS certification this year. We went from crickets in the beginning to almost daily recognition on Slack for a learning milestone. It's a great but simple way to reinforce that learning is valued and just what we do here. We believe it contributes to creating a safe space where employees can be vulnerable at trying something new but have the courage to do it anyway.

One of our most valued behaviors (MVBs) is: We Foster a Growth Mindset. These cards, designed by our Manager of Digital Experience, Candice McManus, can be given by any employee to another to recognize the courage it takes to learn something new.

Learning and Work Are the Same Thing

Finding structured time to learn was and is our greatest challenge. Some employees resented the expectation of using personal time to complete a course and some managers resented time away from "actual work" to enable learning. We debated approaches for solving the problem but were not successful and decided to manage it instead by trying multiple ways of making time to learn. In our year-end survey, some employees complained about scheduling lunch-and-learns over their lunch hour. This was actionable feedback and now we do not schedule learning events at lunch time. Easy. Enjoy your ?? or ??in peace and quiet, Glen. Kidding aside, time away from "real" work to complete training is an outdated notion. Work in the digital era is about incorporating continuous learning into everyday workflow. We are very inspired by Satya Nadella’s approach at Microsoft to move away from a know-it-all culture to a learn-it-all culture. 

Redefine Leadership’s Role in Supporting Learning Success

Our two-year learning journey has fundamentally changed my view of what it means to be a technology leader in the digital era. The conventional view that one can rely on another department to transform your workforce to develop new capabilities to support your organization's mission is obsolete and will ultimately fail. The most successful technology leaders will learn how to become Chief Learning Officers, if you will, in their own right by taking personal accountability for creating and nurturing a learn-it-all organization. Start by having all managers reflect on key questions: What are we learning? How do we accelerate the pace and diversify the breadth of learning? How are we supporting it in terms of time, role-modeling, recognition, and engaging learning experiences regardless of format? How do we measure what we learn? How do we know if we are learning the right things? What do I know about the cognitive science of adult professional learning? When and how do I demonstrate or reinforce a fixed mindset, even if unintentionally? What are other organizations, including our direct competitors and aspirational benchmarks, doing in this space that we can try? In conversations with my peers at other organizations, I frequently hear this common priority: transform IT from a service provider to a trusted advisor and partner to the business. One way to get there can be a highly visible learning program where you invite your business stakeholders to join you. Everyone is trying to figure out how to navigate digital transformation successfully but no one has all the answers. Let's stop pretending we do and start learning together as we explore what might work for us.

Make Your Own L&D Team

Our journey is the culmination of two years of hard work by an incredibly talented Learn Team. All of these IT professionals have a regular day job that has nothing to do with L&D and yet, they've made a profound impact on our department by just rolling up their sleeves and getting to it. It has been a pleasure and privilege to fake it with them while we hustle to become a learn-it-all organization. Gratitude and kudos to: Kerri Hudzikiewicz, Allison Bamforth, Patrick Brandon, Kristina England, Scott Szajna, Kathy Sawyer, Marybeth Spellman, Jenny Adams, Kristen Luiz, Erin Rubinton, Steve Madigan, Jared Jacob, Darpan Gokharu, Kanhai Shah, Mounika Bonam, and Nicole Apistola.

For those of you who are ahead of us, I invite you to share your insights so we can continue to challenge ourselves to get better at learning for the future of work. 

Please permit a final shameless plug for our IT team. Are you an intensely curious technology professional and driven to learn? If so, we are almost always hiring new talent into our technology organization. Follow our openings here. We'd love to find out what you've been learning lately.

Recommended Reading:

Learning Is The New Pension by Heather E. McGowan

Future of Learning Platforms by Phil Komarny

Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Oprah Winfrey All Use the 5-Hour Rule