Charles Jennings contrasts „learning from working“ with the traditional „learning to work“ model, stressing that most impactful learning occurs during task completion rather than in structured educational settings. He elucidates this with examples from everyday experiences, childhood endeavors like riding a bicycle, or professional challenges in team projects. Jennings also draws parallels from elite sports, emphasizing the significance of learning by doing, stating that experts are crafted through extensive practice and learning from exemplary performers.

Moreover, he outlines the 70-20-10 learning model, advocating a shift in L&D’s approach. He illustrates this transformation with a case study involving Hilti, a construction company, where they addressed high turnover rates among sales managers. The emphasis shifted from mere competency-based training to a performance-centric approach, reducing the time for new sales managers to become productive from 18 months to 3-6 months. Jennings highlights the need for L&D to move beyond traditional learning paradigms and focus on supporting employees during their actual work, enabling performance rather than just learning. Then, Jennings calls for a profound shift in mindset within L&D, urging professionals to transition from being mere order takers to becoming performance enablers and value creators within organizations.

The conversation continued with Charles discussing the transformation of learning methods into performance metrics focused on business outputs. He emphasized the need to align learning metrics with senior business leaders‘ concerns, such as customer satisfaction, problem resolution rates, and sales pipeline strength. He stressed that learning metrics should not be the endpoint but should be tied to broader business outcomes.

The discussion then shifted to Claire Doody, a seasoned professional in learning and development (L&D) and founder of Work in Motion. Claire highlighted a prevalent issue in L&D: the misconception that training alone can solve complex organizational challenges. She emphasized the necessity of a holistic approach, considering factors beyond training, like technology, flawed processes, leadership behavior, and cultural aspects.

In the post-COVID era, Claire stressed the role of technology in humanizing learning experiences. She acknowledged that well-designed tech-enabled learning can enhance inclusivity, sustainability, and flexibility, citing examples where technology bridged gaps in organizational adoption, urging the need for effective facilitation in virtual spaces.

Claire shared insights on creating impactful L&D strategies, stressing the importance of understanding the business, focusing ruthlessly on key objectives, and expanding thinking beyond learning-only solutions. She underlined that L&D should act as a performance consultant rather than solely relying on training interventions.

Addressing ROI measurement in creating great workspaces, Claire emphasized the complexity of measuring everything, highlighting alternative indicators like hiring data, attrition rates, employee tenure after development courses, trends in role-specific attrition, sentiment surveys, and manager expectations as essential data sources to gauge workplace effectiveness.