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Features

Published June 2009

Are Deep Learning Skills Atrophying?

  

  Craig Mindrum

As organizations take a business-focused approach, deeply skilled instructional designers and learning theorists may feel marginalized. In today’s climate, finding the right blend of business acumen and learning experience is critical.

The concerns are expressed quietly, sometimes with a “don’t tell anyone I told you this” tone, but the story is often quite similar: A person deeply skilled in learning theory, instructional design or human resources management sees his or her insights and experience not always being welcomed by the senior team. Why? Because learning is being run by someone from a business unit who was brought in for rigor and project management expertise.

Such an executive may not fully appreciate the import of the deeply skilled learning professional’s perspective and may, in fact, look upon that perspective as something with the potential to add cost and time to the development project. And hitting those budget and schedule goals has become the primary measure by which the learning executive and the department itself is assessed.

Today’s stressful economic situation only adds to a learning person’s concerns. In the last round of layoffs, who survived and who didn’t? If, as anecdotal evidence sometimes suggests, the best project managers were retained instead of the best Web-based learning designers, one has to wonder about the long-term effects. If a company’s enterprise learning “muscles” are atrophying, what happens when the economy turns around and an organization needs those muscles again? How long will it take to get its strength back?

Clearly, there is a balance to be found here. No one is saying that applying business-outcome analysis to learning is a bad thing. The question is whether the pendulum has swung too far. One might argue that the balance was once set too far toward instructional design and learning delivery for their own sake, without enough emphasis on the measurable impact of learning on the business. Today, the issue that must be carefully addressed is whether the balance has shifted too far toward “running learning like a business” without adequate grounding in the what, how and why of enterprise learning.

The importance of the question goes well beyond individuals and their career paths. It goes to the heart of learning’s value to the business. It’s critical to run a tightly managed business function focused on hitting goals. But are they the right goals? Learning executives need to make processes more efficient. But are they the right processes? Answering those questions properly requires a blend of business acumen and learning experience. Different organizations may take different paths toward providing that blend, but finding such a path is critical.

Pulling All the Levers
Vince Eugenio, vice president of learning and organization development for information protection and storage company Iron Mountain, speaks of this learning-business blend in terms of how effectively a company is pulling all the “levers” available to drive better workforce and business performance.