A slight misnomer

I confess that whenever I see someone has cited their job title as “Learning Experience Designer” my first reaction is skepticism.

As the joke goes, a data scientist is a statistician who lives in San Francisco. So too at times, it seems a learning experience designer is an instructional designer who lives in Sydney.

Aggrandising one’s title is hardly new, so I’ve been pondering why this title bothers me so much. And I think I’ve cracked it.

According to yours truly, a true learning experience designer applies User Experience (UX) design methodology to their role. Sure, instructional design and solution development remain critical skills, but arguably more important is ensuring the solution meets the needs of the learner in the first place. This is where user-centered approaches such as design thinking come into play.

Thus the term “Learning Experience Designer” is a slight misnomer. Yes, such a person designs learning experiences; but the point is that by looking through the lens of UX, they position the learner as the user.

Hence I propose the term “Learner Experience Designer” as a pedantic yet meaningful adjustment that better represents the nature of the role.

The good life

In a previous role I had cause to draw up an employee lifecycle. Despite my years in HR up until that point, it wasn’t something that had ever occurred to me to do.

The driving force was an idea to support managers through the various people-related matters to which they needed to attend. The employee lifecycle would provide the structure for a platform containing information and resources that our managers could draw upon on demand.

After a bit of googlising, it struck me that there is no one standard model of the employee lifecycle. I found this surprising as the basics of the employee experience – and the HR functions that correspond to them – are arguably similar across jobs, organisations and industries.

Moreover, some of the models I found were either overly complicated (in my opinion) or they were presented in an illogical manner. In any case they didn’t quite suit my needs, so I decided to draw up my own.

After much thinking and reflection, I realised the employee lifecycle can be distilled into just four main parts: (1) Recruitment; (2) Onboarding; (3) Performance; and (4) Offboarding. Of course the employee experience is more complex than that, but it is within these four parts that the complexities reside.

I call this model the 4 Part Employee Lifecycle.

While some other models of the employee lifecycle start with “Attraction”, I consider this a subset of recruitment, along with other activities such as interviewing and selection. Diversity may also reside in this part.

Onboarding concerns the bringing up to speed of the new recruit, and it may include a combination of pre-boarding, orientation and/or induction.

Performance is the raison d’etre of recruitment and onboarding. It is the productivity of the employee. In other words, are they doing what they are paid to do, and how well are they doing it?

Offboarding is probably the most under-leveraged of all the employee experiences. While exiting resides here – voluntary or otherwise – so too does succession planning and promotion. An organisation that neglects this part of the lifecycle shoots itself in the proverbial foot.

While the 4 Part Employee Lifecycle is purposefully simple, for many it may be a little too simple in terms of “Performance”. So I propose the subdivision of this part into its own four subparts: (1) Performance Management; (2) Development; (3) Health & Wellbeing; and (4) Retention.

Hence I call this model the 4+4 Part Employee Lifecycle.

Performance management would include probation, along with goal setting – KPI’s and behavioural markers – and the dreaded performance appraisal. While performance management has attracted a lot of heat in recent years, my view is that rather than dispensing with it altogether (to the organisation’s detriment), change its nature. For example, I suggest performance appraisals be frequent, short, and feedback rich. There should be no nasty surprises at the end of the year!

Development is complex in its own right; indeed this blog is almost entirely devoted to it. Suffice it to say that in this context, it’s probably best to think of an employee’s development as the totality of their formal development – including training, development planning, leadership programs, career development and talent management – and their informal development – comprising learning (as opposed to training) and performance support.

Health & wellbeing enjoys ever-increasing interest among HR folks, and rightly so as beyond the ethical imperative, an employee who is healthy in body and mind is also productive. I see the usual suspects – inclusion, bullying & harassment, WH&S – in this space, along with personal health initiatives such as pedometer challenges and flu jabs.

And finally, retention concerns the obvious – remuneration and benefits – and the less obvious such as opportunities for growth and career prospects. Engagement may also reside here.

A smart man once declared all models are wrong, but some are useful; and I find the 4+4 Part Employee Lifecycle useful because it identifies key parts of the employee experience which we HR folks need to support.

If we look at the model through the lens of L&D, for example, it prompts us to ask questions that are critical to the success of the business:

• Recruitment – What capabilities do we need to buy into the organisation? Which attitudes do we need to inject to shift our culture? Who can we develop into a future leader or SME?
• Onboarding – What do we need our new recruits to know and do as soon as possible? How do we support this process?
• Performance Management – Where are the performance gaps? Why do these gaps exist? Are they due to deficiencies in capability?
• Development – Which capabilities do our people need to develop? What training should we push? How do we enable our people to drive their own learning? How do we support their performance on the job?
• Health & Wellbeing – Are our people in tune with their physical and mental health? Are our managers capable of supporting them in this space? How do we shift our culture from one of rules and regulation to one of care and collaboration?
• Retention – Are our people aware of the wonderful benefits that are available to them? What kinds of work experiences do they seek? Do they have a career development plan?
• Offboarding – What capabilities do our people need to equip them for the future?

In a similar manner we can look at the model through other lenses, such as technology, process improvement, innovation, or analytics, to ensure they add value across the gamut of HR functions.

Our secret world of learning

One of my peers in Australia, Arun Pradhan, is developing an app to help us learn smarter, faster and deeper.

To gain insight on how we learn in the real world, he’s reaching out to L&D professionals, CEOs, entrepreneurs, actors and artists who have mastered complex skills, with the aim of uncovering our “learning secrets”.

Arun asks 4 specific questions and my answers are as follows…

Q1. In your working life, how have you learned effectively from experience, please provide an example if possible? (e.g. how have you used intentional practice, learned from failure, learned from ambitious projects and/or used reflection)

When I first got into e-learning, it was all very new for everyone. Of course computer-based training had been around for decades, but when the World Wide Web took off in the 1990’s, it transformed education.

When I assumed my first role in this space, I learned mostly through experience because there weren’t many alternatives available. I would learn what I needed to “on the go” or just in time, immediately putting it into practice and seeing how it went – whether that be the design of a web page by tinkering with HTML and JavaScript, or the production of a saleable product by getting onto the platform and just working it out.

Q2. In your working life, how have you learned effectively from people, please provide an example if possible? (e.g. how have you learned from project teams, mentors, coaches and/or broader social networks)

Over time I’ve realised that learning from other people is not only important but crucial to my professional development. Conferences get a bit of a beat-up these days, but I always learn something useful from seeing what other people have done. I also like meetups, and social media has taken my peer-to-peer networking to a whole new level.

I think it’s important to maintain relationships with people who are not only knowledgeable and experienced, but also open and generous; these relationships are two-way streets as you learn from each other. I also know someone whom I respect immensely and whom I consider a mentor; I seek his insight on matters that I’m thinking about, and I’ll bounce ideas off him to get his perspective.

So my recommendation is to actively engage with other people, utilising all the various means of doing so.

Q3. In your working life, how have you learned effectively from courses, research or investigation, please provide an example if possible? (e.g. how have you learned from reading on the web, reading books or attending conferences/courses)

It’s all very well to learn from experience and roll with the punches as you go along, but you have to beware not knowing what you don’t know.

When I decided to make e-learning my career, I went back to university to do a Masters in Learning Sciences & Technology. This course opened up my eyes to concepts that I would never have appreciated otherwise, such as learning theory, and raised my awareness of important empirical research.

Post-uni, I read lots of blogs and keep an eye on the academic journals. I also like to run my own “mini” research studies at work by trialling something new and seeing how it goes.

Q4. What’s your top advice for someone who wishes to develop faster and learn complex skills in modern workplaces?

You have to do it. Yes, read widely and talk to lots of people, but not at the expense of giving it a go. Only then can you gain the insights you really need and appreciate the nuances of real-life application.

The workplace is only ever going to get more VUCA, so by maintaining an experimental mindset you can be confident to take on whatever comes.

      

If you would like to respond to Arun’s questions, he invites you to do so here.

The 70:20:10 lens

In 70:20:10 for trainers I advocated the use of the 70:20:10 model by L&D professionals as a lens through which to view their instructional design.

The excellent comments on my post, and insightful blog posts by others – notably Mark Britz, Clark Quinn and Arun Pradhan – have prompted me to think deeper about my premise.

I continue to reject the notion that 70:20:10 is a formula or a goal, because it is not a model of what “should be”. For example, we needn’t assign 70% of our time, effort and money on OTJ interventions, 20% on social learning, and 10% on formal training. Similarly, we shouldn’t mandate that our target audience aligns its learning activity according to these proportions. Both of these approaches miss the point.

The point is that 70:20:10 is a model of what “is”. Our target audience does undertake 70% of its learning on the job, 20% via interacting with others, and 10% off the job (or thereabouts). Mark Britz calls it a principle. It’s not right and it’s not wrong. It just is.

Our role then as L&D professionals is to support and facilitate this learning as best we can. One of the ways I propose we do this is by using 70:20:10 as a lens. By this I mean using it as a framework to structure our thinking and prompt us on what to consider. Less a recipe citing specific ingredients and amounts, more a shopping basket containing various ingredients that we can use in different combinations depending on the meal.

For this purpose I have created the following diagram. To avoid the formula trap, I decided against labelling each segment 70, 20 and 10, and instead chose their 3E equivalents of Experience, Exposure and Education. For the same reason, I sized each segment evenly rather than to scale.

Using the framework at face value is straight-forward. Given a learning objective, we consider whether a course or a resource may be suitable; whether a social forum might be of use; if matching mentees with mentors would be worthwhile. Perhaps it would be helpful to develop some reference content, or provide a job aid. When looking through the lens, we see alternatives and complements beyond the usual event-based intervention.

Yet we can see more. Consider not only the elements in the framework, but also the interactions between them. For example, in our course we could assign an on-the-job task to the learners, and ask them to share their experiences with it on the ESN. In the language of the framework, we are connecting education to experience, which in turn we connect to exposure. Conversely we can ask workshop attendees to share their experiences in class (connecting experience to education) or encourage them to call out for project opportunities (connecting exposure to experience). The possibilities for integrating the elements are endless.

Those who see L&D as the arbiter of all learning in the workplace may find all this overwhelming. But I see L&D as a support function. To me, 70:20:10 is not about engineering the perfect solution. It’s about adding value to what already happens in our absence.

The 3 mindsets of m-learning

One of my most popular posts of last year was M-Learning’s dirty little secrets.

By “popular” I mean quantitatively: it attracted a relatively large number of hits and comments. Qualitatively, however, the situation was somewhat different: while many of the comments were concordant, others were not. For the record, I don’t believe those discordant comments were wrong – they just represented different points of view in different contexts.

Nonetheless, while I stand by what I wrote back then, there was always something niggling at the back of my mind. I felt that I had missed something. Those discordant comments prompted me to think about it deeper, and I’m glad they did because now I feel I can improve my position.

Mindset #1 – Push

Given the increasingly mobile workforce and the emergence of BYOD, increasing pressure is being placed on the organisation to distribute its content to multiple devices. In corporate e-learning, the most obvious example of such content is the online modules that the company distributes via its Learning Management System.

In M-Learning’s dirty little secrets I advocated the creation of “one course to rule them all”. I argued that if you must push out training, forget about smartphones. No one wants to use them for that, so they are an unnecessary complication.

Instead, concentrate your efforts on the one course that will fit onto desktops and laptops and tablets – ie what your target audience will use to consume it. If you base it on HTML so it will run across operating systems, you can make the course device agnostic.

Responsive web design may render my argument moot – but only when rapid authoring tools adopt the protocol, enabling Average Joe to implement it.

Mindset #2 – Pull

Having said that, in M-Learning’s dirty little secrets I also advocated pull learning.

Instead of pushing out yet another course, I’m more inclined to host content on a mobile-friendly platform like an intranet or a wiki that the learner can access, browse and search via their device of choice – including a smartphone.

This approach empowers the learner to pull the content at their discretion, wherever they are, at the time of need. It replaces the notion of training “in case” it will be required with performance support “when” it is required.

For many, this is the essence of m-learning: on demand, in the moment, in context, just in time, in the workflow.

And yet, while this deceptively simple mindset represents a tectonic shift in corporate pedagogy, it does not on its own fulfil the potential of m-learning. For that, we need a third mindset…

Mindset #3 – Experience

Experiential m-learning leverages the environment in which the learner exists.

This approach need not be hi-tech. For example, a tourist following the walking tour in a Lonely Planet is undertaking experiential m-learning. The book points out the specifics of the environment, and the tourist subsequently experiences them.

Of course, electronic technology facilitates experiential m-learning like never before. Handheld devices combined with the Internet, geolocation, and the likes of augmented reality make the learning experience engaging, timely and real.

It’s also important to note that this mindset applies to both push and pull learning. For example, an LMS-based architecture course may step the learner along a particular route through the city. Alternatively, an interactive map may empower the learner to select the points of interest at their discretion and convenience.

Which leads me to one of the commenters who took umbrage at M-Learning’s dirty little secrets. This fellow was developing a smartphone app for his students enrolled in a Diploma of Community Services. While I suspect his polemic stemmed from a misinterpretation of my argument (which no doubt related to my inability to articulate it sufficiently), he did indeed cause me to ask myself:

Why can’t an app push training on a smartphone?

And the answer, of course, is it can. But then I would add:

Why would you want to?

Given the speed and cost effectiveness of producing online courses in-house these days, combined with the availability of content repositories in most organisations, I would be inclined to save the time and expense of building an app – unless it exploited the mobility of the device.

So part of my lengthy response to this fellow was:

…I would suggest that the app enables the student to interact with the content *in the field*. Perhaps it encourages them to walk around the Cross (to be Sydney-centric, but you know what I mean) and prompts the student to describe their surroundings. If the app then simulates an interaction with a homeless person or with someone who is drug-affected, then it’s done in the context of the work and thus becomes infinitely more meaningful. And if the student could select the scenarios at their discretion rather than have to wade through them in a pre-defined linear manner, then that hands over to them some of the control that you want them to have.

In other words, I would bother with an app only if it offered something that “regular” push or pull content doesn’t. And that something is an authentic experience.

It is this mindset which urges us to realise the full potential of m-learning.