Skills Development and Deliberate Practice

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.