1.
The Golden Lotus under India’s software deities
Our software powerhouses amputate the engineering
capabilities of the majority of their recruits to make them fit for
non-technical programming tasks. What does this do their commitment and
contribution?
Among
the most heart-rending things learned in
school was the Chinese practice of foot-binding for women of the upper classes.
It resulted in severely stunted feet, euphemistically called 'Golden Lotuses'
which could never be used normally. One could vividly imagine the feet of those
young girls being subjected to such severe constriction that they could
scarcely walk, leave aside run or aspire to athletic prowess.
And one of the most distressing things witnessed in a
career was the Indian practice of herding tens of thousands of highly qualified
graduate and post-graduate engineers into software coding roles where most of
their dearly acquired education was wasted.One became privy to some of their
tales of frustration about the routine to which they were bound in place of
their bright-eyed dreams of designing snazzy sports cars or space rockets.
2.
21st Century Learning at Flipkart
It is important to continually challenge, innovate and
understand the purpose and medium of learning.
Flipkart
had a clear identification of the idea, that being a new-age millennial
organisation, it had to grow and learn differently. As admitted by Stefaan, the
biggest challenge here was to un-learn the traditional and conventional
knowledge on learning, which although everybody admits is essential, but few
have a practical approach to undertake. Hence, a cultural environment of
learning had to be consciously built from the ground with the aim of creating a
system that reinvented knowledge from the traditional and conventional methods.
This led to coining of ‘I Learn. We Grow.’
Probably
a big reason as to why the supermarket model gained traction (right from its
inception in the Industrial Age to present times) is a term that every Learner
knows all too well: ROI. However, as this event-based learning intervention
system makes way for an understanding-based system, it will be measured and
studied using new parameters and formula. With the belief that almost 90% of
what people learn happens outside the classroom, and the modern workplace
learning goes way beyond traditional learning and e-learning, ‘Flipskool’ was
envisioned not as a training or skilling centre, but a knowledge and a
performance centre. The matrix of the learning requirement of the talent might
be squarely divided into ‘demand’ and ‘supply’, but customising it according to
the organisation is where one needs to careful. Even at Flipkart, knowledge
about retain, supply chain, ecommerce, happiness quotient needs to reach to
every part of the organisation – right from strategic, marketing, IT and
multimedia. A few low-cost elements of this arrangement which have reaped
encouraging results include HBR access to directors, personal learning wallet to
pursue a learning based on interest, passion-based communities to facilitate
understanding and engagement, Flipster to Flipster (a Flipster is a Flipkart
employee) sessions to give everybody a platform to share and interact, and
focussing on the impact that all these activities have created.
Leaders and learners need to own their learning, and the
effectiveness of the same will follow – in quantifiable statistics and charts,
which can further make a case for increasing the scope of the learning
intervention. Flipskool presently focuses on employees, but in the long run, it
can be a centre for knowledge and excellence for just about anybody – as is the
goal.
3.
Change in learning curve in the age of disruption
Are all functions in your organization getting disrupted?
Read on to know how this impacts the learning curve of your employee
Disruption
has caused redundancy of skills, creating the need to constantly evolve and
learn new skills. We need to upskill and reskill ourselves continuously. Today,
the L&D teams have very good tools at their disposal. Their toolkit has
drastically expanded in scope, availability and accessibility in order to pace
with this constant change.
Most
of us when we were in our school and college, we assumed that learning that we
got then, would take us through bulk of our career. That is changed massively
now because of disruption. Old paradigm was that one should know -how to run
operations. So, people who would do well in the industry were those- who could
manage people and lead large teams. Also, those who could understand technology
well. This scenario has completely changed today as people should now know- how
to partner with machines. They have to learn how to use robotics and learn use
of natural language processing. These things are becoming more and more
relevant. It is no more intuitive now. One needs to figure out ways to really
substantially change their skillsets or else they will become irrelevant. This
shift is now perhaps going to happen every 10-15 years or some say it might
happen every 5-6 years. That’s a huge disrupter, keeping in view, how
L&D is going to provide that value added curve through.
Another
question arising of this context is - What percentage of knowledge for your job,
you currently possess? Research shows that in 1960’s it used to be 90%. Most
people felt that they have most of the information they require to do their
work. Today, people believe that they have less than 50% information with them.
This again is massive impact in terms of how companies and individuals
work.
In
the present scenario, learning is discretionary and easily accessible outside
office systems. Our learning ecosystem extends beyond organizational trainings
to non-traditional assets. Our new age source model includes open source
content , knowledge management , collaboration tools and peer networks , formal
classroom training , expert forums and search engine etc.
How L&D teams are changing
today?
First, CLOs need to learn
knowledge management and collaboration. They need to come together to deliver
solutions.
Second, L&D leaders need
21st century skills i.e. collaboration, innovation, creativity, design thinking
and ability to curate. I think curation is most important. All information is
out there. The challenge is to access more information from different learning
platforms and curate a playlist of the all the knowledge gathered. Design
thinking is another important factor which makes user experience better.
Third, Coaching becomes
increasingly important in disruptive situations. As world is changing super-
fast, coaching is essential to thrive and progress in this transformational
phase.
Fourth, Partnership with Chief
Information Officer is needed to make strides in user experience.
Fifth and last is linking learning to performance.
These two should be significantly interlinked.
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