LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT ANGELA BINGHAM
Sustainability for Learning and Development Angela Bingham, Executive Director People and Capability at the Open Polytechnic, looks at a practical guide to capability, drawn from her experience of designing and developing learning within a sustainable framework.
M
any of us are continually reading and looking for the ‘next big thing’, or trying to predict the future of work, and seeking out cutting-edge research in the field of learning and development. What’s important in all of this perusing is that, whatever we end up choosing, we get a positive return on our investment that will have a long-term, long-lasting, sustainable impact on our people.
Sustainability in a learning and development sense is about low maintenance (cost, hours to produce, physical paper and printing), reduction of replication, and developing life skills alongside technical skills; ensuring capability is transferable outside your organisation. Consider this scenario: you have spent countless hours creating a thorough set of reference and learning documentation for your business’s finance (procurement, legal, HR, …) system. You have 26
HUMAN RESOURCES
AUTUMN 2020
crossed every ‘t’ and dotted every ‘i’. Consulted with the best of the best and are ready to go. This will be familiar to many of you, the feeling of pride when you’ve finished the work and printed the artefacts. You have been offered another role or project. In preparation for the handover, you prepare documentation on how to maintain the resources you have created. Your successor joins the organisation with different skills and experience from you. They have decided the enterprise system can be easily replaced by a cloud-based app, with AI and machine learning. In the blink of an eye, technology changes, and the blood, sweat and tears of those resources and artefacts are in the recycling bin.
The very same definition can be applied to capability. You are creating initiatives that maintain a certain rate or level and avoiding depletion. Translated this means: low maintenance (cost, hours to produce, physical paper and printing), reduction of replication, and developing life skills alongside technical skills; ensuring capability is transferable outside your organisation.
My sense is that many organisations are in this space, large-scale enterprise solutions with extensive high maintenance, detailed, specific content. The uptake of Agile methodology, prototyping and minimal viable products are creeping in to the way we have traditionally viewed the work of learning and development teams. We have an immediate call to action to create sustainable practices and resources that enable businesses to be nimble and future focused.
Below is my quick reference guide to developing sustainable learning (artefacts, resources and initiatives). Many of you will be doing this instinctively, and it’s just jolly good practice. For the rest, it should spark some creative ideas on how you can take your practice to the next level.
What is sustainability in terms of capability? Wikipedia offers the following definition of sustainability "the ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level”. And/or “avoidance of the depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance”.
We have an immediate call to action to create sustainable practices and resources that enable businesses to be nimble and future focused.
So now you’re ready to start your next capability project, and you’re keen to adopt a few of the sustainable practices (I also recommend spending time on the needs analysis and then indicative structure phases), here are points to consider. 1. Align the capability plan with the goals of the business. a. Can you achieve the capability outcomes with a mix of formal education and corporate learning?
