Continuous learning can demonstrate the ambition of an organisation, and their commitment to staff development. Some organisations may be content to focus on statutory training such as fire protection and health and safety but a growing number of organisations view it much more strategically.

From an employee perspective there may be some initial anxiety about the continuous nature, and they may interpret it as as remedial actions, therefore line managers will play an important role with popping the myths.

How do we create a culture of continuous learning?

Communicating the commitment to continuous learning is a good starting point, as if people don’t know what is on offer, they wont be aware of all of the opportunities available. Right from the start there should be promotion of why staff development is there and what the benefits are for all parties. Benefits to individual staff include examples such as:

• Good for their CV
• Remaining current and understanding of future developments
• Learning about something new can be a tonic if the current day job is quite monotonous
• Boosts motivation
• Performance may improve which could impact PDRs and bonuses
• May offer different or better ways of working
• Career development
• Some of the sessions might also affect homelife e.g. building self confidence

What are the potential benefits to organisations?

• May increase levels of employee engagement
• May help the organisation to retain their talent
• May improve levels of producivty and/or profitability
• It sends out a strong message to external stakeholders
• Could provide a competitive advantage if it is something that similar organisations don’t offer
• May have an impact on teamworking and provide opportunities for cross-department conversations and future innovations.

What should organisations do to implement continuous learning?

Senior leaders should demonstrate their commitment by engaging in the learning themselves as this sends a strong message. As well as the time needed for employees to attend the events, there must also be allocated time to practice in the workplace soon afterwards.

Clearly the biggest constraint will be around the budget as delivering a large number of events and probably on multiple occasions, will not be cheap. It doesn’t need to be all or nothing and managers may want to identify priority areas for the year and build a programme around that. 

Depending on the size of the organisation, the events may be delivered in-house or contracted out to external providers. When using external providers it is important that they incorporate the continuous learning into their designs so that there are common threads between the different events that employees will participate in.

The quality of events need to be evaluated, particularly in the impact it may have on individual and organisational performance. Regular checkpoints can be useful where the following are considered:

• Do we need it? 
• Is it still meeting our needs? 
• Do we need a refresh? 
• Are there any practical issues?
• How is it adding value?

Where employees have completed different events they should be encouraged to act as champions to share their experiences with wider colleagues. Evaluation data should also be analysed to aid future planning.

Whilst most learning will be delivered in-company or as part of a programme of events, there is another option which can be popular and this is for organisations to pay for or contribute to external qualifications. This may be in the form of supporting people to apply for professional accreditations or University-level studies.

There is considerable cost for these options so there will need to be a transparent application process. It would be sensible to consider including terms such as repayment of fees if they leave the organisation with a defined time period. This mitigates the risk of training people up and then they take their new knowledge and skills into other organisations.