Moving learning from the classroom to the workplace
I just read an interesting article on how the Adidas Group has debuted a new approach to learning. With more than 51,000 employees around the globe, Adidas has, in the past, focused its learning budget on developing classroom-based curricula for job training. But in recent years, the company has switched their approach to integrating learning into the work environment, “recognizing that very little learning takes place in a formal classroom, with most on the contrary occurring on the job or when a new employee works with a mentor or a coach,” according to Jeanne Meister, writing for Forbes.com. Now, the Adidas Group Learning Campus replaces classroom-only training with a digital learning environment that’s online, social, interactive, and accessible to everyone, all the time. The new approach “requires leaders to become actively involved in learning and even to embed learning, teaching and sharing into all of their interactions with team members,” Meister writes. It sounds a lot like our approach to learning and sustaining learning over the long haul, doesn’t it? Adidas also developed five principles to promote its new approach:
- Working is learning and learning is working.
- Shift to an open and collaborative, connected, “social” learning environment.
- Leadership means sharing, teaching, and learning.
- Innovation is part of everybody’s daily work.
- Create a new culture of self-driven life-long learning.