An interesting article in the Harvard Business Review proposes that most employers focus too much on academic qualifications and hard skills and have yet to appreciate the importance of the ability of employees to keep learning and developing new skills and expertise, even if they are not obviously linked to their current job.
“Although learnability does boost academic performance, just because someone is job-ready when they obtain their educational credentials does not mean that they are also learning-ready”.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Professor of Business Psychology at University College London, and Mara Swan, EVP Global Strategy and Talent at ManpowerGroup, explain in HBR how managers should be fostering learnability in the workplace.
They give three main points to follow:
Select for it
Chamorro-Premuzic and Swan say: “Don’t waste training budgets on employees who haven’t demonstrated learnability, even if those employees are otherwise skilled, collaborative and productive.
“To maximise the benefit of limited training investments, focus on employees with higher learnability: curious and inquisitive individuals who are genuinely interested in acquiring new knowledge.”
Nurture it
Here, they point out that managers who want their staff to learn new things will foster that behaviour in themselves in order to demonstrate it to their employees.
“Instant access to information may suppress our natural curiosity and appetite for knowledge. It is to our learnability what fast food is to our diet: a ubiquitous vice with no nutritional value and the potential to make healthy food tasteless.
“High learnability enables people to dive deeper to translate information into actual expertise.”
Reward it
They note: “One of the best ways to reward high learnability is to provide new and challenging opportunities for those individuals where they can continue to be stimulated to exercise their learnability and be rewarded by broadening their expertise and increasing their value to the company and themselves.
“Another suggestion is to promote people only if they have acquired sufficient expertise in other jobs in the organisation, not just their own.”
