Rachel Burnham writes: One of the things that has been concerning me for a while
in L&D, is that we don’t seem to be paying sufficent attention to skills
development.
In recent years there
has been a lot of focus on how we approach the knowledge that people need to be
effective in their jobs and a welcome move to making much more use of
performance support or resources to address people’s needs and reduce the need
for knowledge learning. There has also
been work done on behaviour change through a focus on experience design, habit
development and learning transfer. I
made this point in my recent blog ‘5 Ways we could change how we think aboutL&D’. But I think we also need look more deeply at skills development as a
profession.
What do we mean by the
term ‘skills’? Here are a couple of
definitions of skills that I think are particularly helpful:
‘the ability to do something well, expertise’
Oxford Dictionary
‘the ability to use one’s knowledge effectively and readily in execution
or peformance’
Merriam-Webster
Both bring out how
important skills are to effective performance, which is what we need to be
focusing on in L&D. Skills take many
forms: specific skills for specific jobs – taking blood in nursing, operating precision
equipment in engineering, managing conflict amongst neighbours in social
housing, advising a client on the best pension options for them, designing the
graphics and layout for a textbook; and skills that have more general relevance
such as problem-solving, project planning, providing feedback, managing our
time, communicating effectively with an upset individual. Skills can be
primarily physical skills, interpersonal skills, cognitive skills or
combinations of these. Some skills are relatively simple and straightforward,
others hugely complex and ones which need to be used in very many variable
situations and ways to be fully effective.
Many skills take a long time to develop and hone. Developing expertise is in part about not
only having the skills, but being able to judge when and how to apply them in
very different situations. I think skills
are really important to effective workplace performance.
So, I have found
myself wondering whether we are giving skills development the attention it deserves,
so that we can support this as well as possible within our organisations and
the clients we work with. I think some
of the workplace qualifications in wide use don’t sufficiently focus on skills
development, over-emphasising knowledge. Some of the new thinking, around approaches to improving
performance in the workplace, provide a needed corrective to traditional
education and ‘content-dumping’ approaches, with increased emphasis on
performance support or the use of resources and how we engage employees to care
for the things that matter to the organisation.
But that still raises questions for me about how best to support
employees in developing skills.
I think we could do
better.
I had the chance to
participate in the eLearning Network’s Connect event in November last
year. One of the sessions I took part
in was led by Toby Harris and he was making some related points in his session ‘Beyond
the Point of Need’. Here is my
Sketchnote of his session:
He recommended the
book “Peak Performance: How all of us can achieve extraordinary things’ by
Anders Ericsson and Robert Peel, which describes Anders Ericsson’s years of
research into how people in many different fields have achieved outstanding
performance and developed their expertise.
In the book, he
identifies ‘deliberate practice’ as the key to this development of expertise
and in particular looks at how this leads to the formation of ‘mental
representations’ which enable high levels of performance. Ericsson is very clear in distinguishing
what he means by ‘deliberate practice’ and how this differs from the purposeful
practice which we may already make use of.
I have set out in
this Sketchnote the key factors which Ericsson uses to describe what ‘deliberate
practice’ is:
I think there is much
to be gained from exploring the implications of Ericsson’s work.
It raises lots of
questions for me. For example:
·
What
are the most effective ways, that we in L&D can support people to develop
their skills?
·
Does
it make a difference if they are new to an area of skill or wishing to enhance
an area of skill – Ericsson suggests it does?
I want to pay more attention to these kinds of boundary conditions (ie
in what circumstances does a particular approach work or not work).
·
What
part can formal programmes and self-directed learning play to develop expertise
in a particular skill or set of skills, including the use of resources? What
might a formal programme look like that is based on ‘deliberate practice’? How can we encourage & support
individuals to use ‘deliberate practice’ in their self-directed learning?
·
How
do we help people to develop the ‘mental representations’ that Ericsson
suggests are needed for expert performers more speedily and reliably?
I would be interested
in hearing from anyone who is already applying these ideas of deliberate
practice in their work to aid skills development.
Rachel Burnham
2/2/2020
I help individuals and organisations to work and learn
more effectively, particularly though using the tools of Sketchnoting and the
curation of resources. I make use of
Sketchnoting to introduce people to using visuals to aid thinking, working and
learning. I help people to manage for
themselves the information they need to stay up-to-date in their professional
work.
