5 Ways to Foster a Learning Culture at Your Company

Business is changing, and if your organization and its employees don’t change with it, you could become obsolete.

375 million workers (approximately 14% of the global workforce) may need to switch occupational categories due to digitization, automation and advances in AI by 2030.

This means that in order for employees and their skill sets to stay relevant, they need to stay up to date. And in order to achieve this, they need their workplaces to double as learning environments.

This isn’t only good for your team members, it’s good for your business overall.

As Edward Hess, author of Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization puts it, “Companies that learn fastest and adapt well to changing environments perform the best over time.”

So what can you do at your organization to begin fostering a learning culture? A “culture that supports an open mindset, an independent quest for knowledge, and shared learning directed toward the mission and goals of the organization”, according to the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), part of Gartner. Well, here are some recommendations.

1. Ensure You’re Speaking the Same Language

It will be much easier to develop a learning culture if everyone is on the same page. Ensure that you’re making your objectives and motivation clear. Define what you mean by a learning culture, explain why team members needs to adopt a growth mindset, and how learning from both internal and external sources can help both individuals and the organization grow.

2. Obtain Executive Buy-In

You’ll never get your initiative off the ground if you don’t have executive buy-in. If the C-Suite is committed to learning, they can model behaviors for the rest of the organization. As the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) puts it, leadership can show that it’s “no longer about how much you know or how adept you are at avoiding mistakes. Instead, it’s about being a critical thinker, a motivated learner and an effective collaborator to further the business.”

3. Take a Look at Hiring Practices

Go one step further than seeing if a candidate is a technical and cultural fit for your company. Leadership needs to know if the candidate in question has a penchant for learning. For example, is s/he intrinsically driven and willing to take calculated risks? Does s/he welcome demanding tasks? Different assessments and interviews can be employed to see if the candidate in question will be an enthusiastic participant of a learning culture.

4. Start a Mentor Program

A mentor program can spur the learning and teaching culture of both new and seasoned employees.  It initiates two-way learning and shows employees that continuous development and learning is essential. It can also introduce new hires to other team members in positions the new employee might want to move into, or help established employees learn about different roles and technology within your company.

5. Organize Team-Based Learning

Having employees physically come together for a mutual learning experience can be incredibly beneficial. A high-touch, hands-on approach like the one The Software Guild offers can be a great way to allow for group dialogue, instant feedback and collaboration.

Ready to get started? Learn more about how our master instructors provide the in-classroom learning you’re looking for supplemented by on-demand materials. The combination of in-person and online learning makes our training far more effective than online training alone.