By Josh Davis

These are the best and worst times for people who have to teach others how to do their jobs better, adapt to change and master new technologies. On the one hand, organizations need learning and development (L&D) more than ever, and expenditures on training have increased almost 33%, reaching USD 90,600 in the United States last year.

Meanwhile, L&D professionals wonder whether automation will leave them aside. After all, Google and YouTube are the actual training departments for many employees: ubiquitous, free, and filled with unlimited content.  In addition, there is a boom of sophisticated technology. For instance, artificial intelligence can determine what a person needs to learn based on data about his/her performance and career experience and prospects, delivering customized content.

Given such context, several trainers focus on controlling quality and coherence of training resources, even though this field is being reduced. Companies such as Pathgather, Degreed and Edcast are developing technological Solutions for that task.

Must we come to terms with a future where robots and algorithms will update us as we move forward in our professional careers and adapt to change? Not necessarily. An area where L&D professional still have leverage is in overcoming the gap between learning and doing.  The science of learning suggests that the art of teaching strongly remains a human task. This is what L&D experts (and the organizations that hire them) will have to do, not only to restrain robots, but to have better trained employees now and in the future.

The way in which content is communicated is equally important (or even more important) to information itself, and training experts can focus in setting such way. For example, people pay close attention to stories; think about how easy is to be caught by a movie or a book. And stories are unusually powerful ways to create a shared vision, aligning the minds of different people. In other words, L&D professionals are good stories tellers. They are experts in adjusting demonstrations to different audiences, taking as a starting point the idea that people learn through observation.

Simple and clear goals also help the brain to organize the content learned. Therefore, teachers can edit and summarize learning content to make it more effective than a YouTube video. The things that people usually say what they want in training resources – such as great production value and gamification-, do not necessarily promote learning.

Is it necessary to motive people to put into practice what they learned? The best strategy is to customize learning. For example, a recently promoted manager could be studying how to have difficult conversations. His/her personal goal is to improve communicating information quickly without losing confidence among the members of his/her team. If the communication skills that he/she is requested to learn are directly linked to this goal, the manager will have better chances of acquiring it. Finding these individual associations is a key new role for L&D professionals, who must guide and motivate people during training program.

It is impossible to learn a new behavior without performing it. Brain systems involved in learning new concepts, such as the hippocampus, are really good at remembering data. However, they are totally different to the systems that learn actions through experience, including the corpus striatum.  In other words, it is not possible to reach every area of the brain through arguments. To overcome the gap between learning and doing it is necessary to work of every brain system simultaneously, to make sure that the desired habit is actually acquired. A technological platform may provide the necessary information at the right moment, but a human is usually needed to create opportunities that take learning into practice in the real world.

Regardless of how properly the content is designed for the brain, how motivated the person is, or how hard he/she practices, efforts will fail is the person learning only connects once to the new knowledge. Neuronal paths that represent new ideas have to be activated multiple times in order to grow and survive in the long term.

There are surveys that even suggest that our brains must get recently learned information back at least three times to get better results. In addition, the learning process benefits from sleeping. Therefore, these memory recovery opportunities must ideally take place during different days. L&D experts can help to develop these schedules, making sure that the training content can be acquired by the employee’s mind.

The fact is that, in order to adapt to the future of work, everyone has a lot to learn, and not just once, but on a continuous way. And access to proper content, using robots as teachers will not do the trick. We must find the way to close the gap between learning and doing. Learning science claims that best at solving this problem are not algorithms, but people.

Source: La Nación