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The value of learning is how you embed it into your work

Value of Learning

If you are trying to recruit and keep the best talent – and who isn’t – opportunities for professional growth and a culture of continuous learning are super appealing. They can set you apart from other organisations as an employer, and investing in employee knowledge can lead to massive returns.

One of the best approaches to learning is to holistically weave it into your organisation and into each person’s everyday work. There are lots of ways you can make that happen in a meaningful way, from educating your leaders to making space for apprenticeships.

Read on for more on the value of embedded learning and shifting your organisational culture to support it.

What is embedded learning?

Embedded learning means your employees learn while they work. This kind of learning keeps people motivated and engaged while they’re gathering new knowledge, which will help them gain a deeper understanding of what they’re learning.

Workshops, bootcamps and apprenticeships are all great examples of embedded learning, with the latter offering the most hands-on approach.

How apprenticeships encourage embedded learning

Through an apprenticeship, your employee can continue contributing to their team while they grow their skillset. At Avado, we recently supported Angelika Martyna, a People Manager at McDonald’s to achieve her L3 HR Support Apprenticeship.

Angelika has gone on to demonstrate her commitment to learning by progressing onto our Level 5 HR Consultant apprenticeship which she is currently studying now. Her success is a splendid example of how beneficial embedded learning can be.

Richard Forte, Franchisee at McDonald’s Fortress Operations where Angelika is undertaking her studies says, “From my perspective as an employer, I wanted to invest in deepening the HR talent and capability within my organisation and to retain the very best talent over the long term.”

The CIPD Apprenticeships have helped provide a career development pathway for my organisation’s People Manager team. Angelika has worked incredibly hard, balancing her apprenticeship studies with the dynamic demands of work during turbulent times. Through this time, she has grown in confidence to lead more challenging cases, to demonstrate her flair for innovation and increasingly provide HR advice and counsel to her peers.”

If you’re looking to hire an apprentice or upskill your existing workforce, make sure you know exactly how to use the Levy so you can make the most of your budget while boosting your team’s knowledge.

Make sure managers are focused on embedded learning

It’s important to understand that leaders and C-suite people have a massive role to play in creating a learning culture. It’s not enough for them to encourage learning – they need to be participating in it, too.

That means those top-level people should be visibly taking a more learning-focused approach to their own roles. If they are engaged in your learning programmes, this will add to their success throughout the entire organisation. You can’t have that cultural shift without their participation.

Make sure everyone understands the value of embedded learning

Along with those leaders, you need to ensure that everyone in your business sees the importance of embedded learning. Desirable skill sets are no longer hard skills, but behaviours, like adaptability and problem solving. When someone can hone those softer skills and apply them, they’ll be better at their job.

Angelika Martyna is once again a great example of this. “Angelika went through a period of big internal organisational change of which she had to manage components and despite this upheaval,” said her Avado learning coach, Rachel Eales. “She was committed to her assessments and her EPA. She would always go that extra mile in her own development, like listening to relevant podcasts. Angelika always had a positive, can-do attitude and because of this she excelled in her apprenticeship.”

Once you’ve given someone the space to learn a new skill, the way Angelika focused on positivity and adaptability, they need to see the importance of that skill to their role. They need to understand how they’ll use what they’re learning.

Things like developing plans and systems to support people in embedding and applying what they’ve learned can help. So can encouraging collaboration and peer assessment, to keep people accountable.

Integrate learning into the everyday, and make it accessible

As we found in our recent report on organisational agility, learning methods need to keep up with the needs of a modern team.

Are your employees using certain tools to make their workdays easier, like workflow trackers and chat platforms? The learning you choose should work seamlessly with their daily routines, and be accessible.

If learning effortlessly fits into a person’s day-to-day, it becomes more natural and ongoing. Learning shouldn’t be something that causes breaks in a person’s workday or made to feel like a chore.

On that note, learning should be celebrated, too. If someone reaches milestones along their learning journey, completes a programme or earns a diploma, make sure everyone knows about it. When everyone sees learning as an exciting part of your organisation, that cultural shift will happen.

About Avado 

For more than 20 years, Avado have been providing professional training and qualifications that transform businesses. This month, we are offering amazing discounts on all of our CIPD courses. Reach out to our team to make the most of the savings now! 

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Tara MacInnis

Posted February 8, 2021