There will always be a new cool name being invented to describe what good corporate learning should be like. Most of which are often featured in the latest blog posts by Josh Bersin. One of the cool concepts that many corporations have built into their thinking lately is that of capability academies. I recently had the chance to help one of our customers at NIIT implement this kind of model and had some thoughts and annotations to share. This will be my personal take—don't expect any official definitions.
What is a Capability Academy?
As a business, you want your staff to keep their skills current. But developing training courses takes time and effort: by the time training content is ready, the skills required might have evolved (or people may have transitioned to another position). Besides: training can be a risky investment if you are not sure exactly how to develop certain skills, which might have you spending money without knowing whether the training had any impact at all. To add to all this, we know that most learning takes place on the job.
What can you do then? Stop spending time on training? What some companies are doing is to create spaces where the staff can develop future-ready skills through a range of experiences: formal training, self-led, social environments, on-the-job, etc. They expect this will help them overcome the challenges of more traditional approaches.
Is IT really a good idea?
It depends on how you're planning to pull it through. There's countless different platforms, schedules, engagement strategies, etc. you could use to set up a capability academy. Regardless what you choose, I would recommend you make sure to have the following before you begin.
Clear performance model. It doesn't make any sense to think of training without having defined what is success for the job/team. But I guess that goes for any kind of training. So does ensuring your strategy is in line with whatever HR is doing related to performance.
Current capabilities. The performance model needs to be future-oriented: what is likely to be required in the present and the near future to succeed? This also means regular revisions/updates are a must. The key here is that traditional competency frameworks tend to focus on proven facts: describe past successful performance and make it a model for the future. None of this is incorrect, but perhaps it is incomplete: organizations and markets are changing quickly enough to factor in what you expect successful performance will involve in the near future.
Cross-sectional capabilities. Core to the capabilities approach is the fluidity of modern corporate teams: responsibilities tend to overlap and people tend to move on quickly. Capabilities should be specific to the environment where they are used, but span different functional areas. This means you need the input from multiple SMEs for any given capability.
Application. The ever-present question in corporate training: how much of what the audience is learning can be immediately applied in real work scenarios? The answer should be 'most of it' if not all.
Learner centricity. Probably a good question to ask yourself or your team when you are starting to develop a capabilities model is: who is my client? Fine: your funding might be coming from your manager, or from a business instance. But your users are your consumers. Your model will only succeed if your users find your product useful. What will make learners find your platform useful? Here are some considerations.
Are you offering tools that are relevant and will help learners do better where they want to improve?
Are you helping learners identify their own gaps?
Are you creating a safe environment where the learner can make mistakes and be the masters of their own learning?
Are you offering sufficient opportunities to cater for different levels of proficiency, availability, preference, etc.?
Coaching network. Your platform or materials won't answer all questions. Moreover: consider yourself lucky if learners are using your platform to learn new things. Their top choices are likely to be Google and their peers. But if they know there is an expert they can contact, or someone who can guide them in their development plan, they will use it. Consider who those experts/coaches will be, how learners will find out about them, and how they will get in touch.
what else?
Above were some of the foundational thoughts. Now, things you might do in the course of implementing your academy and I would consider as mistakes.
Think about the user experience. Learners may be interacting with the academy through a virtual platform, a network of coaches, their managers, etc. Consider what the experience will be like for the learner as a user: will they be interested? Will they be getting what they need? Will they understand what the platform is intended to do? Think of your academy as a product your learners may or may not be willing to buy.
Drop the learning lingo. The idea behind capabilities (as with many other learning concepts) is fascinating. You might get carried away defining apart skills, competencies, capabilities, learning objectives, curricula, etc. But learners won't care about any of that. Good learners should be interested in what makes them successful at their job. They are also likely to be busy and have little time to get into learning models. Help them spend time where they should by using simple language they will understand.
Engage learners. I often listen to customers regretting the little interaction they get through forums, chats, and other social devices they might have implemented to facilitate social learning. Except in most cases those interactions are taking place 1:1 or in small groups but go unnoticed for a wider audience. Take time to find the right SMEs (remember to go beyond managers) and give them the means to broadcast their expertise. Best practice sharing sessions are often a great way to kickstart the conversation.
Plan updates. Nobody returns to sites that show nothing new. Feed your academy with new learning opportunities to keep learners connected.
What do you think about capability academies? Truth or myth? Revelation or waste of time? Share your thoughts!
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