Dive Brief:
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Enterprise learning may do more harm than good, at least when trying to encourage further skills learning, according an article at Chief Learning Officer.
- Enterprise learning used to be typically about compliance training, with little to no expectation that an employee would know what else they could do with that experience.
- But times have changed, the article says, with employees hired based on their existing skills and ability to learn, not just the ability to follow instructions. Enterprise learning's new objective should be to help develop employee skill sets, but that's not happening enough, the article says.
Dive Insight:
In fact, the CLO article says few employers "truly encourage" employees to use learning for career development. An employer may offer a learning management system (LMS) with thousands of courses, but few are taking them. Another problem is limiting programs to specific employee groups.
The result is workers, especially younger ones, becoming stuck "in a job, when what they want is a career." Learning leaders don't encourage career growth -- rather they try to keep employees locked in a training, not career development, mindset. Unmotivated employees are likely to leave sooner when their they are asked to focus only on their work and given little time to learn new skills. HR and learning leaders need to treat employees as customers, balancing their career needs against business needs, according to the CLO article.
