Putting skills development into practice

PEOPLE development is big business and it is driven by powerful influencers like legislation and social media. Here in South Africa, this industry is fuelled by the fact that employers are forced to fund skills development. Medium and large South African companies are compelled to pay skills levies at 1% of the total amount paid in salaries to employees (including overtime payments, leave pay, bonuses, commissions and lump sum payments). That amounted to more than R15-billion in the 2015/2016 tax year!

Learning and development professionals worth their salt should be obsessed with the transfer of knowledge to sustainable changes in thinking and behaviour, to improved performance over time. But, how is this achieved?

A move from literacy v fluency

“Literacy” refers to a limited degree of understanding a topic. We get it from consuming information in the form of books, lectures, and videos. On the other hand, “fluency” is the ability to actually do something. That can only be gained from education. For example, ABC Company wants to achieve better collaboration between teams so it provides the following information to its employees to achieve “literacy”:

Organogram: a breakdown of the teams, functions, people and reporting lines within the company;

Policies and procedures: details of how the business should operate;

Personality profiles: insights into why people behave the way they do;

Theories on team dynamics and interpersonal skills: a framework within which people can contextualise and assimilate their experiences.

But for employees to be “fluent”, they would need:

To experience first-hand what happens in downstream departments when they are “let down” by upstream teams;

To experience the benefits of open dialogue between teams so that pressure points could be relieved effectively;

To experience the positive effects of embracing change as an improvement tool.

Those of us in the business of learning and development need to be mindful of the challenge of improving retention after participants leave the classroom or online training experience.

If people are to achieve fluency and not just literacy, greater collaboration is needed between procurement teams, educators (facilitators, coaches and mentors), managers and colleagues – and employees themselves.