Nov 1, 2009
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This White Paper overviews key success factors for harnessing the realities, challenges and opportunities inherent in the Adult Education of "knowledge workers" for today's workplace. For enterprises, the focus is to enhance Performance Management (for ever-better achievement of enterprise goals), and Talent Management (for the support of personal career planning, succession planning, and capabilities improvement assurance; as paths to continuously improving Performance Management, and achieving the resulting gains).
The adult education opportunities and challenges are unique vs. children's education and must be addressed. In general, adult learning is not as much a naturally driven priority, and is even resisted by some. Generational differences exist that must be addressed. Peer-based "informal" learning is becoming more important vs. traditional formal learning. Also, adults become very busy and distracted, resist accountability, want to totally control their time and actions, require redundancy to learn, and often see learning efforts as third or fourth level priorities versus higher level, "must do," immediate business needs. Of course, there are sub-segments within these truisms, often (but not always) as follows:
|
Personality Type |
Approximate Group Size (%)* |
Comment |
|
A-Personalities |
~10% |
Proactively seek new knowledge; high curiosity |
|
B-Personalities |
~30% |
Are open to new learning but have certain intangible quality and access requirements |
|
C-Personalities |
~30% |
Don't really like learning and will postpone or even somewhat resist it if possible |
|
X-Personalities |
~30% |
Proactive in avoiding learning
|
* Specific situations may vary due to many possible factors, including high esprit de corps, zeal, etc.
Many new vs. old action ideas are provided, including forty-four options in Exhibit I for combining Content, Delivery, Accountability and Control for excellent Adult Education opportunities and knowledge transfer programs. All four elements are needed for a complete program.
