Training, Learning, and Talent: Changing the Discourse
“Learning is the kindling of a fire, not the filling of a vessel”
— Socrates
A distinction in the workplace that is not made often enough is the difference between training and learning. While closely and inextricably related — which is why they are so often used interchangeably — a useful way to think about them as distinct concepts is to tie them specifically to a job or a position. Conceptualized this way, it can be useful to think about training as being something that is necessary for your current position, while learning is something that is necessary for your next position. Once applied in this manner, interesting insights emerge, for employees and organizations alike. And from these insights, employees and organizations can situate themselves for far better mutually beneficial interactions.
While all training is learning, not all learning is training, and that is the key to the differentiation: training is context-specific learning. While learning can be context-specific, learning is often context-free. Paradoxically, that is what makes it invaluable: learning is something that can potentially be beneficial in an endless multiplicity of contexts, many of which are entirely unknown at the time of learning acquisition. Many of us learned skills in school, for example, decades ago that we use daily in jobs or organizations or industries that in many cases did not even exist at the time that we learned those skills.
Examples are myriad and endless. Take just one elemental example to illustrate — the math skills that were acquired decades ago that are being applied today by data scientists (“the job”) at Shopify (“the organization”) in on-line shopping (“the industry”). A second elemental example would be learning to make presentations to your classmates, which you did all the way from the time you entered pre-school (“tell the class what you did over your vacation”) to the day you finished grad school (“you can now proceed with the oral defense of your thesis”). The best example of all, however, is simply, as the books says, all the skills you learned in kindergarten: be nice, be helpful, don’t hit people. Learning those skills repays you daily for a lifetime.
I. Training — What is Needed for the Current Position
Every position consists of a set of skills that are necessary to execute the bundle of tasks entailed in having a specific “job”. This ranges the full gambit from relatively straightforward entry level work at a fast-food chain to the highly technical and sophisticated tasks entailed in running a nuclear power facility or flying a commercial airline.
Training is simply how to execute the specific functions necessary to successfully doing your job. Training can be done in relative minutes and without much prerequisite learning — mastering how to operate the french-fry machine. Or training can take years and require extensive preparatory learning — mastering how to remove a gall bladder from a human without killing them.
In addition to the “how” of training, a major feature of training is often geared to taking the “basic how” and turning that into increased efficiency and effectiveness. Simply put, you can be trained to pump out more widgets per hour or more widgets per dollar of inputs consumed, or you can be trained to pump out better widgets than would otherwise be the case absent training. The widget can be a physical good (a bookcase or an automobile), a process (cutting a piece of lumber to spec), or a service (training call center employees in customer interactions).
Finally for our purposes, training can be portable or it can be proprietary. Training someone on how to operate a particular make and model airplane makes the recipient of that training portable to airlines that use that same particular make and model airplane. But training a pilot on the company-specific ways to exchange pleasantries with passengers before or after a flight is proprietary — it only helps you with that one company. It is not portable. Being trained as a bookkeeper is pretty portable. But being trained as a bookkeeper on the highly specific way your company reimburses travel expenses or on the custom-designed proprietary software that your company uses is not portable — the value of that training largely dissipates once you leave that company.
In theory, if you are not punching out widgets efficiently and effectively, you lack training on something that is necessary to execute your job. But if you are punching out widgets efficiently and effectively, you do not need any further material training in your job. Instead, what you need is learning. And learning, in our construct, is not about executing the functions of your current job. Rather, learning is about your next job.
II. Learning — What is Needed for the Next Position
As mentioned earlier, learning can also be context-specific, but it does not need to be, and often, in fact, it is entirely devoid of pre-planned application. You learn a lot by reading a great novel. You learn so much in fact that it is virtually impossible to accurately catalogue that learning in any meaningful sense. The greater the novel, the more you learn, and the less you can articulate what you have learned.
That is a critical feature of learning. The immediate application of much that learning entails is often unknown. Even if you learn something with a specific application in mind, learning also often has applications that you cannot even articulate today. And, like the data scientist who learned math in the 90s and is working at Shopify today, the ultimate application of that learning could not even have been a conscious context-specific aspiration at the time that the learning was being acquired. Today we use lasers in untold hundreds of commercial applications. But at the time of discovery, lasers were often referred to a solution in search of a problem. The “pure” research of the curious scientist became over time the “applied” research of the commercially-oriented entity.
The most fundamental learning of all may be the proverbial “learning how to learn”. Often the enduring learning that comes from most secondary and post-secondary education is not so much knowing the capital of this country or the order of the elements on the periodic tables or the book report on why there are so many different types of turtles on the Galapagos Islands. Instead, it is to teach you how to learn those things. How to find answers. How to absorb information. How to recall information in context. How to use the information in ways beyond the textbook. For some, post-secondary education — the first time we have relative scholastic freedom — also taught us how to prioritize tasks and plan to complete complex essays and study for exams all required from competing classes which were all due in the same week.
A related key aspect of general education, in addition to the acquisition of knowledge per se, is constantly honing critical knowledge acquisition tools such as language and numeracy through repeated applications in low-stake venues. While it is certainly possible to learn absent language or math skills (owners of pets know that cats and dogs learn how to get things, or how to avoid things, absent these skills), there is only so much that can be absorbed without these fundamental skills. A lament in the workplace from employers, for example, is often that you cannot train someone to do X because their communication or their numeracy skills are not sufficient enough to allow them to jump off at that point to absorb context-specific training. It is also generally easier for people to present before their corporate boss if they have already had years and years of experience presenting before their classmates and their teachers.
Learning also — hopefully — engenders curiosity, the drive to learn more. Curiosity is a wonderful quality present in almost all children, yet it escapes many of us as we pass into adulthood. Learning can lead to curiosity which can lead to more learning and more curiosity ….. It is like the network effect of a modern platform. Users increase the utility of networks. Additional users increase the utility of networks. Additional utility increases the numbers of users on the network ……
So what does all this have to do with your next job? Well, after a period of time, through a combination of training, learning, and application experience, you should have become pretty darn good at your job. In fact, you should be so good at your job that the marginal benefit of incremental training should diminish with each new training session. That is, as you are taking training, over time, you should need less and less training, if your job is in a relatively static environment. Other things being equal, training on how to make a given widget more efficiently and more effectively should have significant material payoffs at the start of your training. But after being trained, and after incurring some application experience in the job, training should become less and less relevant to your capacity to punch out widgets effectively and efficiently. Other things being equal, as the economists say, the value of incremental training should approach zero.
At that point, you no longer crave training. In fact, some would actively detest incremental training. Certainly you will get a little bit better, but the payoff in widget efficiency and effectiveness is generally not worth the individual cost. Instead, what you crave is not training for your current position. What you start to crave is learning that may be applicable for your next position.
III. Training, Learning, and Talent: So What?
The best organizations know this. Instead of training you to be better at your current job — squeezing a little more juice out of the lemon — they begin to offer you learning for your next job. That is what will spark curiosity. That is what will spark interest in the employee skilled at their current job. That is what will create the virtuous network effect that comes from learning and curiosity and learning and curiosity and learning and …..
Talent craves training at the start of a job, and craves learning upon the mastery of a job. Once you have become competent at the function of your job, the marginal utility of training — for employee and employers alike, ceteris paribus — declines. As you move from competence to mastery, the marginal utility of training — again, for employee and employers alike, and again ceteris paribus — approaches zero. You are done with training — it has no marginal utility. Instead, you want learning. Your organization should want to give it to you just as much, if not more, than when they eagerly gave you training in the early days that you were in your job.
Why? Having a workforce in your organization that is trained in all facets of its current functions is amazing. It is particularly amazing if nothing in your external environment ever changes — you, your team, and your organization are set for hundreds upon hundreds of years of untold bliss. Because nothing outside of your organization will ever change again this year or this decade or this century. Right? Right. But having a workforce that learns — that’s pure magic. That’s what keeps you, your team, and your organization relevant in tomorrow’s environment. And that environment, by the way, that is busy creating itself today.
As we intensify our entry into a period where things like technology and data and algorithms converge into commodity status, it will be the skilled and curious and learning-obsessed organizations and employees alike that will thrive, because people will increasingly be the value-differentiators. First movers in a technology reap a lot, for sure, but durable growth is premised on having better people than the organization beside you. The best sustainable advantage you can develop to stand out from the people beside you is to learn faster than they do.
IV. Concluding Thoughts
Training is for your current job. Training immediately benefits the organization more than the employee. After a certain threshold, however, training is just about squeezing a little more juice a little more efficiently and little more effectively from the same lemon. That is incredibly valuable for the company on a large scale, but of minimal utility for employees on an individual scale.
Learning is for your next job. Learning can often have no immediately obvious benefits to your organization. Learning is for your career more than it is about your job. Learning is more for you than it is for your organization.
So why would an employer provide non-application specific learning? Well, what shows more commitment to having a great workforce than investing in the careers of your workforce rather than investing in order to squeeze another marginal drop of juice from the lemon? What shows more concretely that you want to be an employer of choice than making sure that your workforce is better equipped than it otherwise would be in order to deal with an unknown future? Why would someone be attached to your organization if you do not care about their career beyond the immediate needs of your organization? Sure, you will have your share of mercenaries who are purely mercurial in motivation and attachment and effort. Is that the workforce you want to create? Is that the workforce you want at your side during the next crisis?
If talent matters to your organization, then learning should matter as much as training to your organization. As talent become more scarce, learning should matter more than training to your organization. In a tight labour market where you compete for skills, learning is what talented and committed people will want from your organization. If you only provide them with an opportunity to squeeze out yet another widget a little more efficiently and little more effectively, you will get the workforce you deserve.
