1.6 Employees as Learners

Staff who are confident of their own learning ability

  • concentrate more, think harder, find learning enjoyable;
  • are more confident and better team players;
  • can grow their natural intelligence by exercising their learning muscles: their brains;
  • can change their learning habits … important because intelligence is known to be, “the sum total of habits of mind”;
  • have learnt that learning is a learnable craft; and
  • are in command of their learning behaviors and thereby, are enthusiastic about learning and can cope with both its challenges and potential rewards.

GETTING LEARNING FIT … is no different from the physical and mental training of an athlete. Learners also need more than tools and techniques, they need stamina, strength, coordination, self-awareness and the ability to be strategic. They too must have a learning fitness that is ready for the engagements ahead.

LEARNING POWER … uses 30 years’ experience of working with adult learners globally to create, and share, a coherent picture of the mental agility and emotional stamina that are the hallmarks of a good and proficient learner… these are the principal contributors to productivity. So, WHAT IS LEARNING POWER?

DEVELOPING THE LEARNING MIND

  • helping staff to learn more to improve their achievement;
  • helping staff to learn better;
  • helping staff to become better learners not just in the workplace but for life and thereby contributors to market opportunity.

Three very different goals often requiring different managerial approaches. This is about the building of portable learning power and that means addressing the whole person. With self-awareness, confidence, competence and curiosity comes a personality with the attitudes and values that can exercise judgment over choice of skills and strategies.

Learning Power is a central determinant of character

Learning to learn and the building and management of learning capacity govern the making of life’s choices and the taking of life’s chances.

A business’s responsibility to its staff as learners is therefore much more than attainment and the skills they acquire as learners. When learning is fully understood and applied intuitively, it will govern their lifelong performance as employees and release their lifetime value to the organization.

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THE EMOTIONAL DIMENSIONS

Research has found that there are 7 primary dimensions underlying the capacity to learn, with Resilience and Strategic Awareness relying on emotional engagement. They empower the learner to embrace and adopt change.

Resilience

This is about staying engaged with a learning experience despite distraction, excitement or frustration and not becoming disengaged when the going gets tough or mistakes are made. Resilience means perseverance, managing distraction, noticing, absorbing, reconstructing and re-engineering to reach a satisfactory conclusion.

Strategic Awareness

This is not about the ability to think strategically or making strategic contributions to debate … an error of judgement common among adults.

In the context of understanding the learning-powered mind, strategic awareness means self-knowledge and self-awareness. Reflection and intuitiveness abound in the best learners who plan, distill, revise and capitalize to ensure that the personal decisions they make are informed and strategically adept.

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CHANGING AND LEARNING

Scores in this dimension demonstrate how much the learner puts into practice their understanding that learning is itself learned. Thus, the most effective learners view learning as learnable.

A strong profile here indicates that these learners have come to  the realization that learning will lead to change because new experiences, knowledge and skills will automatically ensure that the way they think and act will be different from the thoughts and actions that they had, and exhibited, previously.

Aspiration, ambition and competitiveness, as well as strategic direction, rely heavily on sustained strength in this dimension. Nonetheless, it is also the dimension that can become immediately responsive to  unexpected change in personal circumstance and environment.

It is here too that the dynamics of Learning Power’s profiling come into their own. Each profile, and its successors, will highlight changes in a participant’s comfort with their learning environment.

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THE LEARNING JOURNEY

ELLI, Learning Power’s learning profiling , is its SATNAV!

 

ELLI does not rely on the typologies, trait-casting and pigeon-holing typical of the psychometric tools. It enables progress throughout the learning journey to be planned and mapped with profiling revisited as milestones are reached. ELLI is a tool with a lifelong guarantee!

 

Whether adults or very young children, high flyers or underperformers, the academic and operational research has consistently shown that with an introduction to their ELLI profile they become significantly more aware of themselves as learners. They respect the messaging that the profiling gives and use it to take their management of their Learning Power seriously.

Perhaps most important is the fact that use of the dimensional language gives learning a language. It’s use breeds an ownership and motivation that enables the learning that drives a material change in performance.

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