Learning Agility: How Do We Find Agile Learners?
- wendytan5
- Mar 24, 2022
- 5 min read
Updated: May 31, 2024
Wendy Tan
Author, Keynote Speaker & Managing Partner of Flame Centre | Human Skills Institute
Updated on 27 May 2024
Great question!
Imagine if we can recruit agile learners who take ownership of their learning, learn fast and effectively, and pick up cross-disciplinary skills easily, what happens? The competitive advantage to your team and organization gains will be enormous.
An organization or even a nation is as competitive as the collective skills it has!
During recruitment, I looked specifically for their learning agility. One of the first assignment to candidates is to fill in the Learning Agility Profile™, an instrument developed from my research, which measures a person's learning motivation, attitudes, processes, and environment.
Clearly, in a recruitment situation, most people present a more favorable impression of themselves. So I take the profile results with a pinch of salt, especially when the scores are inflated. More importantly, I triangulate their scores with data points from the interview. These are the characteristics I look out for to get a sense of their learning agility.
1. Diverse Work Experience
Look at their personal and work history for evidence of learning, especially self-initiated cross-functional learning. Here are some examples:
Diverse experience across different fields and job roles
Voluntary experiences doing work that is different from one's job
Work in an area that they are not specifically trained for
My research study shows an increased variety of job experiences correlates positively with developing more skills and capabilities. So people who work in different functional roles across diverse industries have more skills and capabilities than people with the same functional roles across different industries. Additionally, people who work in the same job roles in the same industry have the lowest skills and capabilities developed.
A possible explanation is the more diverse work experiences we have, the more we will be out of our comfort zone and have a greater need to learn different skills and capabilities to thrive.
2. Learning New Skills
Next, ask the following questions about their skills and learning process:
What skills have you been learning the past six months?
What led you to learn these skills?
How did you learn these new skills?
What challenges did you face and what happened next?
Ask these questions in the natural ebb and flow of the conversation. Through these questions, I am looking for initiative, metacognitive ability, and learning strategies.
Agile learners are resourceful and proactive, they don't wait to be sent to training or nudged into learning.
Instead, agile learners search online, take up free courses, ask others for help shamelessly, experiment with what they learned, and ask for feedback relentlessly. Having a rich array of learning strategies accelerates learning.
3. Level of Self-Awareness
In addition, look for a level of self-awareness of how they are learning; do they know their own barriers and how they are tripping themselves? If anyone says, their challenge in learning is the lack of time, it's a red flag. Who isn't busy with life? Being busy is a lazy excuse. Instead, look for people who reflect deeper. For example, someone told me his barrier is the lack of courage to ask questions and appear silly. Herein lies his salvation, if he can articulate his barrier, he can also help himself.
The willingness and ease in changing one's mind in the process of learning also suggest learning agility.
For example, I once worked with a Japanese young man who decided that people cannot be trusted and treated relationships as superficial transactions. Despite experiencing good relationships with others, his inability to change his mind meant he could not build deeper relationships and thereby lost the opportunity to garner support for his dream.
4. Reflective Ability
Here's another tip, ask the candidate how was the conversation at the end of the interview. If the person says it led him to reflect and articulate new thoughts he did not know existed, perfect! If he says, it was ok or an interesting chit-chat, that's another red flag, suggesting the lack of reflective ability.
Assuming the interview had interesting probing questions, a self-reflective candidate should be thinking more deeply about themselves and gaining new insight. If they did not, they could be regurgitating well-rehearsed answers.
5. Learning Motivation
Finally, look for learning motivation, specifically, evidence of a sense of purpose. Initially, it was intuitive to me; I want to work with people with a sense of purpose; people who have an interest in making the world a better place.
Looking at the factors that predict lifelong learning, the analyses confirm that purpose is one of the motivation that drives lifelong learning; I learn because I believe what I learn will make a difference.
Look for people who paid a price for pursuing their purpose and passion. This could be spending part of their life on it, giving up higher-paying jobs, and taking on additional burdens or stress. However, purpose does not need to be lofty, it could also be as simple as wanting to take care of family and sending their children to a good school.
In summary, these 5 ideas come from a combination of my research, interviews with working professionals of varying levels of learning agility, and actual recruitment experience. I am conscious of my ethical responsibility; so let's be clear here, learning agility is one of the many factors in assessing a candidate.
For what it's worth, here is another important data point - age, gender, and education experience do not correlate with learning outcomes.
It does not matter whether the candidate is in his 20s or 50s, male or female, graduate or non-graduate, as long as he has the capacity to learn. Learning Agility is a quality that can be cultivated.
If you think your staff needs to develop their learning agility, check out these ideas on the process of agile learning and how to improve learning agility.
Disclaimer:
The information in this blog is based on our research, interviews, and experience. We must note that Learning Agility is a skill that can be learned, and should not be the determining factor in job selection. The contents shared here are intended to summarize the qualities of agile learners, and anyone can be nurtured to be agile learners.
For more ideas on learning agility, check out my book, Learning Agility: Relearn, Reskill, and Reinvent.
If you're ready to build a more empowered learning team or organization, let’s schedule a chat.
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