What convinces enterprises to value training and learning and what does not?

This study of training/learning cultures in small to medium-large sized enterprises was funded as part of the National Centre for Vocational Education and Training Research and Evaluation Strategy. It had two purposes:

1. to better understand the concept of cultures of training and learning in enterprises
2. to investigate what makes case studies and other information about exemplar enterprises interesting and convincing enough that other enterprises will follow their lead

The project proceeded in two stages. Stage One focussed on studying ten enterprises in enough depth that we could construct a comprehensive picture of each enterprise: its culture and the strategies it used - including why those strategies were used - to further develop the skills and knowledge of individual employees and of the enterprise as a whole. In Stage Two, material capturing the most interesting and important ideas about training and learning emerging from Stage One was given to a new sample of enterprises. These enterprises were asked to look at the material and give us feedback about what, if anything, they found that convinced them they might profit from rethinking their own approaches to training and learning.

Enterprise culture: The importance of informal learning

When people in enterprises described their experiences of training and learning, the outstanding feature was how important informal processes were to them. When our respondents, who ranged from shop floor workers to senior managers, said 'informal' they meant simply the opposite of formal structured training. They considered formal training to be that which is organised by an expert who has clear expectations of what skill or knowledge is to be learned - whether certified or not, long or short, self-paced or classroom-based. Through further questioning, it became clear that 'informality' refers to two different aspects of learning and training:

• the specificity of the outcomes expected: Outcomes can be tightly specified (e.g. everyone who works at this hospital, including volunteers, must understand and live its values and mission). Other times intentional learning opportunities are set up but the exact learning outcome is not determined in advance (e.g. when workplace teams are created or employees put together to solve a workplace problem).
   
• the formality of the guidance given the learner: Guidance can be as loose as a casual conversation walking to the car park: 'is that how you do it ...?'; or more intentional through mentoring, network meetings, job enrichment, modelling, etc. The processes are all relatively informal but the final outcomes can be - although need not be - formally specified either in advance through annual performance reviews or retrospectively in an RPL process.

The enterprises' interest in informal approaches is not meant to denigrate formal approaches to training and learning - almost all of them used both. In fact, the point made time and again was that the two approaches need to be used in concert. Informal learning amplifies the value of formal training but informal learning by itself runs the risk of restricting people to old ways of thinking and working.

The majority of enterprises in both stages of the study felt that informal strategies for skill development and expanding the knowledge available to the enterprise is more important and effective than the Australian vocational education and training (VET) sector acknowledges. Information provided to enterprises by authorities in the sector tends to ignore informal processes. To enterprises it appears that the sector is interested in selling its own product (formal training) and not in developing their capacity to grow using a range of approaches.

Where the enterprise is large enough to have an in-house expert in training/learning, it can negotiate between the external formal program and internal informal mechanisms. Many of the companies that could most profit from consistent skill growth do not have such expertise.

The enterprises in our study also pointed out that formal procedures are often costly while informal processes appear to be more economical. They also made it clear that many formal training programs are still very inflexible.

Enterprise cultures that amplify the value of training and learning

While there is an extensive and well-documented literature on the culture of groups in general and on the cultures of organisations and workplaces in particular, we deliberately went into the Stage One enterprises without a precise definition of culture - indeed, without any preconceptions of what we might find about training, learning or culture in the enterprises.

What became abundantly clear in analysing the data collected in Stage One was that there was something about many of the enterprises that made the training and learning they engaged in, formal and informal, deliver special value to both the employees and the enterprise itself. In these enterprises:

• people talk to one another about what they have learned
• people are willing to share their knowledge and expertise
• skill, knowledge and information are applied to the work at hand - where necessary the organisation shifts so the new skill and learning can be applied
• many different forms of learning are used and supported (from the formal certified course to lunch-time meetings and modelling) and they are accessible to those who need or want them
• everyone in the enterprise is accorded genuine respect
• there is a can-do climate - that it is not all too hard, too daunting, too much trouble
• the environment encourages and supports people pushing at frontiers, taking justifiable risks
• there is genuine curiosity about solving problems together

Other Australian research has also noted these characteristics, as documented in detail in the full report.

We concluded that there are enterprises where the culture - the way people relate to one another, the way they co-operate and show respect for one another, the way they afford opportunities to one another - amplifies the usefulness of training and learning. These are cultures where the environment itself stimulates learning, where the whole of skill and knowledge becomes greater than the sum of its parts. In these enterprises training and learning, quite literally, work.

A question remains, however. If there are cultures in some enterprises which enhance the value of training and learning, what do we call such cultures? Does the enterprise have a training culture? Does it have a learning culture? Does it simply have a supportive culture? Having reviewed the recent literature on the subject, and in light of our study, we have become convinced of two things:

The idea of a training culture is too narrow a concept and aspiration. For several years leaders in the VET sector have urged enterprises in Australia to establish training cultures. The development of a highly skilled and enterprising workforce is critically important to any enterprise but, even taking a broad definition of training, there are too many aspects of capacity building, skill development and deployment, workplace learning and knowledge generation which do not fall within the meaning of a 'training culture'.

The idea that each enterprise should develop a learning culture better captures the sense that a broad and dynamic engagement with knowledge and innovation is needed. Indeed, the phrase 'a learning culture' is in common use and appears to be an ideal that is widely admired. The problem with the phrase is that it has an air of sloganeering about it: another fad will inevitably come along. Additionally, learning - like training - is only a tool for achieving business ends (which can, of course, include worker morale and community obligation). It would be inappropriate to insist that the most important aspect of an enterprise's culture is that it delivers learning.

The fulcrum on which the capacity of an enterprise to gain maximum value from training and learning - formal and informal - turns is its climate of interpersonal relations. The best way to convey that is not by the shorthand of labelling an enterprise's culture as either a 'training' or a 'learning' culture but by pointing to the central action saying: this enterprise has a culture which amplifies the value of training and learning through its interpersonal relationships. In the small to medium-large enterprises we spoke to, the point that it isn't training alone nor learning alone but the dynamics of the relationships within the enterprise that is the key was readily understood and appreciated.

What was convincing about the Stage One cases?

Three features of the material presented to Stage Two enterprises on the basis of the case studies of Stage One enterprises seem principally responsible for attracting, and holding, their attention:

1 The wide scope of the Stage One cases and the element of freshness about them.

These enterprises were not the big well-known names. There was an element almost of delight in respondents 'discovering' and being invited in to these places. And each of the enterprises had interesting, insightful experiences to share. The ten Stage One enterprises were:

• Harvey Beef, Harvey, WA  -  a family-owned meat processing plant with 510 employees and a growing export market. It underwent a major change in thinking about training and learning.
• Harvey Newsagency, Harvey, WA  -  a newsagency in a small country town. This is hardly rocket science, but a considerable amount of training and lively learning happens.
• O'Reilly's Rainforest Guesthouse, Lamington National Park, Queensland  -  a family-owned business, almost an institution since 1926, which has moved in several new directions with corresponding dilemmas.
• Pretzel Logic, Perth WA  -  a rapidly expanding web design company facing all the IT industry's problems such as tools and knowledge changing almost daily, talented people leaving, and a frenetic work pace.
• St John of God Hospital, Subiaco, WA  -  has an enviable reputation amongst patients and employees as a caring place, despite the fact that it faces the same financial pressures as every other Australian hospital.
• Salty Seas, St Helens, Tasmania  -  the enterprise was originally created as a training program for unemployed youth in the area. It is now a prospering private company processing oysters with many of the original trainees now managing it.
• Simplot Kelso, Bathurst. NSW  - produces all the fish fingers in Australia. The company has been through some difficult times (which people at the plant now call 'the dark ages') but things are being turned around.
• South Sydney City Council, Sydney, NSW  - the Council, a large and diverse organisation, illustrates many of the problems which need to be overcome in trying to generate a culture where individuals are comfortable sharing their knowledge.
• Stelform Engineering, Newcastle, NSW - designs and fabricates pressure vessels; the managing director decided, for hard business reasons, that people's 'soft skills' needed improving, especially, their capacity to talk about sensitive issues.
• University of Wollongong Library - has managed to forge a cohesive and impressive whole amongst its wide range of employees in an environment of diminishing resources by taking 'investing in people' seriously.

2 The material was 'honest' and 'real'.

We were determined that the material would not be trivialised 'good news stories' but would honour the complexity of the Stage One enterprise's achievements and articulate the challenge ahead for the Stage Two enterprises. We dealt with questions which we know concern businesses: that trained employees will be poached; that some employees don't want to be trained; that training might well have been tried before with disappointing results. None of the Stage One enterprises had a mistake-free run in establishing a culture which amplifies the value of training and learning.

It cannot be emphasised too strongly that we won the trust of the Stage Two enterprises by keeping the material firmly bedded in real people's experience and not patronising, generalising or over-simplifying the issues. The material itself was contained in a professionally designed 130-page booklet titled Building on other people's experience.

3 We talked to the Stage Two enterprises.

A number of the Stage Two interviewees commented that our visit to discuss Building on other people's experience created a deadline without which the booklet might never have reached the top of their 'to do' list. While that deadline was far from irrelevant, the true value in meeting with the respondents was that the conversations themselves became lively learning experiences. As we probed their ideas and they probed ours, their interest in thinking about their approaches to training and learning was visibly engaged and energised.

It needs to be recognised that not all 19 of the Stage Two enterprises were equally convinced by the material. In terms of their future intentions, three roughly equal sized groups could be identified. The enterprises in the first group found the booklet interesting to read and think about but they were not inspired to change their approach to training at this time. Enterprises in the second group picked out 'snippets' of new ideas they wanted to try. Those in the third were stimulated to reflect quite deeply about what they were doing.

What is interesting is that there was no pattern to this difference amongst enterprises in terms of their size, industry, location, business environment nor the amount of training/learning they currently engage in. The single difference is rather simple. The least interested enterprises were satisfied with what they were currently doing in terms of training and learning. The most interested ones were all doing well in a business sense - so they have confidence to build on - but they were ambitious to do better, and to do better by working differently.

Lessons for marketing training and learning to Australian enterprises

The key lessons to emerge from this study in marketing the value of investing more in training and learning to Australian enterprises are:

• in using exemplars to convince enterprises to rethink their approach to training and learning, the examples need to be real and detailed. Rosy, good news stories that make training and learning a panacea are patronising and ultimately unconvincing. People will make up their own minds about what to take from other people's experience if that experience is presented fully
• calculating a return on the investment made in training and learning is an issue of concern to enterprises but that does not mean they have to see the impact directly in dollars on the bottom line. Much of the workforce change wanted is in the ways employees think about their jobs, think about how the work could be done better. Many of the tools for effecting that change are incremental and intangible. In other words, both the change wanted (the outcomes) and the interventions (inputs) are of a qualitative nature and not readily costed in dollars. What enterprises need to 'calculate' their return on investment is help in deciding what indicators of change they might observe and whether the employees themselves recognise that they have learned and applied that learning. They need proximal not distal indicators of change
• a key message to convey is that the kind of culture an enterprise has, and particularly the tenor of interpersonal relations throughout the enterprise, shapes the value of the investment in training and learning
• the most effective channel of communication with enterprises is personal interaction - above all because it allows for conversation and the 'receivers' of messages about training and learning have the opportunity to think out loud about how the information might apply in their circumstances
• there are people throughout most enterprises who have an interest in training and learning. These people should be consulted along with senior management about training and learning. They are often far more critical to making decisions about skill and knowledge development, and certainly to encouraging employee engagement, than management

As this summary indicates, the study has been a rich and productive one. It has provided robust evidence of the critical importance of informal learning and new insights into the ways small and medium-large sized enterprises create cultures where the value of training and learning is amplified. Stage Two enterprises said they were convinced at least to think about their current approaches to training and learning because the information from the Stage One cases was frank, generous and authentic. The Stage Two enterprises in the study had the sense that they were learning directly from the Stage One enterprises without the information being mediated by people with an agenda - they trusted the researchers were not distorting things.

A final word: our appreciation is extended to the many men and women we spoke with in both stages of the study. They were thoughtful, gracious and very honest. It was a privilege, and a pleasure, to meet them.