A research report by Derek Smith on the Linkage Inc website.
Traditional training often uses contrived examples in training sessions that are devoid of organizational context and focus on developing the individual without a clear connection to the organization or effecting business results. A proposed alternative is action learning. Action learning is the process of developing employees on hard (e.g., marketing, finance, accounting) and soft (e.g., vision, leadership, values) skills by having them work with others on real organizational challenges and reflecting on their decision-making and experience during training.
The previous article in this two-part series on Action Learning discussed action learning as a remedy to some of the problems with traditional training approaches. Among the problems of traditional training is that it often uses contrived examples in training sessions that are devoid of organizational context and focuses on developing the individual without necessarily a clear connection to developing the organization or effecting business results (Barker, 1993). A proposed alternative is action learning. Action learning is the process of developing employees on hard (e.g., marketing, finance, accounting) and soft (e.g., vision, leadership, values) skills by having them work with others on real organizational challenges and reflecting on their decision-making and experience during training. With Action learning, trainees bring real organizational problems to work on in their training sessions with groups, a facilitator encourages participants to continuously question and investigate their assumptions, and they leave with an action plan for the problem’s owner to implement.
Read Derek Smith's conclusion of "Leveraging Learning to Achieve Organizational Change & Development - Best Practices in Developing Employees, Leaders, and Organizations Part 2: Applying Action Learning for Results"
