Learning can be defined in many ways, but most psychologists would agree that it is a relatively permanent change in behaviour that results from experience. The three major types of learning described by behavioural psychology are; classical conditioning, operant conditioning and observational learning. In order for learning to stick and becomes the new normal, all three types require self-driven will. Therefore, how people view the world through their lens matters.
It’s that time of year again—the annual Speexx Exchange conference in Berlin is right around the corner! This leading industry event on talent management practices brings together learning and development (L&D) practitioners from around the world for a full day of networking, sharing and learning.
The UK’s most comprehensive learning event takes place on 15 and 16 October at Birmingham’s NEC.
When it comes to organisational culture, performance and learning, blind spots (or as they are often referred to ‘not seeing the light’) are usually found at the root of most of our problems with work today. These problems shape our day to day conversations, thinking, mood, judgement, decisions-making, or fundamental lack of them. These issues can make or break your workplace experience.
In Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital Trends report, their top-rated trend for 2019 is the need to improve Learning and Development (L&D). 86% of respondents to their global survey rated this issue important or very important, with only 10% of respondents feeling “very ready” to address it.
Every year over $400billion is spent on corporate learning globally, yet only 15% is proven to stick. Investments in learning are continuing to grow year on year but performance impact is not changing. The industry is still struggling to provide real proof of impact, in fact, for the first time our Index is tracking a significant decline. This is causing leaders to have low confidence levels in L&D.
Having clear evidence is a vital starting point in identifying where improvement is needed and backing up your business case for change. We spoke with Emma Smith, Head of Talent at FirstPort Limited, a residential property management company. She had used the Towards Maturity Learning Health Check in a previous role and has now brought this tool to her new organisation in order to help transform their workplace learning culture.
Towards Maturity Learning Health Check provides an ideal starting point for organisations wanting to improve their development, by giving clear evidence and comparisons with high-performing learning cultures. To get a real idea of how the Health Check has a proven business impact, we spoke with Robin Lilly, Capabilities and Leadership Development Director of Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company, to hear his experiences.
The L&D profession is under pressure to transform and become future-fit in order to stay ahead of the demands of work and workers. The profession is finding it hard to influence and allow their expertise to gain traction, with 78% of L&D professionals saying that their leaders have traditional expectations of L&D that are difficult to challenge.
We always talk about the benefits of undergoing Towards Maturity’s Learning Health Check and using statistics to emphasise the effects of benchmarking, but what does its real impact look like on a business? We interviewed Nebel Crowhurst, Head of People Experience at River Island, to find out what role the Towards Maturity Health Check played in helping her develop her organisation into one that facilitates a high-performing learning culture.
This recorded webinar provides a case study from Vodafone and PurpleMedia following their success in designing and implementing a credible and impactful learning solution surrounding diversity and inclusion in the workplace and beyond.
Today, over 98% of organisations are on a mission to transform the impact of their learning strategy and the majority of L&D leaders are focusing on accelerating digital because they believe it holds the key to help more people increase their performance.
In 2018, 93% of learning practitioners wanted to increase employee engagement with learning, but only 27% were successful. With less than a third meeting this goal, it is important to explore how an exemplar organisation turned their learning strategy on its head to achieve just that. Read more about how Mitchells & Butlers teamed up with Kineo to become Gold award winners at Learning Technologies Awards 2018.
With only 21% of learning professionals successfully harmonising learning across their organisation, it is clear that whatever methods we are using at present to take learning to scale are largely failing.
We have reached a pivotal point in the development of the L&D industry, where we need to make some hard decisions and critical changes if we are to remain effective. The actions we are taking at present, are often ineffective as they rarely create any lasting business impact.
The point of learning in the workplace is to ultimately establish and develop skills within learners that help organisations to adapt and thrive. Saying that, with only 15% of L&D professionals reporting to have noticed positive changes in staff behaviour, it is clear that the extent to which learning is having an impact on subsequent actions is insufficient.1 The very nature of the L&D role is to instill new knowledge and behaviours into learners which they can apply in order to do their jobs more efficient and effectively. But at present this is lacking. So how do we ensure the behaviour of our learners change and learning is applied in practice?
Culture has been the most topical and provoked the more curiosity, yet, only 1 in 5 organisations manage to create a high performing learning culture today, and out of those that do, only 2 in 3 are successful in maintaining it.
Every day your employees face dozens of clients, managers, reports and projects competing for their attention. With 55% of workers saying they lack time to learn, it is clear that we need to apply some fresh forward-thinking to recapture the attention of the learners and revive their passion for learning.
L&D practitioners discussing with Jane Bozarth they can support the capture and sharing of tacit knowledge, the information that people keep to themselves, that enable them to get things done in their roles.
Towards Maturity announces departure of CEO and founder. Towards Maturity announces that CEO Laura Overton has taken the decision to step back as the business moves to its next phase of growth.
A spotlight on insights gathered surrounding female learners in the workplace. Through an analysis of over 10,000 work-place learners, it is apparent that there are three key areas where women differ from their male counterparts.
Unleash the power of evidence-based practice with Towards Maturity and Opel-Vauxhall Finance. Given the pace of transformation, developing and executing an L&D strategy that underpins the learning organisation of the future is no easy task. Using evidence-based practice allows you to identify tactics and characteristics specific to your organisations that will accelerate you to becoming a high performing learning organisation.
With only 23% of learning practitioners successfully developing a learning culture within their organisation, it is clear more needs to be done to help inform the industry on how they can meet this goal. The first in our LT Exchange 2019 blog series, sharing the highlights from this year’s event.
With the pace of the work constantly increasing and the number of distractions facing learners on the rise, global organisations are struggling to make their online distance learning programmes memorable. Take a look at our case study exploring Speexx award winning learning course.
In a world in which the nature of work, the workplace and workforce are changing at a relentless pace, organisations must respond to change. In the context of such rapid change Learning and Development (L&D) functions play a vital role. The transformation of organisations demands the transformation of L&D practitioners, however many L&D teams are struggling to change.
Research shows 29% of learning leaders are overwhelmed and under skilled. The biggest challenges to learning transformation are digital disruption, cultural resistance and L&D readiness.
Laura Overton provides the 5th expert Analyst Angle on the Transformation Journey. In this article she explores the power of using benchmarking to bring the outside in.
The learning profession is hungry for change, but is it ready? With skills and capabilities either static or retracting, L&D readiness is as much about developing a mindset and networks as it is about skills and competency.
An organisation’s learning culture doesn’t just happen. Business leaders, individuals and learning professionals all play a critical role in its development over time.
Specific technologies alone do not correlate to business or learning impact. However, the way they are used can dramatically accelerate the learning transformation journey.
The most significant pivot point of change is at the centre of the curve as organisations move from left to right. This marks the fundamental shift of L&D from producer to enabler, from delivering courses to enabling organisational change.
This year marks Towards Maturity’s 15th anniversary, over which time our research programme has gathered longitudinal evidence from all stakeholders in the learning process; allowing participants to understand how decisions in the past have affected the present, to make informed recommendations for the future.
Towards Maturity is set to release its 15th annual report, The Transformation Journey, at 5:30pm on 13th February at Learning Technologies 2019, providing powerful new evidence to help learning leaders establish strong foundations for delivering business impact.
Your Ultimate Guide to LT 2019 – all the best conference sessions, free seminars and fringe events in one place!
Qantas Airway, the flag carrier airline of Australia, is on a learning transformation journey. Michelle Ockers, an expert learning analyst, worked with Qantas as an independent strategic advisor in 2017. She utilised the Learner Intelligence programme to help Qantas identify how they could create a modern and engaging learner experience.
Evidence from 10,000 workers dispel the myths that business leaders have about how they learn in the modern workplace.
Measuring the benefits of L&D and comms initiatives remains a challenge. Just one in eight learning and development professionals1 believe their organization measures the return on investment of learning programmes. Success can be measured either through quantitative measurement or qualitative change, but whatever approach is chosen, effective measurement is vital to ensure L&D and comms strategies are delivering on objectives and attract future investment.
Micro-learning delivers learning nuggets in easily digestible, bite-sized chunks. Learners can access micro-learning as they need it, on the job. Industry expert Josh Bersin describes micro-learning as an ‘amazing innovation’, explaining that microlearning platforms now let you manage the proliferation of video, assessment, and other small content objects with tools for curation, tracking, recommendations, and AI-based prescriptive learning”.
A huge congratulation to all the winners and nominees at the 2018 Learning Technologies Awards, held on Wednesday night in London. We were delighted to join in the celebrations on the night and get together with so many members of the learning and development community!
We speak to Teresa Rose, Learning and Talent Expert at E.ON to see how the Learner Intelligence Programme provided Evidence for Change.
West Midlands police force serves a population of almost 2.8 million. With a shrinking force dealing with increasing demand, a real change needed to happen if the officers were to remain effective in their roles.
As learning professionals, we want to design interventions that lead to lasting change. Shifting behaviour involves a process that continues long after the programme finishes. Our research has shown that mature learning organisations are more successful at integrating learning and work, but they don’t abandon formal learning. One of their strategies is to design learning campaigns and programmes that build and encourage new habits.
In the final installment of our ambassador round up series, we speak to Peter Casebow, CEO of Good Practice, about his thoughts on the Transformation Curve.
In order to achieve true and lasting transformation, organisations need to take it one step, one stage at a time, says Piers Lea, chief strategy officer at LEO and Learning Technologies Group. It’s also what the ‘The Transformation Curve’, says when it outlines the four stages of maturity – Optimising Training, Taking Control, Letting Go and Sharing Responsibility.
Read about the two things that Ken Govan, from our ambassadors Cegos, particularly likes about ‘The Transformation Curve’, the latest Towards Maturity benchmarking report.
Someone who knows a thing or two about transformation is John Helmer, Director of Marketing at Lumesse Learning. “There’s rapid disruption of business models in this digital age. As something is becoming mature, that’s the stage that you need to move towards the next development.”
Jenny Lycett thinks it’s high time that everyone owns learning, not just the L&D department. “I think there are plenty of benefits from organisations seeing L&D as a shared responsibility and I think this is a huge change from what we’ve seen in the past,” she says.
Some avoid it like the plague, many are ambivalent and others embrace it fully. Whatever our position, we can’t avoid the L&D ‘F’ Word.
“When they revealed ‘The Transformation Curve’ and I saw how they had interpreted the data into a model of maturity, I was blown away,” says Stephanie, director of learning solutions at Bray Leino Learning and a Towards Maturity ambassador. “It left me feeling excited for the future of learning and development”
Something that Clive Shepherd really likes about ‘The Transformation Curve’ is the fact it highlights that the road to transformation is not a straightforward, predictable or smooth one. “The report recognises that progress occurs in waves,” says Clive, founding partner at the learning organisation, More Than Blended.
Although we would all like progress to be linear, constant and straightforward, it rarely is. Sometimes we need to stop and take a step back in order to go forward. Robert Wagner, Director at the CIPD Qualifications & Apprenticeship provider DPG plc tells us more.
Are you taking the right next steps in your transformation journey? Digital transformation is at the top of most business agendas and for some time L&D leaders around the globe understand the need to change to keep up.
“Small steps leading to real change” is what Martin Baker, CEO and founder of The Charity Learning Consortium says about our report ‘The Transformation Curve’. One of the key messages of the report is that transformation happens in stages and that organisations have to keep taking small steps in the right direction.
This article describes how The Medical Research Council developed a bespoke e-learning curriculum for frontline workers at the research unit in The Gambia (MRCG) involved in combating disease in West Africa.
It’s ten years since our team of ambassadors started working with us at Towards Maturity, sharing their L&D insights and expertise and supporting us on our benchmarking journey.
This article describes how Action Against Hunger Nigeria provided e-learning to equip their frontline staff to effectively project manage and tackle an enfolding humanitarian crisis in Nigeria.
How to align learning with the business is a constant and evolving question for L&D professionals and it’s a question that Krystyna Gadd of How to Accelerate Learning helped to answer during her session at the Learning Technologies 2018 speaker exchange.
How would Booking.com use AI to ensure that its e-learning enabled the company to develop its staff and enjoy its exponential world growth?
Industry thought-leaders speaking at the Learning Technologies Conference joined our LT Exchanges to tackle some of today’s big questions around technology. What, how and where can it be applied?
Micro learning is one of the hot new trends this year, but as with any new learning technology, it comes with its challenges for implementation.
Consider the 3 ‘P’s – Purpose, Principles and Personas and put users at the heart of your learning content design strategy.
One of the biggest shifts in learning technology is in the development of increasingly collaborative platforms. So how do we best harness these solutions and create a culture of knowledge sharing?
Day 1 of Learning Technologies and Fabrizio Conrado reports on the key challenges and opportunities that surfaced during the exchange with David Kelly.
L&D needs to be helping drive business transformation, creating a culture of agility and continuous learning that ensures organisations are at the forefront of change.
With the world facing a biodiversity crisis, ZSL saw the urgent need to provide online conservation courses that would equip and raise up a new generation of conservation leaders across the world.
2018 is another year of opportunity for L&D leaders. Laura Overton discusses how the fearless can set a new direction that will impact their organisation’s growth, transformation, productivity and performance.
Stephanie Morgan, Director of Learning Solutions at Bray Leino Learning, shares five top tips to build learner engagement and more.
This month we are capturing the essence of some of these case studies by featuring a treasure trove of tops tips that could transform your e-learning program into a class act!
How Qantas used the Learner Intelligence programme to explore if they could better leverage learning to improve business performance and create a more modern and engaging learning experience.
Finding itself subject to increasing industry demand, a global brand agency decided to invest in its 48 managers to equip them to deal with challenges that can arise from periods of rapid and un-forecasted growth.
With a rapidly expanding workforce and only one training location, Aggreko’s had to bring its staff-learning provision into the 21st Century, where it would be able to bring an effective learning solution that would support their diverse personnel in 45 countries.
For any department looking to deliver and embed change and transformation, effective internal communications are essential. Here’s 10 tips to get you on right path and some BOLD suggestions from those who joined us at last month’s CLC Member Meeting.
Martins Couzins talks curation: a process for sense checking and sharing resources in useful, relevant and timely ways.
Check out the shortlist of nominees for Learning Technologies Awards 2017 – it’s a celebration of everything excellent in L&D.
Since 2010 Qantas Airways has benchmarked its learning strategy with the Learning Health Check, working to improve business performance, and create a modern and engaging learning experience.
This case study describes how The Marine Learning Alliance (MLA) used e-learning to bring a sea-change in the way that professionals in the marine industry meet their CPD needs whilst at sea.
In this article Laura Overton walks you through the state of play today and the principals behind the concept of the ‘New Learning Organisation’ – first introduced by Senge in 1990.
When there are so many things you could be measuring or reporting on, how do you identify L&D KPIs that the business cares about? Here’s how to turn the heads of your business leaders with metrics that matter.
To join in the fun of #BookLoversDay, here’s 10 books that stood out to us and were recommended by our community that we think every L&D leader should read.
Fuse Universal is a technology company helping enterprise, education and public sector organisations revolutionise online learning, knowledge sharing and communication in the workplace. They invited our CEO and Founder Laura Overton, to talk about our latest annual Benchmark Report, Unlocking Potential, and discuss what the insights mean for today’s learning professionals.
This case study describes how NATS used e-learning to engage a new generation of trainee flight controllers and increase the success rate of candidates.
We take a look at the upcoming World of Learning conference and highlight our recommended picks of the show.
Find out how L&D priorities are shifting in our early analysis of the 2017 Benchmark data.
Just as we thought we were getting a handle on digital disruption, the workforce is onto the next big thing. It’s pretty clear that learning is evolving faster than L&D departments can keep up.
Everyone loves winning awards though entering can be a daunting and time-consuming process. Whether you’ve entered this year or are thinking of doing so in the future, Benchmarking your learning strategy can help!
A learning culture enables organisations to learn, innovate and grow, whilst attracting and retaining the best talent. But developing a learning culture is a huge challenge for many organisations. How do you do it?
This year’s Learning Benchmark Report, Unlocking Potential, presents our research around five key outcomes: improving efficiency, fine-tuning processes, boosting performance, cultivating agility and influencing culture, that both learning leaders and business leaders are looking to deliver
Technology helps L&D professionals deliver efficient learning experiences, faster, at scale. But when it comes to supporting the day to day running of an organisation, is learning having a worthwhile effect on processes?
Everyone is looking for evidence to make smarter decisions, but data can be overwhelming and even dangerous if you get it wrong. Our Senior Research Analyst explains how methodology ensures Towards Maturity research hits the mark and ensures successful interpretation that helps you make decisions that count.
Teresa Rose from E.ON describes how her team gained deep insights into the way people learn across the organisation, helping them transform their learning strategy.
One thing has remained the same since we started providing benchmarks for learning teams in 2003 – the disparity between the goals of the L&D team and the impact learning is having on the organisation.
This case study describes how ASADA used e-learning to combat sports doping and revitalise its out-dated doping awareness course, taking a gold for Best use of Learning Technologies to Ensure Compliance at the 2016 Learning Technologies Awards.
Learning professionals should be playing a vital role in helping people and organisations thrive in times of change. However, to do this, they must be agile. This article, by LEO’s Imogen Casebourne and Gareth Jones, and Watershed’s Andrew Downes, explains the importance of measuring the impact of learning on business.
