y-day as agents of development.
In response to this wider view of adult workplace learning, and to these changes, learning and work must, by necessity, merge.
This evolving view of modern workplace learning includes:
A re-focusing away from Taylorist views of management as a scientific discipline and the need to standardise for efficiency towards approaches to support the need for agility, innovation and speed.
An acceptance that ‘best practice’ (i.e. one single best way to achieve optimum outcomes) is increasingly irrelevant in our complicated and complex working world. The focus is moving towards ‘good practice’ (i.e. practices that work well for our context but may not be appropriate in other contexts) and ‘emerging practices’ (i.e. practices that we develop retrospectively as we seek to improve).
An understanding that a ‘curriculum’ mindset – where plans for standardised learning pathways are defined for standardised job roles and standardised career progression – is increasingly irrelevant in a world where a culture of continuous and flexible development is required to keep ahead.
The knowledge that competencies (i.e. ‘satisfactory’) is what people should enter our organisations with, but that capabilities (i.e. ‘potential’) are what we need to help develop.
The realisation that with the intangible value of organisations out-stripping the tangible value, people (the largest intangible element) need to be seen and treated as co-creators of value. What is in the heads of workers has never before been more important for organisations to survive and thrive.
We still have a long way to go to break the learning=schooling mindset, to increase the impact and efficiency of learning, and to build cultures of continuous development embedded in work. But we’ve made some good starting steps.
The 70:20:10 reference model can certainly help us expand our concepts and practices to support a better workforce development approach when it is used wisely and as an agent of change and not followed slavishly as some ‘rule’.
Blended learning is only the beginning of the story
Blended learning has been an important first step in this process as it has helped break the shackles of time and location imposed by the dominant face-to-face dependent learning approaches that have been in use for centuries. Technology has enabled that. The ‘richness-reach trade-off’ described by Evans and Wurster in 1999 has truly been broken.
But ‘blending’ is just a baby step.
Blended learning is still on the wrong side of the chasm between learning and the learning/work continuum – and it needs to jump. A lot more work is required beyond ‘blending’ to truly embed learning into work.
It is important to remember that blended learning is a sub-set of 70:20:10, and one way to support a 70:20:10 approach, but it is not a replacement for it. If you’ve implemented blending, you’re on the road but not at the end of the journey yet.